Part 30

All chance of succeeding as a clergyman, to which office he, moreover, had an aversion, appearing out of the question, and having either no inclination, or not sufficient spirit of plodding for the pursuit of law, which had been recommended to him, by assistance of his friends he crossed over to Edinburgh, and commenced in that University the study of physic. We have no clew to the exact lodgings of Goldsmith during his stay in Edinburgh, which was two winters. Men in the poverty of Goldsmith, as a student, seldom record very traceably their whereabouts. The tradition is, however, that the lodgings he chiefly occupied were in the College Wynd; and this is very likely, both because the situation is very convenient for the college, and because the character of the place agrees pretty much with the sort of entertainment he describes himself to have found in them. The College Wynd is a narrow alley of wretched houses, now inhabited only by the lowest grade of population. It is probable, however, that in it was the better class of lodgings which Goldsmith occupied in this city. The house in which he located himself at first was also a boarding-house, but of such a description that he used, in after days, to amuse his friends in London with an account of the economy of the table. A leg of mutton, as he told the story, dished up in various ways by the ingenuity of his hostess, served for the better part of dinner during a week; a dish of broth being made on the seventh day from the bone. He soon fled from this luxurious abode, and joined several other students, his friends and countrymen, who were better accommodated, most likely in this College Wynd. He had the advantage of studying under the elder Monro; he became a member of the Medical Society; but was soon more noted for his convivial talents and habits than for his industrious study. He made a trip into the Highlands on a pony, he says, of the size of a ram, and wrote a humorous account of Scotland and the people to his friend, Robert Bryanton, of Ballymahon. Through some Irish connection he was invited to the Duke of Hamilton's, whose duchess at that time was one of the celebrated Gunnings; but he said he soon found himself liked rather as a _jester_ than as a companion, and he at once disdained the company of dukes on any such terms. Among his college friends was that Lauchlan Macleane, whom Sir David Brewster has of late again been endeavoring to prove to be the real Junius, though his claims were long ago sifted, and rejected by public opinion; particularly from the cogent facts that Macleane was the private secretary of Lord Shelburne at the very time that his lordship was violently attacked by Junius, under another signature, in 1767, according to Woodfall's evidence, which would convert Macleane into Junius at the cost of all character; and, secondly, because Macleane was himself ridiculed by Junius, under the signature of Vindex, in 1771.

Having, with his usual incaution in such matters, become security for a fellow-student, he would not have been able to quit Edinburgh had it not been for Macleane and Dr. Joseph Fenn Sleigh, a Quaker, and afterward a popular physician at Cork. Saved from arrest by their kindness, he embarked for Bordeaux, but was driven into Newcastle-on-Tyne, where, the ship proving to be engaged in enlisting soldiers for the French army, he was seized and cast into prison for a fortnight before he could prove his innocence. In the mean time the ship had escaped out of the harbor. He had lost his passage, and his passage-money and luggage, but saved his life, for the ship was wrecked, and every soul perished. He then went over to Rotterdam, studied at Leyden for a year, but, as far as appears, took no degree; and thence set off, on foot, on that tour of which so much has always been said in connection with his name. With his usual good-natured thoughtlessness, when about to set forward from Leyden, provided with a small fund by his uncle Contarine, being struck, in the garden of a florist, with some beautiful bulbous flowers, and recollecting in his gratitude his uncle Contarine's admiration of those flowers, he spent most of the money in purchasing a quantity of them to ship to Ireland for him, as the most welcome present he could think of, and then set out, almost penniless, on his journey. His tour extended through Flanders; and France, at Paris attending the chemical lectures of Rouelle, and being introduced to Voltaire; a small portion of Germany; thence through Switzerland, visiting some of its most celebrated scenes, and climbing some of its highest mountains, as the Jura, into Italy, where he extended his journey to most of the northern cities, Mantua, Milan, Padua, Florence, Verona, Venice, and the wilds of Carinthia, but never reached Rome or Naples. His necessities became too great to permit him to go farther. In France his flute was, among the peasantry, as represented in his Traveler, a never-failing resource; not so in Italy. There the higher taste for music made his rude skill useless; but he found many of his countrymen residents in the monasteries, and these were always ready to relieve his wants. He found also another resource, which he relates in his Philosophic Vagabond: "My skill in music could avail me nothing in Italy, where every peasant was a better musician than I; but by this time I had acquired another talent, which answered my purpose as well, and this was a skill in disputation. In all the foreign universities and convents, there are, upon certain days, philosophical theses maintained against every adventitious disputant; for which, if the champion opposes with any dexterity, he can claim a gratuity in money, a dinner, and a bed for one night. In this manner, then, I fought my way toward England; walked along from city to city, examined mankind more closely, and, if I may so express it, saw both sides of the picture."

