Category: Biographies

Oliver Goldsmith

The Goldsmith family sprang originally from Crayford, a nestling village in Kent. This southern county, in all its loveliness, can thus add this high honour to its other though not greater glories. "To be the best beloved of English writers," said Thackeray, "what a title that...

Chapters

10. Chapter 10

To think of Oliver Goldsmith is to feel him near--a friend, and the brightest of friends. This is the spell that still he sways. His words are semblant to moving memories. His g...

2. Chapter 2

The wandering boy, stricken with grief at the pain and the poverty he sees, alike in town and village in Ireland, foreshadows and unveils the coming man, who, knowing his own an...

1. Chapter 1

The Goldsmith family sprang originally from Crayford, a nestling village in Kent. This southern county, in all its loveliness, can thus add this high honour to its other though...

8. Chapter 8

In 1771 Goldsmith was full of hope for that capital essay in comedy, _She Stoops to Conquer_. Two years passed before he could obtain its definite acceptance. He found his manag...

9. Chapter 9

Successful in every sphere, it is as an essayist that, amongst the immortals, Goldsmith sways signal and supreme distinction. As a poet, not less than as a playwright, he triump...

4. Chapter 4

Young Oliver Goldsmith, diffident and with no adroitness of address, was not one of those authors who can take publishers by storm, and fame with a wave of the hand. He was a ne...

6. Chapter 6

Goldsmith's income accrued, not through royalties upon his few great and immortal works, but from arduous and endless ephemeral tasks. This ceaseless taxation of the mental facu...

3. Chapter 3

At the University of Edinburgh, Goldsmith became a more earnest student. He was certainly not without the higher aspirations of the sublime profession to which circumstance and...

7. Chapter 7

All through his life Goldsmith was greatly given to grand clothes. It is a pity that grand clothes were not always greatly given to him, for he never appeared quite able to pay...

5. Chapter 5

The _Inquiry_ was written at a time when its author had suffered from the tyranny and the mercilessness of booksellers. This explains his onslaught upon this then ungenerous cra...