Oliver Goldsmith | Page 3

collateral facts, would do
well to refer themselves to Mr. Prior's circumstantial volumes, or to the
elegant and discursive pages of Mr. Forster.
For my own part, I can only regret my shortcomings in what to me is a
labor of love; for it is a tribute of gratitude to the memory of an author
whose writings were the delight of my childhood, and have been a
source of enjoyment to me throughout life; and to whom, of all others, I
may address the beautiful apostrophe of Dante to Virgil:
"Tu se' lo mio maestro, e 'l mio autore: Tu se' solo colui, da cu, io tolsi
Lo bello stile, che m' ha fato onore."

W.I.
SUNNYSIDE, _Aug. 1, 1849._

CHAPTER ONE
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE--CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
GOLDSMITH RACE--POETICAL BIRTHPLACE--GOBLIN
HOUSE--SCENES OF BOYHOOD--LISSOY--PICTURE OF A
COUNTRY PARSON--GOLDSMITH'S
SCHOOLMISTRESS--BYRNE, THE VILLAGE SCHOOLMASTER
--GOLDSMITH'S HORNPIPE AND EPIGRAM--UNCLE
CONTARINE--SCHOOL STUDIES AND SCHOOL
SPORTS--MISTAKES OF A NIGHT
There are few writers for whom the reader feels such personal kindness
as for Oliver Goldsmith, for few have so eminently possessed the
magic gift of identifying themselves with their writings. We read his
character in every page, and grow into familiar intimacy with him as
we read. The artless benevolence that beams throughout his works; the
whimsical, yet amiable views of human life and human nature; the
unforced humor, blending so happily with good feeling and good sense,
and singularly dashed at times with a pleasing melancholy; even the
very nature of his mellow, and flowing, and softly-tinted style, all seem
to bespeak his moral as well as his intellectual qualities, and make us
love the man at the same time that we admire the author. While the
productions of writers of loftier pretension and more sounding names
are suffered to moulder on our shelves, those of Goldsmith are
cherished and laid in our bosoms. We do not quote them with
ostentation, but they mingle with our minds, sweeten our tempers, and
harmonize our thoughts; they put us in good humor with ourselves and
with the world, and in so doing they make us happier and better men.
An acquaintance with the private biography of Goldsmith lets us into
the secret of his gifted pages. We there discover them to be little more
than transcripts of his own heart and picturings of his fortunes. There
he shows himself the same kind, artless, good-humored, excursive,
sensible, whimsical, intelligent being that he appears in his writings.

Scarcely an adventure or character is given in his works that may not be
traced to his own party-colored story. Many of his most ludicrous
scenes and ridiculous incidents have been drawn from his own blunders
and mischances, and he seems really to have been buffeted into almost
every maxim imparted by him for the instruction of his reader.
Oliver Goldsmith was born on the 10th of November, 1728, at the
hamlet of Pallas, or Pallasmore, county of Longford, in Ireland. He
sprang from a respectable, but by no means a thrifty stock. Some
families seem to inherit kindliness and incompetency, and to hand
down virtue and poverty from generation to generation. Such was the
case with the Goldsmiths. "They were always," according to their own
accounts, "a strange family; they rarely acted like other people; their
hearts were in the right place, but their heads seemed to be doing
anything but what they ought."--"They were remarkable," says another
statement, "for their worth, but of no cleverness in the ways of the
world." Oliver Goldsmith will be found faithfully to inherit the virtues
and weaknesses of his race.
His father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, with hereditary improvidence,
married when very young and very poor, and starved along for several
years on a small country curacy and the assistance of his wife's friends.
His whole income, eked out by the produce of some fields which he
farmed, and of some occasional duties performed for his wife's uncle,
the rector of an adjoining parish, did not exceed forty pounds.
"And passing rich with forty pounds a year."
He inhabited an old, half rustic mansion that stood on a rising ground in
a rough, lonely part of the country, overlooking a low tract occasionally
flooded by the river Inny. In this house Goldsmith was born, and it was
a birthplace worthy of a poet; for, by all accounts, it was haunted
ground. A tradition handed down among the neighboring peasantry
states that, in after years, the house, remaining for some time
untenanted, went to decay, the roof fell in, and it became so lonely and
forlorn as to be a resort for the "good people" or fairies, who in Ireland
are supposed to delight in old, crazy, deserted mansions for their
midnight revels. All attempts to repair it were in vain; the fairies battled

stoutly to maintain