There is no question that this hardy enterprise of making the tour of Europe on foot, and pushing his way as he could, by his powers of argument or his flute, though, as he observed, it made him a debtor in almost every kingdom in Europe, yet immensely extended his knowledge of human nature. He was the first man, through his close observation of the French people, to predict their breaking up the despotism of the old monarchy. "As the Swedes are making concealed approaches to despotism, the French, on the other hand, are imperceptibly vindicating themselves into freedom. When I consider that these Parliaments, the members of which are all created by the court; the presidents of which can only act by immediate direction; presume even to mention privileges and freedom, who, till of late, received directions from the throne with implicit humility; when this is considered, I can not help fancying that the genius of freedom has entered that kingdom in disguise. If they have but three weak monarchs successively on the throne, the mask will be laid aside, and the country will certainly once more be free." This was a remarkable prophecy; the sagacity of Goldsmith penetrated the eventful future twelve years before the mind of Burke, by treading the same ground, arrived at the same conclusion.

In 1756 Oliver Goldsmith reached England, destined now to the end of his life to become the scene of his varied struggles, his poverty, and his fame. It were a long story to follow him minutely through all his numerous pursuits of an existence, his various changes of residence for a long time, without much advance toward profit or reputation. The early part of his career is lost in obscurity and conjecture. He stepped upon the shore of England a nameless adventurer, destitute of cash, and uncertain as to what means of livelihood he should embrace. The struggle which now and for some time went on was for life itself. He was reduced to the most desperate circumstances. He applied for assistance to his relations in Ireland, but whether they could no longer help him, or whether they now regarded his continual wanderings, and continual drain upon them, as the confirmed signs of a thriftless vagabond, none came. It is said that in this situation he tried the stage in a country town, and his intimate acquaintanceship with the interior of the wretched country play-house, as displayed in The Adventures of a Strolling Player, and the conclusion of the story of George Primrose, renders it very probable. He was driven by utter need, according to the by-word of the Irishman, to be almost "any body's customer." The next resource was, trusting to his scholastic acquirements to procure an engagement as an usher in a country school. But his appearance must have been against him; reference he had none in this country to give, and though he applied to his old kind tutor in Dublin, Dr. Radcliffe, not the brute Wilder, he requested his recommendation to be given to him under a feigned name, being ashamed of hereafter having his present condition associated with his own. Dr. Radcliffe was obliged to be silent. Goldsmith held this situation, it may be supposed, under these circumstances for no long period; but the very location of the school is unknown; it has been said to be in Yorkshire, and also in Kent, near Ashford or Tenterden. What sort of a life he had of it in this "Do-the-boys Hall," wherever it was, we may learn from the curious catechism he puts into the mouth of the cousin of one of his heroes. "Ay, this is indeed a very pretty career that has been chalked out for you. I have been an usher at a boarding-school myself; and may I die by an anodyne necklace, but I had rather be under-turnkey in Newgate. I was up early and late. I was browbeat by the master; hated for my ugly face by the mistress; worried by the boys within, and never permitted to stir out to receive civility abroad. But are you sure you are fit for a school? Let me examine you a little. Have you been bred apprentice to the business?" "No." "Then you won't do for a school. Have you had the small-pox?" "No." "Then you won't do for a school. Can you lie three in a bed?" "No." "Then you won't do for a school. Have you got a good stomach?" "Yes." "Then you will by no means do for a school!"

