E

OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S EARLY YEARS

VERY lover of literature loves Oliver Goldsmith, whose open and warm-hearted character is faithfully reflected in his writings. And what writings are his! So clear, so easy and unaffected, so buoyant and witty, so musical and pleasing even when read for the twentieth or the hundredth time. It is no wonder that some modern critics regard him as the first and purest of all writers of English prose. Frederic Harrison exclaims: "Dear old Goldsmith! there is ease, pellucid simplicity, wit, pathos. I doubt if English prose has ever gone further, or will go further or higher.' And Robert Buchanan says in A Poet's Sketch Book: "Between Shakespeare and Dickens, only one humorist of the truly divine sort rose, fluted magically for a moment, and passed away, leaving the Primrose family as his legacy to posterity."

There came to me some time since a volume on Goldsmith's schoolboy days-The Early Haunts of Oliver Goldsmith. By J. J. Kelly, D.D., M.R.I.A., Athlone. This excellent book, which I have read with keen pleasure, throws considerable light upon an obscure part of the poet's life, and forms an important addition to the bibliography of his career and writings. As I turned the pages, I was transported in spirit to the scenes there described and pictured; for, born and reared in the Goldsmith country, I spent in my youth, as Oliver himself did, many happy days wandering upon the banks of the Shannon, and boating among the wooded islands, that glow like emeralds set in silver amidst the waters of Lough Ree, the lake which the great river enters a short distance from the town of Athlone.

The Latin epitaph written by Johnson for Goldsmith's grave states that the poet was born at Pallas, in the County of Longford. The author of the Early Haunts proves conclusively that in this point Johnson erred, and that Goldsmith was born at Elphin, in the County of Roscommon; he points out also that the date of Oliver's birth was 1728, not, as stated in the epitaph, 1731. Oliver's father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, lived at Pallas, in Longford, "passing rich with forty pounds a year;" but Mrs. Goldsmith paid a visit, shortly before her confinement, to her mother's house in the neighbouring town of Elphin, and there, on the 10th November, 1728, she was delivered of a son, who

* Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker; M. H. Gill and Son.

was called Oliver, after his maternal grandfather, under whose roof he was born.

In Oliver's second year his father removed from Pallas to Lissoy, in Westmeath. Lissoy, which is five miles from Athlone is the original of "sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain.” In after years, when living in London, Goldsmith wrote to one of his relations, who resided at Lissoy, in this strain of affectionate remembrance: If I go to the opera, where Signora Columba pours out all the mazes of melody, I sit and sigh for Lissoy fireside, and Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night' from Peggy Golden. If I climb Hampstead Hill, than where nature never exhibited a more magnificent prospect, I confess it fine, but then I had rather be placed on the little mount before Lissoy gate, and there take in, to me, the most pleasing horizon in nature."

Oliver first attended a dame's school kept by Mrs. Elizabeth Delap, who looked upon him as a dull and stupid child, and at the age of six years he became a pupil of the village schoolmaster, Tom Byrne, whose portrait is preserved for all time in "The Deserted Village."

Beside yon straggling fence that skirts the way,
With blossomed furze unprofitably gay,
There, in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule,
The village master taught his little school.
A man severe he was, and stern to view;
I knew him well, and every truant knew:
Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace
The day's disasters in his morning face;
Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee
At all his jokes, for many a joke had he;
Full well the busy whisper circling round
Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned.
Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault;
The village all declared how much he knew:
'Twas certain he could write, and cypher too;
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And e'en the story ran that he could gauge:
In arguing, too, the parson owned his skill;
For e'en though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around ;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.

Tom Byrne had been a soldier, and had fought in the wars on the Continent, of which he had many stories to tell. He used also to relate tales of robbers and fairies, and from him Goldsmith caught the trick of weaving simple verses. When the boy was eight years of age, he wrote couplets that filled his mother with delight. At his uncle's he once undertook to dance

a hornpipe. The fiddler, amused at the lad's awkward figure, called him Æsop, and Oliver replied:

Heralds proclaim aloud! all saying,

See Æsop dancing and his monkey playing.

From the village school Goldsmith passed to the diocesan academy of Elphin, and on reaching his eleventh year he was sent to Athlone, where he spent two years at a High School kept by the Rev. Mr. Campbell. A lad with such a bent for rambling and adventure must have known the quaint old town and its environs well. That he strayed by the Shannon and Lough Ree (Lissoy was close to the lake, and his eldest sister, Catherine, married to Daniel Hudson, dwelt at St. John's, distant about six miles' sail across the bright waters) we may infer from the passage in his Animated Nature, in which he says: "Those who have walked in the evening by the sedgy sides of unfrequented rivers must remember a variety of notes from different waterfowl; the loud scream of the wild goose, the croaking of the mallard, the whining of the lapwing, and the tremulous neighing of the jack-snipe. But of all those sounds there is none so dismally hollow as the booming of the bittern. I remember in the place where I was a boy with what terror this bird's note affected the whole village."

