drawing upon the thoughts and reviving the memories of that “unhallowed time” when, to all appearance, he was hopelessly squandering his opportunities.“No man “-says one of his biographers”*-ever put so much of himself into his books as Goldsmith.” To his last hour he was As it was, if he could not be said “to have seen life steadily, and seen it whole,” he had, at all events, inspected it pretty narrowly in parts and, at a time when he was most impressible, had preserved the impress of many things which, in his turn, he was to impress upon his writings. Had he fulfilled the modest expectations of his family, he would probably have remained a simple curate in Westmeath, eking out his ” forty pounds a year” by farming a field or two, migrating contentedly at the fitting season from the “blue bed to the brown,” and (it may be) subsisting vaguely as a local poet upon the tradition of some youthful couplets to a pretty cousin, who had married a richer man. And yet, as things fell out, it is doubtful whether his parti-coloured experiences were not of more service to him than any he could have obtained if his progress had been less erratic. He had been many things :-a medical student, a strolling musician, a corrector of the press, an apothecary, an usher at a Peckham “academy.” Judged by ordinary standards, he had wantonly wasted his time. He had started for London and stopped at Dublin he had set out for America and arrived at Cork.
He had been an idle, orchard-robbing schoolboy a tuneful but intractable sizar of Trinity a lounging, loitering, fair-haunting, flute-playing Irish “buckeen.” He had tried both Law and Divinity, and crossed the threshold of neither.
What was to come he knew not but, from his bare-walled lodging in Green-Arbour-Court, he could at least look back upon a sufficiently diversified past. When, in 1758, his failure to pass at Surgeons’ Hall finally threw him on letters for a living, the thirty years were finished, and the fifteen years had been begun.
Thirty years of taking-in fifteen years of giving out -that, in brief, is Oliver Goldsmith’s story.
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