when we leave the perusal of biography with this heavy sense of sadness and blank disappointment weighing upon our hearts. It regards the correctness of the view which the biographer has been able to give of the whole life and being of his hero. The world has seen but one man daguerreotyped by his friend, or rather by himself; for Boswell only adjusted the lens by means of which Johnson drew his own picture. All other mind-portraits depend largely upon the skill, and still more upon the idiosyncrasy, of the painter; as witness the fact, that if one life be written by two or more people, of distinct and peculiar minds, we shall hardly recognize the character as the same. The life of Byron, as written by Moore, and by Hunt, and others, is an instance of this kind. We have therefore a good right to suppose, that, to our own immediate observation, the reality might have appeared different from either or all, and that a career which, even under the pen of friendship shows as a terrible failure, would very possibly have escaped our personal concern as wearing a general aspect of at least ordinary prosperity. We need some such consoling thought, to keep up our faith in the promise, "he that watereth shall himself be watered," as we read the lives of those who have bestowed upon us the highest and most blameless of all the pleasures of earth; and the life of Oliver Goldsmith, written out once more, and by one perhaps as worthy as any man living to write it, is no exception to the remark.

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We remember receiving a painful and half-indignant impression of the position of Goldsmith among the friends of Johnson, when we first read Boswell, more years ago than we care to remember. Boswell's evident desire to depreciate him was not the sole source of this, for the motive was too patent to excite any thing but contempt. But there was an obvious insolence habitual in that circle when Goldsmith was company, which implied a want of any proper sense of the power to which we owe the Vicar of Wakefield and the Deserted Village, and which was inexplicable without some further insight into Goldsmith's character and manners than could be gleaned from the big book devoted to the big man. Johnson himself, more discerning, more generous, and also less fastidious, reproved this insolence at times; yet even he was not always above the weakness of countenancing it, especially when under the influence of the homage rendered to

himself, which he loved to find exclusive as well as supreme. He was ever Goldsmith's best friend, but even his friendship had a certain admixture of contempt. It was "poor Goldy, in his best humor; and in his worst, Goldsmith is "a fool! he knows nothing." This tone was more than imitated throughout the sphere of which Johnson was the centre, and which constituted the literary world of that day. Boswell's mental universe admitted but one sun, and the grand business of his life was the exclusion of whatever might intervene between himself and the rays which glorified his insignificance. To disparage Goldsmith, to set his failings in the worst light, and to flatter Johnson by contrasts and comparisons, was, therefore, the care of this prince of toadies; and as Goldsmith's disposition was averse to the very shadow of toadyism, he was peculiarly at the mercy of a man in whom it was an instinct. Johnson loved flattery as only persons whose early circumstances have been such as to exclude flattery can love it; and Goldsmith was of a nature to repress even the gushing tribute of his own affectionate and generous heart, lest it should be mistaken for flattery. It is easy to see what was Boswell's advantage; while in the splendid Beauclerc, and the classic Langton, and the other distinguished persons who circulated about the great Cham, we can pardon some little genuine distaste of manners formed in the course of rambles almost on the footing of mendicancy, and of a style of dress which would have been much improved by being exchanged for any cast-off clothing that had once belonged to a gentleman. The more we study the accounts of Goldsmith, the more we become convinced that the unfavorable impression made by his manners was inevitable, and that we ought not to blame too indignantly a want of personal respect to which his writings would seem to prove his triumphant claim. We cannot deny the truth of the proverb, that "manners make the man ;" although something very different is required to make the writer whose memory shall be regarded with honor and affection wherever his language is spoken. It is we who see and know Goldsmith- the essential Goldsmith. Those about him could not see him among the disguising, deforming, distressing accidents through which this clear, radiant soul was trying to make itself known, and which it at length burst from, in disappointment and despair.

If he could have been hammered into hardness, Goldsmith would not have carried through life with him the sweet, tender, and genial spirit for which he was so remarkable. At school, he was considered "a stupid, heavy blockhead, little better than a fool." "When do you mean to get handsome again?" was the sneering question, after the smallpox had hideously scarred his face. If he dances, he is called by some would-be wit, "Ugly Æsop; " and what would have aroused enmity in a less amiable temper generated only despair in his. If he sometimes retorted, it was but to hide the arrow which he had no means of extracting. When he went to college, it was not as his elder brother had gone, but in a menial capacity; and this on no more sensible account than a piece of truly Irish generosity on the part of his father; who, when his daughter married clandestinely a wealthy young man who had been his pupil, to clear himself from the imputation of having furthered the match, saddled himself and his family with an engagement to pay a marriage portion of four hundred pounds, entailing thereby hopeless poverty on all his other children! Men have been placed under guardianship sometimes for acts less declarative of inability to transact ordinary affairs; yet one of Goldsmith's biographers considers the deed as proving "a high sense of honor"! If this be indeed a specimen of honor, give us rather the old-fashioned, Bible principle of justice, though it may show homely in comparison.

