require other than a very cursory mention here. On the day 1752. of his arrival he is reported to have set forth for a ramble Et. 24. round the streets, after leaving his luggage at hired lodgings where he had forgotten to inquire the name either of the street or the landlady, and to which he only found his way back by the accident of meeting the porter who had carried his trunk from the coach.* He is also said to have obtained, in this temporary abode, a knowledge of the wondrous culinary expedients with which three medical students might be supported for a whole week on a single loin of mutton, by a brandered chop served up one day, a fried steak another, chops with onion sauce a third, and so on till the fleshy parts should be quite consumed, when finally, on the seventh day, a dish of broth manufactured from the bones would appear, and the ingenious landlady rested from her labours. It is moreover recorded, in proof of his careless habits in respect to money, that being in company with several fellow-students. on the first night of a new play, he suddenly proposed to draw lots with any one present which of the two should treat the whole party to the theatre; when the real fact was, as he afterwards confessed in speaking of the secret joy with which he heard them all decline the challenge, that had it been accepted, and had he proved the loser, he must have pledged a part of his wardrobe in order to raise the money.‡ This last anecdote, if true, reveals to us at any rate that he had a wardrobe to pledge. Such resource in the matter of dress is one of his peculiarities found generally peeping out in some form or other: and, unable to confirm any other fact in these recollections, I can at least establish that. *Percy Memoir, 19. + Ibid. And see preface to the Glasgow edition of the Works published in 1816. Prior, i. 137. E 1752. But first let me remark that no traditions remain of the Æt. 24. character or extent of his studies. It seems tolerably certain that any learned celebrity he may have got in the schools, paled an ineffectual fire before his amazing social repute, as inimitable teller of a humorous story and capital singer of Irish songs.* But he was really fond of chemistry, and was remembered favourably by the celebrated Black; other well known fellow-students, as William Farr, and his whilome college acquaintance, Lauchlan Macleane, conceived a regard for him, which somewhat later Farr seems to have had the opportunity of showing; certainly of kind quaker Sleigh, afterwards known as the eminent physician of that name, as painter Barry's first patron, Burke's friend, and one of the many victims of Foote's witty malice, so much may without contradiction be affirmed; and it is therefore to be supposed that his eighteen months' residence in Edinburgh was, on the whole, not unprofitable. It had its mortifications, of course; for all his life had these. "An ugly and a poor man is society only for himself; and such society the world "lets me enjoy in great abundance:" "nor do I envy my "dear Bob his blessings, while I may sit down and laugh at "the world; and at myself, the most ridiculous object in it : " are among his expressions of half bitter, half good-natured candour, in a letter to his cousin Bryanton.‡ * We may afford to smile at his first biographer's notice of this fact, which forms one of the “interpolations" complained of by Malone. "These endeavours "to amuse, it must be confessed, were however, from an inordinate desire of "gaining applause, and of setting the table in a roar, too often blended with "grimace and buffoonery, from which defects, notwithstanding he was afterwards "introduced into the politest company, his conversation was never wholly exempt.” Percy Memoir, 19. + See Burke's Correspondence, i. 35. The letter to Bryanton quoted above was first printed in the Anthologia Hibernica of 1793, and thence transferred to the London magazines of the same year. A mutilated copy was afterwards printed in the Percy Memoir (22—26). But I do not feel myself at liberty to suppress any of the expressions of this letter; as other biographers, though with the original letter before them, appear to have 1752. There is another confession in a later letter to his uncle, which touches him in a nearer point, and suggests perhaps Et. 24. more than it reveals. It would seem as though, to eke out 66 his resources, he had, for some part of his time, accepted employment in a great man's house: probably as tutor. "I have spent," he says, "more than a fortnight every "second day at the Duke of Hamilton's; but it seems they "like me more as a jester than as a companion; so I "disdained so servile an employment." To those with whom, on equal terms, he could be both jester and companion, Bryanton was charged with every kind of remembrance. "You cannot send me much news from