At the schools of Edgeworthstown and Ballymahon he was prepared for entrance into Trinity College, Dublin. On one occasion when going home from Edgeworthstown at the beginning of the holidays, he rode a horse, and had a guinea in his pocket for travelling expenses. He was not sixteen years of age, and, arriving at the small town of Ardagh, he determined to play the man, and put up at the best inn. Meeting a passer-by, who proved to be a wag, he asked to be shown to the best house in the place. The private residence of a Mr. Featherstone, the richest man in the town, was pointed out. The stripling rode up to the door, ordered his horse to be well cared for, and entering the parlour, called consequentially for a dinner, to which he invited the members of the family. The latter, perceiving his mistake, entered into the joke. Goldsmith, before retiring to rest, requested that a hot cake should be ready for his breakfast next day. In the morning, to his mortification, he discovered the error into which he had been betrayed; but Mr. Featherstone and his family, who were acquainted with Oliver's father, laughed heartily, and the lad joined shamefacedly in their merriment. This adventure he afterwards utilised in the comedy, "She Stoops to Conquer, or, The Mistakes of a Night."

No author, indeed, has, to the same extent as Goldsmith, the

gift of interweaving with his writings traits of his own character and the incidents of his life. The persons whom he knew, the hardships and mishaps of which he had so large experience, the scenes that were familiar to his early years, reappear in his works, illumined, no doubt, with the radiance flung around them by memory, imagination, or affection. Hence, I think that Lord Macaulay is mistaken, when, in his article on Goldsmith (Encyclopædia Britannica), he alleges that discerning judges are shocked by one unpardonable fault that pervades the whole of "The Deserted Village." The poem, he says, is made up of incongruous parts. "The village in its happy days is a true English village. The village in its decay is an Irish village.

.The hamlet he had probably seen in Kent; the ejectment he had probably seen in Munster; but by joining the two he has produced something which never was, and never will be, seen in any part of the world."

No one acquainted with the character of the Irish peasantry could entertain this opinion; nor could such a scene of content, gaiety, and outdoor amusement as Goldsmith describes be witnessed in Kent in the second half of the eighteenth century. Such scenes the poet often took part in on the Continent; but he assuredly never expected to meet with them in England. And Macaulay himself acknowledges as much when he says: "He rambled on foot through Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes which everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and which often procured for him a supper and a bed.

The

wanderer landed at Dover without a shilling, without a friend, and without a calling. In England his flute was not

in request."

In Ireland, beyond doubt, his flute would have been in request; it would have set the peasantry dancing, as it did in France, and would have secured him a hearty welcome to both bed and board.

William Hazlitt, a native of Kent (he was born at Maidstone in 1778, four years after Goldsmith's death), had an intimate knowledge of English character and customs, and in his essay, "Merry England," he dwells upon the difference between the mirth of Continental peoples and that of the English. He quotes Froissart's well-known saying, that the English amuse themselves sadly after the fashion of their country; and he says: "They ask you in France how you pass your time without amusements." It is true," he adds, "that they (the English) do not dance and sing, but they make good cheer, eat, drink, and are merry.' He acknowledges that the old-fashioned epithet, "Merry England," might be supposed to have been bestowed ironically, or

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on the old principle-Ut lucus a non lucendo. He plainly would not endorse Macaulay's assertion that the lines in "The Deserted Village" present a true picture of the customs and amusements of the English peasantry in the eighteenth century.

Let us now turn to Ireland. In my youth, not content with the reports of other tourists, I made a pilgrimage to Lissoy, the original of Auburn, and I easily identified the main physical features of the scenery with the statements in the poem. There I saw "the decent church that topp'd the neighbouring hill," the "never-failing brook," though the mill had disappeared; the bowers (I looked upon a fair and well-wooded country), and even the old orchard and garden, where some flowers and fruit still grew—

Yonder copse, where once the garden smiled,

And still where many a garden flower grows wild.

It is no wonder that the poet, contemplating such a scene, mirrored in an affectionate heart, should address it thus:

Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,
How often have I loitered o'er thy green,
Where humble happiness endeared each scene!
How often have I blest the coming day,
When toil remitting lent its turn to play,
And all the village train, from labour free,
Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree.
In all my wanderings round this world of care,
In all my griefs-and God has given my share-
I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,
Amidst those humble bowers to lay me down;
And, as a hare whom hounds and horns pursue
Pants to the place from whence at first he flew,
I still had hopes, my long vexations past,
Here to return-and die at home at last.

It is not possible to believe that Goldsmith could have spoken thus of any place that was not "home" to him, the scene of the well-remembered joys of his early years. "He writes," says Thackeray (English Humorists), “ a book and a poem, full of the recollection and feelings of home; he paints the friends and scenes of his youth, and peoples Auburn and Wakefield with remembrance of Lissoy."

Irish rural communities are extremely conservative in their local usages and sports, and none are more light-hearted and gay in their seasons of relaxation. Everyone who lives in the country parts of Ireland has again and again seen the people, young and old, assemble on a quiet evening at a favourite rendezvous,