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CHARLES DICKENS.

GENIUS AND ITS REWARDS ARE BRIEFLY TOLD :

A LIBERAL NATURE AND A NIGGARD DOOM,

A DIFFICULT JOURNEY TO A SPLENDID TOMB.

NEW-WRIT, NOR LIGHTLY WEIGHED, THAT STORY OLD

IN GENTLE GOLDSMITH'S LIFE I HERE UNFOLD:

THRO' OTHER THAN LONE WILD OR DESERT-GLOOM,

IN ITS MERE JOY AND PAIN, ITS BLIGHT AND BLOOM,

THAN IN CRUEL ISLANDS 'MID THE FAR-OFF SEA.

March, 1848.

JOHN FORSTER.

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Ir seems rational to hope,' says Johnson in the Life of Savage, that minds qualified for great attainments should first endeavour their own benefit; and that they who are most able to teach others the way to happiness, should with most ' certainty follow it themselves: but this expectation, however plausible, has been very frequently disappointed.' Perhaps not so frequently as the earnest biographer imagined. Much depends on what we look to for our benefit, much on what we follow as the way to happiness. It may not be for the one, and may have led us far out of the way of the other, that we had acted on the world's estimate of worldly success, and to that directed our endeavour.' So might we ourselves have blocked up the path, which it was our hope to have pointed out to others; and, in the straits of a selfish profit, made wreck of 'great attainments.'

OLIVER GOLDSMITH, whose Life and Adventures should be known to all who know his writings, must be held to have succeeded in nothing that the world would have had him succeed in. He was intended for a clergyman, and was rejected

when he applied for orders; he practised as a physician, and never made what would have paid for a degree. The world did not ask him to write, but he wrote and paid the penalty. His existence was a continued privation. The days were few, in which he had resources for the night, or dared to look forward to the morrow. There was not any miserable want, in the long and sordid catalogue, which in its turn and in all its bitterness he did not feel. The experience of those to whom he makes affecting reference in his Animated Nature, 'people who die really of hunger, in common language of a 'broken heart,' was his own. And when he succeeded at the last, success was but a feeble sunshine on a rapidly approaching decay, which was to lead him, by its flickering and uncertain light, to an early grave.

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Self-benefit seems out of the question here: the way to happiness, distant indeed from this. But if we look a little closer, we shall see that he passes through it all without one enduring stain upon the childlike purity of his heart. misery vanishes when that is known: when it is remembered too, that in spite of it, a Vicar of Wakefield was written; nay, that without it, in all human probability, a Vicar of Wakefield could not have been written. Fifty-six years after its author's death, a great German thinker, and wise man, recounted to a friend how much he had been indebted to the celebrated Irishman. 'It is not to be described,' wrote Goethe to Zelter, in 1830, the effect that Goldsmith's Vicar had upon me, just at the critical moment of mental development. That lofty

and benevolent irony, that fair and indulgent view of all

infirmities and faults, that meekness under all calamities,

that equanimity under all changes and chances, and the whole train of kindred virtues, whatever names they bear, 'proved my best education; and in the end,' he added with sound philosophy, these are the thoughts and feelings which have reclaimed us from all the errors of life.'

And why were they so enforced in that charming book, but because the writer had undergone them all; because they had reclaimed himself, not from the world's errors only, but also from its suffering and care; and because his own Life and Adventures had been the same chequered and beautiful romance of the triumph of good over evil.

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Though what is called worldly success, then, was not attained by Goldsmith, it may be that the way to happiness was not missed wholly. The sincere and sad biographer of Savage, might have profited by the example. His own 'benefit' he had not successfully endeavoured,' when the gloom of his early life embittered life to the last, and the trouble he had endured was made excuse for a sorrowful philosophy, and for manners that were an outrage to the kindness of his heart. Goldsmith had borne what Johnson bore. Of the calamities to which the literary life is subject,

'Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol,'

none had been spared to him. But they found him, and left him, gentle; and though the discipline that taught him charity had little contributed to his social ease, by unfeigned sincerity and unaffected simplicity of heart he diffused every social

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