him living wholly with his brother. It was but for a short time; disagreement followed there too; and we see him next by Mr. Contarine's fireside, again talking literature to his good-natured uncle, writing new verses to please him (alleged copies of which are not sufficiently authentic to be quoted), and joining his flute to Miss Contarine's harpsichord. There was a sort of cold grandee of the family, Dean Goldsmith of Cloyne, who did not think it unbecoming his dignity to visit the good clergyman's parsonage now and then; and Oliver having made a remark which showed him no fool, the Dean gave it as his opinion to Mr. Contarine that his young relative would make an excellent medical man. The hint seemed a good one, and was the Dean's contribution to his young relative's fortune. The small purse was contributed by Mr. Contarine; and in the autumn of 1752, Oliver Goldsmith started for Edinburgh, medical student.

Anecdotes of amusing simplicity and forgetfulness in this new character, are more rife than notices of his course of study; and it is certain that any learned celebrity he may have got in the schools, paled an ineffectual fire before his amazing social repute, as inimitable teller of a humorous story and capital singer of Irish songs. But he was really fond of chemistry, and was remembered favourably by the celebrated Black; other well known fellow-students, as William Farr, and his whilome college acquaintance, Lauchlan Macleane, conceived a great regard for him, or at any rate afterwards boasted that they did;

certainly, of kind quaker Sleigh, known later as the eminent physician of that name, as painter Barry's first patron and Burke's friend, so much may without contradiction be affirmed; and it is therefore to be supposed that his eighteen months' residence in Edinburgh was, on the whole, not unprofitable. It had its mortifications, of course; for all his life had these. An ugly and a poor 'man is society only for himself; and such society the 'world lets me enjoy in great abundance :' 'Nor do I 'envy my dear Bob his blessings, while I may sit down 'and laugh at the world; and at myself, the most ridi'culous object in it:' are among his expressions of half bitter, half good-natured candour, in a letter to his cousin Bryanton.

There is another confession in a later letter to his uncle, which touches him in a nearer point, and suggests more than it reveals. It would seem as though, to eke out his resources, he had, for some part of his time, accepted employment in a great man's house : probably as tutor. 'I have spent,' he says, 'more than a fortnight every 'second day at the Duke of Hamilton's; but it seems they ' like me more as a jester than as a companion; so I dis'dained so servile an employment.' To those with whom, on equal terms, he could be both jester and companion, Bryanton was charged with every kind of remembrance. 'You cannot send me much news from Ballymahon, but 'such as it is, send it all; everything you send will be 'agreeable to me. Has George Conway put up a sign

'yet? or John Bincly left off drinking drams? or Tom 'Allen got a new wig?' To the remarkably pleasant

and whimsical satire of the Scotch he at the same time wrote to Bryanton, I do not refer, because in all the editions of his works, except the Scotch, it is commonly printed but three letters to his uncle Contarine must have mention, the two less important of which, and the earliest in date, Mr. Prior discovered.

In the first, dated May, 1753, and in which he alludes to a description of himself by his uncle, as 'the philosopher 'who carries all his goods about him,' he describes Munro as the one great professor, and the rest of the doctorteachers as only less afflicting to their students than they must be to their patients. He makes humourous mention of a trip to the Highlands, for which he had hired a horse about the size of a ram, who walked away (trot he 'could not) as pensive as his master.' Other passages show to what narrow limits he had brought his wants, and with how little he was cheerfully content, and full of gratitude.

There has been some harsh judgment of Goldsmith for money wasted on abortive professional undertakings: but the sacrifices were not great. Burke had an allowance of 2007. a-year for leisure to follow studies to which he never paid the least attention; and when his father anxiously expected to hear of his call to the bar, he might have heard, instead, of a distress which forced him to sell his books: : yet no one thinks, and rightly, of exacting penalties from Burke on this ground. Poor Goldsmith's supplies

were on the other hand small, irregular, uncertain, and in some two years at the furthest, exhausted altogether.

Here, in this letter to his uncle, he says that he has drawn for six pounds, and that his next draft, five months after this date, will be for but four pounds; pleading in extenuation of even these demands, that he has been obliged to buy everything since he came to Scotland, 'shirts not even excepted.' He professes himself pleased with his studies, and hopes that when he shall have heard Munro for another year, he may go to hear Albinus, the 'great professor at Leyden.' The whole of the letter gives evidence of a most grateful affection. In the second, written eight months later, where he describes his preparations for travel, it is not less apparent : 'Let me here acknowledge,' he says, 'the humility of the station in 'which you found me; let me tell how I was despised by 'most, and hateful to myself. Poverty, hopeless poverty,

was my lot, and Melancholy was beginning to make me 'her own. When you.. 'This good man did not

live to know the entire good he had done, or that his own. name would probably live with the memory of it as long as the English language lasted. Thou best of men!' exclaims his nephew in the third of these letters, to which I shall presently make larger reference, 'may Heaven 'guard and preserve you, and those you love!' It is the care of Heaven that actions worthy of itself should, in the doing, find reward: waiting not even on the thanks and prayers of such a heart as Goldsmith's. Another twenty

pounds are acknowledged on the eve of departure from Edinburgh, as the last he will ever draw for. It was the last, of which we have record. But Goldsmith had drawn his last breath before he forgot his uncle Contarine.

The old vicissitudes attended him at this new move in his game of life. Land rats and water rats were at his heels as he quitted Scotland. Bailiffs hunted him for security given to a fellow-student; and shipwreck he only escaped by a fortnight's imprisonment on a false political charge. Bound for Leyden, with characteristic carelessness or oddity he had secured his passage in a ship bound for Bourdeaux; but taken for a Jacobite in Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in Sunderland arrested by a tailor, the ship sailed on without him, and sank at the mouth of the Garonne. At last he got safe to the learned city; and wrote off to his uncle, among other sketches of character obviously meant to give him pleasure, what he thought of the three specimens of womankind he had now seen, out of Ireland. The Dutch is pale and fat,' he writes, the Scotch lean and ruddy: the one walks as 'if she were straddling after a go-cart, the other takes 'too masculine a stride. I shall not endeavour to deprive 'either country of its share of beauty; but I must say, 'that of all objects on this earth, an English farmer's ' daughter is most charming.'

In the same delightful letter he observingly corrects the vulgar notion of the better kind of Dutchman, and amusingly contrasts him with the downright Hollander.