Ballymahon, "but such as it is, send it all; everything you send will be agreeable to me. Has George Conway put up a sign yet? "or John Bincly left off drinking drams? or Tom Allen got a new wig?" To the remarkably pleasant and whimsical satire of the Scotch he at the same time wrote to Bryanton, I need scarcely have referred, because in all the editions of his works, except the Scotch, it is commonly printed but on the whole I think it best to include these various letters in an appendix without pledging myself to any special belief in the accuracy of all their statements. As a generally humorous picture drawn from various sources, rather than a strictly veracious record of his own experience, it will perhaps be safest to regard them; but this remark applies less strongly to those two of the three letters to his uncle Contarine, the earliest in date and least important in contents, which Mr. Prior discovered. In the first, dated May 1753,* and in which he alludes 1753. to a description of himself by his uncle, as "the philosopher Et. 25. 1752. Et. 24. 1753. "who carries all his goods about him," he describes Munro as the one great professor, and the rest of the doctorteachers as only less afflicting to their students than they must be to their patients. He makes whimsical mention of a trip to the Highlands, for which he had hired a horse about the size of a ram, who "walked away (trot he could "not) as pensive as his master." Other passages have a tendency to show within what really narrow limits he had brought his wants; with how little he was prepared to be cheerfully content; and that, for whatever advances were sent him, though certainly it might have been desirable that he should have turned them to more practical use, he at least overflowed with gratitude. There has been occasionally a harsh judgment of Goldsmith for this money so wasted on abortive professional undertakings: but the sacrifices cannot fairly be called very great. Burke had an allowance of 2001. a-year for leisure to follow studies to which he never paid the least attention; and when his father anxiously expected to hear of his call to the bar, he might have heard, instead, of a distress which forced him to sell his books :* yet no one thinks, and rightly, of exacting penalties from Burke on this ground. Poor Goldsmith's supplies were on the other hand small, irregular, uncertain, and, in some two years at the furthest, exhausted altogether. Here, in this letter to his uncle, he says that he has Æt. 25. drawn for six pounds, and that his next draft, five months after this date, will be for but four pounds; pleading in extenuation of these light demands, that he has been obliged to buy everything since he came to Scotland, "shirts not "even excepted:" while in another letter at the close of the same year he accounts for money spent by the remark that * Burke's Life by Mr. Prior, i.68, 69. he has "good store of clothes" to accompany him on his 1753. travels. Yet there was decided moderation even in the direc- Et. 25. tion sartorial; nor does the wardrobe, to which allusion was made a few pages back, appear to have been by any means extensive in the proportion of the gaiety of its colours. Upon the latter point our evidence is not to be gainsayed. What will have to be remarked of Goldsmith in this respect at Mr. Boswell's or Sir Joshua's, is already to be said of him in the lodging-house and lecture-room at Edinburgh; and on the same proof of old tailors' bills, the very ghosts of which continue to flutter about and plague his memory. The leaf of an Edinburgh ledger of 1753 has fallen into my hands, from which it would appear that one of his fellow students, Mr. Honner, had introduced him at the beginning of that year to a merchant tailor with whom he dealt for sundry items of hose, hats, silver lace, satin, allapeen, fustian, durant, shalloon, cloth, and velvet; which materials of adornment are charged to him, from the January to the December of the year, in the not very immoderate sum of 9l. 118. 24d. the first entries of which, to the amount of 31. 15s. 9ąd. were in November duly paid in full, and what remained at the year's end carried to a folio in the same ledger, unluckily destroyed before it was discovered to whom the page related. A copy of the old leaf is given below; and radiant as it is, through all its age and dinginess, with a name bright and familiar since to many generations of boys and men in the good merchant-tailors' city, is it not also still sparkling in every part with its rich sky-blue satin, its fine sky-blue shalloon, its superfine silver-laced small hat, its rich black Genoa velvet, and its best superfine high claret-coloured * * I owe this curious little document to the kindness of Mr. David Laing, of the advocates library in Edinburgh, whose readiness to communicate information to |