Driven from such a purgatory even for want of a character, Goldsmith, with The Deserted Village and The Vicar of Wakefield in his hand, was once more wandering the streets of London amid a thousand other equally destitute wretches. He applied to apothecary after apothecary, trusting to his medical education, for employment with them; but, with all the traces of vagabond indigence upon him, and without any recommendation to show, his repulses were certain. A chemist of the name of Jacob, residing at the corner of Monument or Bell Yard, on Fish Hill, taking compassion on his destitute condition, at length gave him employment. It may be supposed to be about this time that his lodgings were of that magnificent description with which he once in after life startled a circle of good company, breaking out suddenly in some fit of forgetful enthusiasm with, "When I lived among the beggars in Ax Lane." His first gleam of better fortune was finding his old Edinburgh college friend, Dr. Sleigh, in London, who received him in all his squalor with the warmth of true friendship, and enabled him to commence as physician in Bankside, Southwark. It did not answer, and the next glimpse of him is acting as a corrector of the press in the printing-office of Richardson the novelist. The next fortunate circumstance was meeting with Mr. Milner, one of his old Edinburgh fellow-students, whose father, Dr. Milner, a Dissenting minister, kept a classical school at Peckham, in Surrey. By him he was recommended to his father, to assist him in his school duties. Dr. Milner was suffering under severe illness, and Goldsmith's services were accepted. Here he continued for some time, it has been said by part of the family, three years; and this connection led to the one which brought him into the direct field of authorship. Mr., afterward Dr. Griffiths, a bookseller of Paternoster Row, had started the Monthly Review, and was beating up for contributors. Goldsmith, whom he had become acquainted with at Dr. Milner's, was one invited. The engagement is calculated to make both proprietors and authors of the present day smile. Goldsmith was regularly boarded and lodged in the bibliopole's house--the hired servant of literature. How satisfactory this odd arrangement of keeping a tame author turned out, may be guessed by the fact that the engagement for a year ended in five months. The great fact at which Goldsmith kicked was, that not only Griffiths, but _his wife_, was in the regular habit of acting as the censor, and altering the articles written for the Review.

From this time to the day of his death Goldsmith was regularly lanched into the drudgery of literature; the most wearing, feverish, uncertain, and worst remunerating life under the sun. To live in one long anxiety, and to die poor, was his lot, as it has been that of thousands of others. There are innocent minds, who are filled with gladness at the sight of a goodly library; who feast on a well-bound row of books, as the lover of nature does on a poetical landscape or on a bank of violets. For my part, I never see such a collection of books without an inward pang. They remind me of a catacomb; every volume is in my eyes but a bone in the great gathering of the remains of literary martyrs. When I call to mind the pleasure with which many of these books were written, followed by the agonies of disappointment they brought; the repulses and contempt of booksellers, to whom the authors had carried them in all the flush of their inexperience and of high hope; the cruel malice of the critics which assailed them,

"Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame; Bloody dissectors, worse than ten Monros: He hacks to teach, they mangle to expose;"--_Burns._

when I think of the glorious hopes which accompanied their composition, and the terrible undeceiving which attended their publication; when I reflect how many of these fair tomes were written in bitterest poverty, with the most aching hearts, in the most cheerless homes, and how many others ruined the writers who were tolerably well off before they put pen to paper; when I remember, on passing my eye along them, how many of them never were raised to their present rank and occupation till the unhappy authors were beyond the knowledge of it; when I see others which _had_ their fame during the author's lifetime, but enriched only the lucky bibliopole, and left the conscious producer of wealth only doubly poor by seeing it in the enjoyment of another; when I see those works which, while the author lived, were assailed as blasphemous and devilish, and are now the text-books of liberty and progress; and when I call to mind all the tears which have bedewed them, the sadness of soul, often leading to suicide, which has weighed down the immortal spirits which created them, I own that there is to me no such melancholy spectacle as a fine collection of books.

Goldsmith had his full share of this baptism of literary wretchedness. I can not follow him minutely through the years of book-drudgery and all its attendant adventures. Suffice it that he wrote an immense mass of articles for the periodicals; hosts of histories; plays, tales, essays, and the like, anonymously; and which, therefore, brought him precarious bread, but little fame. He commenced writing in the Monthly Review in 1757, and it was not till 1764 that his name was first affixed to his first poem, The Traveler. Thus he served a seven years' apprenticeship to anonymous authorship before he began to take that rank in English literature which was his destined portion; exactly in ten years more he was in his grave, having, in the mean time, given to posterity his exquisite Deserted Village; his inimitable Vicar of Wakefield; his Good-natured Man, and She Stoops to Conquer; besides hosts of histories, written to make the pot boil. Histories of Animated Nature; of England, Greece, Rome, and what not. During the whole of his career, the pecuniary condition of Goldsmith was one of uneasiness. It is true that his generous, improvident disposition might have left the result the same had he won ten times the sum he did; but one can not help regarding the sums received by him for his writings as something most humiliating, when their real value to the booksellers of all ages is considered. We find his life abounding with his borrowing two and three guineas of his bookseller, and receiving such sums for articles. The Traveler brought him _twenty guineas_! The Vicar of Wakefield, _sixty_; and for the Deserted Village, _one hundred_; not two hundred pounds altogether, for three of the most popular works in any language. It would be a curious fact to ascertain, were it possible, what these three works alone have made for the booksellers.

