Æt. 6. more apt to teach wild legends of an Irish hovel, and hold 1734. forth about fairies and rapparees, than to inculcate what are called the humanities. Little Oliver came away from him much as he went, in point of learning; but there were certain wandering unsettled tastes, which his friends thought to have been here implanted in him,* and which, as well as a taste for song, one of his later essays might seem to connect with the vagrant life of the blind harper Carolan, whose wayside melodies he had been taken to hear. Unhappily something more and other than this also remained, in the effects of a terrible disease which assailed him at the school, and were not likely soon to pass away. An attack of confluent small-pox which nearly proved mortal, had left deep and indelible traces on his face, for ever settled his small pretension to good-looks, and exposed him to jest and sarcasm. Kind-natured Mr. Byrne might best have reconciled him to it, used to his temper as no doubt he had become; and it was doubly unfortunate to be sent at such a time away from home, to a school among strangers, at once to taste the bitterness of those school experiences which too early and sadly teach the shy, illfavoured, backward boy what tyrannies, in the large as in that little world, the strong have to inflict, and what sufferings the * See his sister Mrs. Hodson's narrative contributed to the Percy Memoir, 3, 4. She does not give the name of the schoolmaster, but this was supplied by Dr. Strean. Mangin's Essay, 142. + Essay xx. Thorlogh O'Carolan, who was born at Nobber in 1670, and brought up at Carrick O'Shannon, where Oliver's uncle Contarine first settled, died in 1738 at Roscommon, to which Contarine had removed. To his patroness, in whose house he died, the wife of the MacDermott of Aldersford, he owed the "horse, harp, and gossoon," with which, renewed as his needs dictated, he had meanwhile wandered about for half a century from house to house, a guest always welcome, improvising music and songs. The harp had been his amusement up to the age of manhood, when, being struck with blindness, he thus made it his profession. For curious anecdotes of Carolan, and other Irish poets, see Nichols's Illustrations of Lit. Hist. of XVIII. Century, vii. 688. 1736. Æt. 8. 1736. weak must be prepared to endure. But to the reverend Mr. Et. 8. Griffin's superior school of Elphin, in Roscommon, it was resolved to send him; and at the house of an uncle John,* at Ballyoughter in the neighbourhood of Elphin, he was lodged and boarded. The knowledge of Ovid and Horace, introduced to him here, was the pleasantest as well as the least important, though it might be by far the most difficult, of what he had now to learn. It was the learning of bitter years, and not taught by the schoolmaster, but by the school-fellows, of this poor little, thick, pale-faced, pockmarked boy. "He was considered by his contemporaries and "school-fellows, with whom I have often conversed on the "subject," said Doctor Strean, who succeeded, on the death of Charles Goldsmith's curate and eldest son, to his pastoral duty and its munificent rewards, "as a stupid, heavy blockhead, "little better than a fool, whom every one made fun of." § It was early to trample fun out of a child; and he bore marks of it to his dying day. It had not been his least qualification as game for laughter, that all confessed his nature to be kind and affectionate, and knew his temper to be cheerful and agreeable; but feeling as well as fun he could hardly be expected to supply without intermission, and, precisely as in after years it was said of him that he had the most unaccountable alternations of gaiety and gloom, and * His father's brother, "who, with his family," Mrs. Hodson tells us, "sidered him as a prodigy for his age." Percy Memoir, 5. "At the age of seven or eight," says Mrs. Hodson, "he discovered a natural "turn for rhyming, and often amused his father and his friends with early poetical "attempts. When he could scarcely write legibly, he was always scribbling verses "which he burnt as he wrote them. Observing his fondness for books and learning, "his mother, with whom he was always a favourite, pleaded with his father to "give him a liberal education: but his own narrow income, the expense attending "the educating of his eldest son, and his numerous family, were strong objections." Percy Memoir, 4, 5. + See Appendix (A. "DR. STREAN AND THE REV. EDWARD MANGIN") at the close of this volume. § Mangin's Essay, 149. was subject to the most particular humours, even so his elder sister described his school-days to Doctor Percy, bishop of Dromore, when that divine and his friends were gathering materials for his biography. That he seemed to possess two natures, was the learned comment at once upon his childhood and his manhood.* And there was sense in it; in so far as it represented that continued struggle, happily always unavailing, carried on against feelings which God had given him, by fears and misgivings he had to thank the world for. 66 66 66 Why Noll!" exclaimed a visitor at uncle John's, "you are become a fright! When do you mean to get hand-. some again?" Oliver moved in silence to the window. The speaker, a thoughtless and notorious scapegrace of the Goldsmith family, repeated the question with a worse sneer: and "I mean to get better, sir, when you do!" was the boy's retort, which has delighted his biographers for its quickness of repartee, though it was probably something more than smartness. Another example of precocious wit occurred also at uncle John's, when his nephew was still a mere child. There was company one day, to a little dance; and the fiddler who happened to be engaged on the occasion, being a fiddler who reckoned himself a wit, received suddenly an Oliver for his Rowland that he had not come prepared for. During a pause between two country dances, the party had been greatly surprised by little Noll quickly jumping up "Oliver was from his earliest infancy," writes his sister to Dr. Percy, "very "different from other children, subject to particular humours, for the most part "uncommonly serious and reserved, but when in gay spirits none ever so agreeable as he." Percy Memoir, 4. "He was such a compound of absurdity, envy, "and malice, contrasted with the opposite virtues of kindness, generosity, and "benevolence," says Mr. Thomas Davies (who, bad actor as he was, seems to have been a still worse philosopher), "that he might be said to consist of two distinct "souls, and influenced by the agency of a good and bad spirit." Life of Garrick, i. 147-8. + Prior, i. 29, 30. 