forced to perform the latter part of their journey on foot. The hamlet lies far from any high road, on a dreary plain, which in wet weather is often a lake. The lanes would break any jaunting-car to pieces; and there are ruts and sloughs through which the most strongly-built wheels cannot be dragged."

The family inhabited an old half-rustic mansion, in which 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 neighbouring 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 possession. A huge misshapen hobgoblin used to bestride the house every evening with an immense pair of jack-boots, which, in his efforts at hard riding, he would thrust through the roof, kicking to pieces all the work of the preceding day. The house was, therefore, left to its fate, and went to ruin.

LISSOY "THE DESERTED VILLAGE.”

When Oliver was in his second year, by the death of his wife's uncle, the father succeeded to the living of KilkennyWest, in Westmeath; and the family removed to Lissoy, where they occupied a farm of seventy acres on the skirts of that pretty village.

This was the earliest scene of Goldsmith's boyhood, the little world whence he drew many of those pictures, rural and domestic, whimsical and touching, which abound throughout his works. Lissoy is confidently cited as the original of his "Auburn" in the Deserted Village; his father's establishment, a mixture of farm and parsonage, furnished hints, it is said, for the rural economy of his Vicar of Wakefield; and his father himself, with his learned simplicity, his guileless wisdom, his amiable piety, and utter ignorance of the world, has been exquisitely portrayed in the worthy Dr. Primrose. In the Deserted Village we have this picture of his father and his father's fireside:

"His house was known to all the vagrant train,

He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain;

The long-remembered beggar was his guest,
Whose beard, descending, swept his aged breast;
The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud,
Claim'd kindred there, and had his claims allow'd;
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,
Sat by his fire, and talk'd the night away;
Wept o'er his wounds, or tales of sorrow done,
Shoulder'd his crutch, and show'd how fields were won ;
Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow,
And quite forgot their vices in their woe;
Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began."

OLIVER'S EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS.

The boy's education began when he was three years of age: a young woman in his father's house, and afterwards known as Elizabeth Delap, and schoolmistress of Lissoy, first put a book (doubtless a hornbook) into Goldsmith's hands. He did not much profit by it; for although she was proud. of having taught the child his first letters, and boasted of it at the age of ninety, when Goldsmith had been thirteen years in his grave, she also confessed, "Never was so dull a boy: he seemed impenetrably stupid."

At six years of age he passed into the hands of the village schoolmaster, one Thomas Byrne, who had been educated for a pedagogue, but had enlisted in the army, served abroad during the wars of Queen Anne's time, and risen to the rank of quartermaster of a regiment in Spain. At the return of peace, he sat down to teach the young of Lissoy reading, writing, and arithmetic, and something more, according to the sketch of him in the Deserted Village. He had a host of strange stories "about ghosts, banshees, and fairies, about the great Rapparee chief, Baldearg O'Donnell and galloping Hogan, and about the exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope, the surprise of Monjuich, and the glorious disaster of Brihuega. He was of the aboriginal race, and not only spoke the Irish language, but could pour forth unpremeditated Irish verses. Oliver became early, and through life continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish music, and especially of the compositions of Carolan, some of the last notes of whose harp he heard."-(Macaulay.)

Another trait of his motley preceptor, Byrne, was a disposition to dabble in poetry, and this likewise was caught by his pupil. Before he was eight years old, Goldsmith had

contracted a habit of scribbling verses on small scraps of paper, which, in a little while, he would throw into the fire: a few, however, were rescued, and his mother read them with a mother's delight, and saw at once that her son was a poet by nature. From that time she beset her husband with solicitations to give the boy an education suitable to his genius, and she succeeded.

OLIVER'S BOYHOOD.

This period of his life was far from happy. A severe attack of confluent smallpox caused him to be taken from Byrne's tuition: the disease had nearly proved fatal: it left his face deeply pitted, spoiled what small pretension he had to good looks. He was next sent to the Rev. Mr. Griffin's superior school at Elphin, in Roscommon; and at the house of an uncle John, at Ballyoughter, in the neighbourhood of Elphin, he was lodged and boarded. This removal to a new school was unfortunate: the poor little thick, pale-faced, pock-marked boy became the jest and sarcasm of his schoolfellows; he was considered "a stupid, heavy blockhead, little better than a fool, whom every one made fun of." Lord Macaulay says:

His stature was small, and his limbs were ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver's appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder, which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the playground, and flogged as a dunce in the schoolroom. When he had risen to eminence, those who had once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him, and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter of a century later, to indicate the powers which produced the Vicar of Wakefield and the Deserted Village.