But if Goldsmith was not well remunerated for the works with which he enriched the English language, he was rich in friends. Johnson, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, all the great men of the age, were his intimate associates, and knew how to value both his genius and his unselfish nature. The friendship of Johnson for him was beautiful. All the world knows the story of Johnson selling "the manuscript of the Vicar of Wakefield" to save the author from an arrest of his landlady for arrears of rent. It has been made the subject of more than one excellent painting; but it is not so generally known, that so uncertain were both Johnson and the publisher of its merits, that it remained nearly two years in the publisher's desk before he ventured to publish it. It was the fame of The Traveler which emboldened the bibliopole to bring it out, and the public at once received it with one instant and general cheer.

We must now confine ourselves to a brief indication of the successive residences and haunts of Goldsmith during his literary life in London, first observing only, that so unpromising for a long time was the field of authorship, that he sought several times to quit it. In 1758, he procured the post of physician and surgeon to one of the factories on the coast of Coromandel, but was refused his certificate at Surgeon's Hall as not duly qualified. He tried, in 1760, to procure the situation of secretary to the Society of Arts, as a means of permanent support; and failing, he recurred to a wild project, which he had entertained years before, of going out to the East to decipher the inscriptions on the Written Mountains, though he was totally ignorant of Arabic, or the language in which the inscriptions might be supposed to be written. His inducement was the salary of £300 a year, which had been left for that purpose. He proposed, in this expedition, also, to acquire a knowledge of the arts peculiar to the East, and introduce them into Britain. When Johnson heard of this, he said, "Why, sir, he would bring home a grinding-barrow, which you see in every street of London, and think he had furnished a wonderful improvement." The scheme appeared as visionary in other quarters, and so fell through. These various plans, however, all show what a thorny path was that of authorship to him.

We find Goldsmith first residing, after he had quitted Griffiths's roof, about 1757, in the vicinity of Salisbury Square, Fleet-street; where exactly, is not known. At this time he was in the habit of frequenting the Temple Exchange Coffee-house, near Temple Bar, where he had his letters addressed, and where he even saw, according to the fashion of the times, his patients, when he had any. There does not appear to be any such coffee-house now. Green-arbor Court, between the Old Bailey and what was lately Fleet Market, was his next abode, where he located himself toward the end of 1758. "Here," says his biographer, "he became well known to his literary brethren, was visited by them, and his lodgings well remembered. This house, a few years ago, formed the abode, as it appears to have done in his own time, of laborious indigence. The adjoining houses likewise presented every appearance of squalid poverty, every floor being occupied by the poorest class. Two of the number fell down from age and dilapidation; and the remainder, on the same side of the court, including that in which the poet resided, standing on the right-hand corner on entering from Farringdon-street by what is called, from their steepness and number, Breakneck-steps, were taken down some time afterward to avoid a similar catastrophe. They were four stories in height; the attics had casement windows, and at one time they were probably inhabited by a superior class of tenants. The site is now occupied by a large building, inclosed by a wall running through the court or square, intended for the stabling and lofts of a wagon office."

In the beginning of March, 1759, he was seen here, in one of his excursions to London, by the Rev. Mr. Percy, afterward Bishop Percy, the collector of the Reliques, and author of the Hermit of Warkworth, one of his earliest literary friends. "The doctor," observed the prelate, "was employed in writing his Inquiry into Polite Learning, in a wretchedly dirty room, in which there was but one chair; and when, from civility, this was offered to his visitant, he himself was obliged to sit in the window. While they were conversing, some one gently rapped at the door, and on being desired to come in, a poor, ragged little girl of very decent behavior entered, who, dropping a courtesy, said, 'My mamma sends her compliments, and begs the favor of your lending her a potful of coals.'"

Mr. Prior, in 1820, going into a small shop in the Clapham Road to purchase the first edition of Goldsmith's Essays, lying in the window, found the woman in the shop an old neighbor of the poet's. She said she was a near relative of the woman who kept the house in Green-arbor Court, and, at the age of seven or eight, went frequently thither; one of the inducements to which was the cakes and sweetmeats given to her and other children of the family by the gentleman who lodged there. These they duly valued at the moment, but when afterward considered as the gift of one so eminent, the recollection became the source of pride and boast. Another of his amusements consisted in assembling these children in his room, and inducing them to dance to the music of his flute. Of this instrument, as a relaxation from study, he was fond. He was usually shut up in the room during the day, went out in the evenings, and preserved regular hours. His habits otherwise were sociable, and he had several visitors. One of the companions whose society gave him particular pleasure was a respectable watchmaker, residing in the same court, celebrated for the possession of much wit and humor; qualities which, as they distinguish his own writings, he professes to have sought and cultivated wherever they were to be found.