1737. Æt. 9. 1737. Æt. 9. and dancing a pas seul impromptu about the room, whereupon, seizing the opportunity of the lad's ungainly look and grotesque figure, the jocose fiddler promptly exclaimed Esop! A burst of laughter rewarded him, which however was rapidly turned the other way by Noll stopping his hornpipe, looking round at his assailant, and giving forth, in audible voice and without hesitation, the couplet which was thought worth preserving as the first formal effort of his genius, by Percy, Malone, Campbell, and the rest, who com. piled that biographical preface to the Miscellaneous Works on which the subsequent biographies have been founded, but who nevertheless appear to have missed the correct version of the lines they thought so clever. * Heralds proclaim aloud! all saying, See Esop dancing, and his Monkey playing.+ Yet these things may stand for more than quickness of • The biographical preface, or Memoir, for which the materials had been collected by Percy, Malone, and other friends, was drawn up in the first instance by Percy's friend, Dr. Campbell; it then received ample correction from Percy, whose remarks and interlineations were engrafted into the text; but circumstances led to a very angry dispute on its being handed to the publishers of the Miscellaneous Works. Other causes of disagreement afterwards sprang up with Mr. Rose (Cowper's friend), employed as their editor, and Percy ultimately declined to sanction the publication. His correspondence with Steevens, Malone, and other friends, shows ample traces of this quarrel, and of his dissatisfaction with Mr. Rose, whom he accuses of impertinently tampering with the Memoir. "I never," writes Malone to Percy, in corroboration of such complaints, "observed any of those grimaces or fooleries that the "interpolator talks of !" "In going over Goldsmith's life," writes Dr. Anderson to Percy, "I will thank you to point out the particular passages which were thrust "into your narrative." Nichols's Illustrations, vii. 213. Substantially, however, the narrative no doubt remained in its leading details what it is stated to be in the advertisement, "composed from the information of persons who were intimate with "the poet at an early period, and who were honoured with a continuance of his "friendship till the time" of his death. For proof of Percy's unceasing reference to the Memoir as the authentic account of Goldsmith, even after its interpolation by Rose, see Nichols's Illustrations, vii. 102, where he recommends it to Dr. Anderson's I quote the couplet (of which the first line is tamely given in the Percy Memoir, 5, "Our herald hath proclaimed this saying ") from Mr. Shaw Mason's Statistical Account, iii. 359. 1738. repartee; for it is even possible that the secret might be found in them, of much that has been too harshly condemned t. 10. for egregious vanity in Goldsmith. It may have been so; but it sprang from the opposite source to that in which the ordinary forms of vanity have birth. Fielding describes a class of men who feed upon their own hearts; who are egotists, as he says, the wrong way; and if Goldsmith was vain, it was the wrong way. It arose, not from overweening self-complacency in supposed advantages, but from what the world had forced him since his earliest youth to feel, intense uneasy consciousness of supposed defects. His resources of boyhood went as manhood came. There was no longer the cricketmatch, the hornpipe, an active descent upon an orchard, or a game of fives or foot-ball, to purge unhealthy humours and "clear out the mind." There was no old dairy-maid, no Peggy Golden, to beguile childish sorrows, or, as he mournfully recalls in one of his delightful essays, to sing him into pleasant tears with Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night, or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen. It was his ardent wish, as he grew to manhood, to be on good terms with the society around him; and, finding it essential first of all to be on good terms with himself, he would have restored by fantastic notice. In a letter to Mr. Nichols (Illustrations, vi. 584), Percy also expressly describes it as compiled under his direction. I refer to this compilation throughout my volume, therefore, as the Percy Memoir; and in an Appendix to the second volume of this biography ("WHAT WAS PROPOSED AND WHAT WAS DONE FOR THE RELATIVES OF GOLDSMITH"), I have entered more largely into the delays and disputes connected with its composition. It should be added that many of the materials for a life which Percy had obtained from Goldsmith himself, were lost by being intrusted to Johnson, when the latter proposed to be his friend's biographer; and some were lost by Percy himself. But the failure of Johnson's design arose less from his own dilatoriness than from a difficulty started by Francis Newbery's surviving partner (Carnan, the elder Newbery's son-in-law), who held the copyright of She Stoops to Conquer, and who refused to join the other possessors of Goldsmith's writings in the "Edition and Memoir" which Johnson had undertaken. "I know he intended to write Goldsmith's Life," says Malone, "for I collected some materials for it by his "desire." |