Oliver's father obtained ultimately a benefice in the county of Roscommon, but died early; for the careful researches of the Rev. John Graham, of Lifford, have found his widow, nigra veste senescens, residing with her son Oliver in Ballymahon, so early as 1740. Among the shop-accounts of a petty grocer of the place, Mrs. Goldsmith's name occurs frequently as a customer for trifling articles; on which occasions Master Noll appears to have been his mother's usual emissary. He was recollected, however, in the neighbourhood by more poetical employments, as that of playing on the flute,

and wandering in solitude on the shores or among the islands of the river Inny, which is remarkably beautiful at Ballymahon.

OLIVER'S SCHOOLS.

It was one of the playful repartees just referred to that led to Oliver's being removed to a school of a higher order, and the confirmation of his mother's opinion of his genius.

A number of young folks had assembled at his uncle's to dance. One of the company, named Cummings, played on the violin. In the course of the evening, Oliver undertook a hornpipe. His short and clumsy figure, and his face pitted and discoloured with the smallpox, led the musician to dub him his little Æsop. Goldsmith was nettled by the jest, and, stopping short in the hornpipe, exclaimed:

"Our herald hath proclaimed this saying,

See Esop dancing, and his monkey playing."

The repartee was thought wonderful for a boy of nine years old, and Oliver became forthwith the bright genius of the family. The greater part of his school expenses was borne by his uncle, the Rev. Thomas Contarine, descended from the noble family of the Contarini of Venice. This worthy_man had been the college companion of Bishop Berkeley, and was possessed of moderate means, holding the living of Carrickon-Shannon: he had married the sister of Goldsmith's father; he had taken Goldsmith into favour from his infancy, and he now undertook the expense of his scholastic education; he was sent first to a school at Athlone, kept by the Rev. Mr. Campbell; and in two years to one at Edgeworthstown, under the superintendence of the Rev. Patrick Hughes. Even here he was indolent and careless rather than dull; he inclined towards the Latin poets and historians; relished Ovid and Horace, and delighted in Livy and Tacitus. He was once detected in robbing an orchard, for which he narrowly escaped the severest punishment.

A MISTAKE OF A NIGHT.

On Goldsmith's last journey homeward from Edgeworthstown-a distance of twenty miles of rough country-he procured a horse for the journey, and a friend furnished him with a guinea for travelling expenses. He was then a stripling of sixteen, but resolved to play the man, and spend his

money. He halted at the little town of Ardagh, and inquired of the first person he met, which was the best house of the place; the person thus accosted was a notorious wag, and directed Oliver to the family mansion of Mr. Featherstone. Goldsmith accordingly rode up to what he supposed to be an inn, ordered his horse to be taken to the stable, walked into the parlour, seated himself by the fire, and demanded what he could have for supper. The owner of the house soon discovered Oliver's whimsical mistake, and with good humour indulged it, especially as he accidentally learned that the intruding guest was the son of an old acquaintance. The supper was served; Goldsmith condescendingly insisted that the landlord and his wife and daughter should sup with him, and he ordered a bottle of wine; and before going to bed, he gave especial orders to have a hot cake for breakfast. Next morning, great was his dismay when he found that he had been swaggering in the house of a private gentleman! True to his habit of turning the events of his life to literary account, we find this chapter of ludicrous blunders and cross purposes dramatized many years afterwards in his admirable comedy of She Stoops to Conquer, or the Mistakes of a Night,

OLIVER'S EARLY RHYMES.

When he began to be noted as a rhymer, his zeal in this noble art was, it seems, quickened by the local celebrity of a volume of verse by one Lawrence Whyte, a neighbour and acquaintance of his family, which was published in 1741. This Whyte described rural manners, and especially the grievances of the Irish tenantry, in many thousands of couplets, now forgotten, which passed in their day for successful imitations of the style of Swift; but Mr. Prior notices them, and particularly a piece in four cantos, called the Parting Cup, or the Humours of Deoch an Doruis, on account of Goldsmith's confession to one of his eminent literary friends that this rustic bard gave his mind its first strong impression of the cruelty with which the Irish poor were treated, and suggested some of the most striking passages in the Deserted Village. It is curious, at all events, to observe that the themes of Whyte's indignant doggerel were exactly those which an Irish patriot of the same class would probably select, now that Whyte has been near a hundred years in his grave.