The Complete Poetical Works | Page 5

. . To face p. 187
PORTRAIT OF GOLDSMITH. Drawn by Henry William Bunbury
and etched by James Bretherton. From the
'Haunch of Venison',
1776. . . . . . . . . . . . . . To face p. 259 PORTRAIT OF GOLDSMITH.
From a silhouette by Ozias
Humphry, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. . . To face p. 261
LISSOY (OR LISHOY) MILL. From an aquatint by S. Alken
of a sketch by R. H. Newell ('Goldsmith's
Poetical Works',
1811) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To face p. 262 THE PARSONAGE. From the
same . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To face p. 264
INTRODUCTION
Two of the earlier, and, in some respects, more important 'Memoirs' of

Oliver Goldsmith open with a quotation from one of his minor works,
in which he refers to the generally uneventful life of the scholar. His
own chequered career was a notable exception to this rule. He was born
on the 10th of November, 1728, at Pallas, a village in the county of
Longford in Ireland, his father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, being a
clergyman of the Established Church. Oliver was the fifth of a family
of five sons and three daughters. In 1730, his father, who had been
assisting the rector of the neighbouring parish of Kilkenny West,
succeeded to that living, and moved to Lissoy, a hamlet in Westmeath,
lying a little to the right of the road from Ballymahon to Athlone.
Educated first by a humble relative named Elizabeth Delap, the boy
passed subsequently to the care of Thomas Byrne, the village
schoolmaster, an old soldier who had fought Queen Anne's battles in
Spain, and had retained from those experiences a wandering and
unsettled spirit, which he is thought to have communicated to one at
least of his pupils. After an attack of confluent small-pox, which
scarred him for life, Oliver was transferred from the care of this
not-uncongenial preceptor to a school at Elphin. From Elphin he passed
to Athlone; from Athlone to Edgeworthstown, where he remained until
he was thirteen or fourteen years of age. The accounts of these early
days are contradictory. By his schoolfellows he seems to have been
regarded as stupid and heavy,--'little better than a fool'; but they
admitted that he was remarkably active and athletic, and that he was an
adept in all boyish sports. At home, notwithstanding a variable
disposition, and occasional fits of depression, he showed to greater
advantage. He scribbled verses early; and sometimes startled those
about him by unexpected 'swallow-flights' of repartee. One of these, an
oft-quoted retort to a musical friend who had likened his awkward
antics in a hornpipe to the dancing of Aesop,--
Heralds! proclaim aloud! all saying,
See 'Aesop' dancing, and his
'monkey' playing,--
reads more like a happily-adapted recollection than the actual
impromptu of a boy of nine. But another, in which, after a painful
silence, he replied to the brutal enquiry of a ne'er-do-well relative as to
when he meant to grow handsome, by saying that he would do so when

the speaker grew good,--is characteristic of the easily-wounded spirit
and 'exquisite sensibility of contempt' with which he was to enter upon
the battle of life.
In June, 1744, after anticipating in his own person, the plot of his later
play of 'She Stoops to Conquer' by mistaking the house of a gentleman
at Ardagh for an inn, he was sent to Trinity College, Dublin. The
special dress and semi-menial footing of a sizar or poor scholar--for his
father, impoverished by the imprudent portioning of his eldest daughter,
could not afford to make him a pensioner--were scarcely calculated to
modify his personal peculiarities. Added to these, his tutor elect, Dr.
Theaker Wilder, was a violent and vindictive man, with whom his
ungainly and unhopeful pupil found little favour. Wilder had a passion
for mathematics which was not shared by Goldsmith, who, indeed,
spoke contemptuously enough of that science in after life. He could,
however, he told Malone, 'turn an Ode of Horace into English better
than any of them.' But his academic career was not a success. In May,
1747, the year in which his father died,--an event that further contracted
his already slender means,--he became involved in a college riot, and
was publicly admonished. From this disgrace he recovered to some
extent in the following month by obtaining a trifling money exhibition,
a triumph which he unluckily celebrated by a party at his rooms. Into
these festivities, the heinousness of which was aggravated by the fact
that they included guests of both sexes, the exasperated Wilder made
irruption, and summarily terminated the proceedings by knocking down
the host. The disgrace was too much for the poor