GOLDSMITH, Oliver, Irish poet and mis cellaneous writer : b. Ireland,* 10 Nov. 1728; d. at 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple, London, 4 April 1774. Goldsmith, like Richardson, "flow ered late?' The son of a poor clergyman of the Established Church, his childhood was spent at Lissoy, a hamlet in Westmeath, lying to the right of the road from Ballymahon to Athlone. From the first instruction of a female relative, he passed to the care of the village school master, a roving old soldier who had fought in Queen Anne's wars. Thence he went to schools at Elphin, at Athlone, at Edgeworthstown, earn ing nowhere any particular distinction. He was regarded as dull and heavy intellectually, al though physically he was robust and athletic. Now and then he surprised his family by an unexpected gift of repartee, and he scribbled verse early. But nothing occurred in his boy hood to favor the supposition that a genius had been born into the world of letters.
In June 1744 after anticipating, in his own person, the plot of his later comedy of
He left no memories behind him but his name scratched upon a window-pane, a battered lexicon scored with "promises to pay," and the tradition that, after writing songs at five shillings a head for the Dublin ballad singers, he used to steal out in the twilight to hear them sung. When he returned to his widowed mother (his father had died during his college days), he had no more pressing vocation than to fish in the river Inny, blow German flute and take the chair at the village "free and easy.° When he was old enough, he presented himself for ordination, but was rejected for incompetence, aggravated by red breeches. He next tried tutoring; made a little money, bought a good horse and started again for America. In brief space he returned on a miserable hack, and without a. penny. Law was then essayed. Being equipped with BO for study in London, he lost it on the road to a sharper.
Finally he did reach Edinburgh, to study physic. Upon the same pretext he went from Edinburgh to Leyden. Then, being again with out means, he started — like Holberg — to make a kind of Grand Tour on foot through Europe. He visited France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, flute-playing and disputing at convents for a subsistence. In February 1756, being then 27, he landed at Dover with a few half pence in his pocket. He had, however, sent home to his brother from Switzerland a frag ment of the poem which afterward became 'The Traveler.' For the moment literature seems to have been the last thing in his thoughts. 'He is sus pected to have tried strolling; he is known to have been an apothecary's assistant, a poor phy sician (with a dubious foreign diploma), a reader and corrector of the press to Richard son the novelist, and an usher in a Peckham °academy.° Here, at last, he drifted into authorship, being engaged by Griffiths of the Monthly Review to supply °copy° of all work for that serial. With Griffiths he speedily fell out; and eventually found his way back to Peckham, where his old employer promised to get him a foreign medical appointment. Mean while he published (1758), under a pseudonym, a translation of the 'Memoirs' of Jean Mar teilhc of Bergerac, a Protestant condemned to the galleys for his religion. Failing, for un known reasons, to take up the post at Coro mandel which had been found for hint, he tried to pass as a hospital mate. He was re jected at Surgeons' Hall in December 1758 as "not qualified.° We next hear of him as living in a tiny court off the Old Bailey, writing a high-titled (Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe.' This, superficial of necessity, but bright and epigrammatic, attracted some notice. He began a miscellany called The Bee, and was employed on various periodicals. Then Smollett enlisted him for the British Maga zine; and for Newberry's Public Ledger he wrote the delightful essays afterward collected in 1762 as the 'Citizen of the World.> By this time the skies were opening. He had moved into better rooms at 6 Wine Office Court, Fleet street, made the acquaintance of Johnson, and was certain of employment. Besides dispersed papers, he wrote 'Memoirs of Voltaire,' a 'History of Medclenburgh,' a 'Life of Richard Nash' (of Bath). What is more, he was writ ing the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' for in October 1762 he sold a third share in that book to Ben jamin Collins, a Salisbury printer, for al. How this is to be reconciled with Boswell's story that Johnson sold the entire novel to a bookseller for MO has not yet been explained; but internal evidence shows clearly that parts of the book were written in 1762.