At college, he had, says Mr. Forster, "a menial position, a savage brute for a tutor, and few inclinations to the study. exacted." Here the iron of poverty entered his soul, for where is poverty more bitterly felt than in college? A bare support, mean and precarious at best, was rendered still narrower by the death of his father; and he learned to save himself from actual starvation by writing street-ballads, which he would steal out at night to hear sung. Yet even in this "lowest depth," he could feel for a fellow-creature in a "lower deep," and give, with that uncalculating and inconsistent benevolence which continued to the last so striking a feature of his character. This was bred in him by the father, whose "sense of honor" brought him to this pass of misery. "He wound us up," said the Man in Black, "to be mere machines of pity, and rendered us incapable of withstanding

the slightest impulse made either by real or fictitious distress; in a word, we were perfectly instructed in the art of giving away thousands, before we were taught the more necessary qualifications of getting a farthing."

Miserably unsuccessful in college, for what does or can despair bring but failure? — Goldsmith crept back to Lissoy, to his mother, and for two years taught the village school, as aid to his brother Henry, besides being a sort of man-of-allwork for the family in general. Certain convivial meetings, of no very high character, cheered this period, from which the hapless poet used in after years to date his "unaccountable fondness" for Ireland. At the end of the two rather jolly, if not very dignified, years, during which the faint sun of a questionable prosperity did perhaps something towards clarifying the future diamond, he applied for orders, but unsuccessfully. The cause of his failure can only be conjectured; but at least one inquirer will have it something ludicrously like that which made the unyielding John Foster unacceptable in his first pulpit, a preference for that color in costume which turkey-cocks and sober people hate. Foster's offence was a scarlet waistcoat; Goldsmith's a pair of scarlet breeches. It does not increase one's respect for the world to find its important affairs turning on points like this; so we may as well hope the Bishop of Elphin had a better reason for rejecting a candidate whose college irregularities had very probably been exaggerated to him. The law was now proposed, and the kindest of uncles advanced money for a beginning in this new study; but here we stumble at once upon one of the sources of poor Goldsmith's "ill-luck" in the world. He lost the money at the gaming-table, and returned to his friends plucked and humbled.

Destined for any thing but playing Mr. Legality in any sense, cast off in indignant despair by the mother who had built much upon his early promise, and the brother who had hitherto pardoned every thing in favor of the "good heart," which was the family cognizance, the poor pigeon found a temporary rest at the untiring uncle's, "piping and poetizing," says Mr. Irving, with his daughter. Here a grand relative — a church dignitary, much looked up to by his simple-minded kin-offered to give the unlucky student something of which grand relatives are apt to be prodigal - some advice; that

he should, in default of virtue enough for divinity and of prudence enough for law, try his hand at medicine, thinking perhaps that, in this profession, blunders would be less apt to tell tales. The readiness with which all concerned jumped at this suggestion of Dean Goldsmith's, shows that Oliver had by this time come to be considered pretty much an enfant perdu, with whom a sort of hit-or-miss game may be played; an impression which he characteristically favored by allowing himself to be tossed from hand to hand with complete nonchalance. A family purse sends him to Edinburgh, where he studied and starved, gambled and idled, for two years more, gnawing ever at the file which he carried with him through life. "An ugly and poor man," he writes to an Irish cousin, "is society only for himself, and such society the world lets me enjoy in great abundance." A visit to the Continent is now his great desire; and that excellent Uncle Contarine, a clergyman only moderately well-off, agrees to furnish the funds for the experiment. Surely, if there be any merit in hoping against hope, that kind soul should be canonized for his adherence to his scape-grace nephew!

Bound for Leyden, where he intended to study under "the great Albinus," Goldsmith characteristically shipped for Bordeaux, rather than part from half a dozen boon companions whom he had fallen in with at the inn at Leith. Driven by stress of weather into Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he was arrested as a Jacobite, his new friends proving to be Scotchmen in the French service, who had been enlisting recruits for the French army. He lay in prison a fortnight; meanwhile the ship sailed without him, and was wrecked and lost, with every soul on board.

His European adventures may be gathered from his works; for there was not an emergency or an incident of his whole life which he did not turn to everybody's advantage but his own. The story of the Philosophic Vagabond, in the Vicar of Wakefield, gives an idea of the reckless, rollicking humor in which he travelled in foreign countries, without the usual resources, relying often upon his flute for supper and lodging, and throwing up a disagreeable tutorship which afforded him a support, as readily as if he had been possessed of an independence. But in France, "he looked upon the state of society with the eye of a philosopher, and read the signs of