Miscellaneous Works

THE Life of Oliver Goldsmith by Mr. (now Sir James) Prior, published in 1837, in two volumes 8vo, was the first really careful biography of a writer who had already for seventy years been among the most popular and fascinating of our English classics. To the results of Mr. Prior's researches it can hardly be said that there has been any material addition. Mr. John Forster's well known Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith, published in 1848, superseded, however, for most purposes, the work of Mr. Prior, and from its greater vivacity and its abundant deliciousness of literary anecdote, will probably remain the standard biography of Goldsmith to all time coming. Washington Irving's Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography, published in 1849, was avowedly a compilation from Prior and Forster, but has an independent interest, as the work of one who delighted, all his life, in acknowledging Goldsmith as his literary master, and has been named, in consequence, The American Goldsmith." Of smaller memoirs of Goldsmith the number is past counting. Perhaps, therefore, no better reason can be given for here adding one more than that it will be convenient for possessors of this edition of Goldsmith's Works to have some account of the Author bound up with it.

Oliver Goldsmith was born, on the 10th of November, 1728, at the obscure, and then almost inaccessible, village of Pallas, or Pallasmore, in the county of Longford, in the very midmost solitude of Ireland. His father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, was the poor Protestant clergyman of that Irish parish. He was one of a family of Goldsmiths, noted for worth and goodness of heart rather than worldly prudence, who were originally from the South of England, and in whom, since their first coming to Ireland, the clerical profession, in its Protestant form, had been almost hereditary. Goldsmith's mother, Ann Jones, was also of a clerical and Protestant family that had been naturalized in Ireland. She was one of the daughters of the Rev. Oliver Jones, master of the diocesan school of Elphin in Roscommon. From this maternal grandfather young Oliver derived his Christian name.

He used afterwards to maintain, however, that it had come into the line of his maternal ancestry through some connexion with Oliver Cromwell.

Four children, three of them daughters, and one a son, named Henry, had been born to the clergyman of Pallasmore and his wife before the appearance of the

"Oliver" that was to make them famous; and the family was ultimately completed by the birth of three sons younger than Oliver, named Maurice, Charles, and John. The eldest of this family of eight (a daughter), and this last-named John, died in childhood. Effectively, therefore, Oliver grew up as one of a family of six, three of whom were older, and two younger, than himself.

A native of the rural heart of Ireland, Goldsmith, till his seventeenth year, received his entire education, whether of scenery and circumstance, or of more formal schooling, within the limits of that little-visited region. Not, however, without some changes of spot and society within those limits. In 1730, while he was yet but an infant, his father, after having been about twelve years minister of Pallas, removed to the better living of Kilkenny West, a parish some miles south of Pallas, and situated not in the county of Longford, but in the adjacent county of West Meath. Thenceforward, accordingly, the head-quarters of the family were no longer at Pallas, but at Lissoy, a quaint Irish village within the bounds of the new parish. Here, in a pretty and rather commodious parsonage-house, on the verge of the village, and on the road between Athlone and Ballymahon, the good clergyman set himself to bring up his children on his paltry clerical income, eked out by the farming of some seventy acres of land. He was himself a mild eccentric of the Dr. Primrose type, kindly to all about him, and of pious, confused ways. But the immortal oddity of Lissoy, and the incarnation of all that had been peculiar for some generations in the race of the Goldsmiths, was the parson's young son, Oliver. In book-learning, for one thing, he was, from the first, a little blockhead. "Never was so dull a boy" was the report of a kinswoman, who, having lived in the Lissoy household, had been the first to try to teach him his letters, and who afterwards, under her married name of Elizabeth Delap, kept a small school at Lissoy, and survived to be proud of her pupil, and to talk of him in her extreme old age, after he was dead. Hardly different seems to have been the report of the Lissoy schoolmaster, Thomas Byrne, more familiarly known as "Paddy Byrne,”—a veteran who had returned to his original vocation of teaching after having served in the wars under Marlborough and risen to the rank of quartermaster to a regiment in Spain. And yet of this " 'Paddy Byrne" Goldsmith seems to have retained to the last an affectionate recollection:

A man severe he was, and stern to view;
I knew him well, and every truant knew.
Well had the boding tremblers learnt 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 even the story ran that he could gauge.

« Претходна Настави »

Књиге