BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH. OLIVER GOLDSMITH, the son of a humble village preacher, was born at the parsonage in Pallas, the property of the Edgeworths of Edgeworthstown, in the county of Longford, Ireland, November 10, 1728. He died in London, wept over by Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and Garrick, April 4, 1774, five months over his forty-fifth year. Between the obscure Irish village birthplace and the monument in Westminster Abbey stretched a career which was half in clouds and half in sunshine, a rainbow of tears and smiles. He had no advantages of birth other than the priceless one of a simple-hearted father, "passing rich with forty pounds a year," who lives again in the preacher of the "Deserted Village" and more minutely in the hero of the "Vicar of Wakefield." His life to outward seeming was a series of blunders. He was tossed about from one school to another, learning many things which somehow seem more in his life than Latin or Greek. He learned to play the flute, and he fell in love with vagrancy, or rather the vagrant in him was carefully nourished by an unworldly, unsophisticated father, a merry-andrew of a teacher, and by fickle For tune herself. An uncle, the Rev. Mr. Contarine, was the prudent man of the family, always appearing as the necessary counterpoise to prevent Oliver from flying off |