THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

1836.

ART. I.-1. The Life of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B., from a variety of Original Sources. By James Prior, Esq., F.S.A.; Member of the Royal Irish Academy; and Author of the Life of Burke. London. 2 vols. 8vo. 2. The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B., with a variety of Pieces in Prose and Verse, now included for the first time. By James Prior, Esq. London. 4 vols. 8vo. 1836.

WE

E have satisfaction in observing that the enterprise of the booksellers has at length taken a bent which we several years ago told them would be found more beneficial to themselves, as well as to the public, than the rage for new libraries' de omni scibili. The monthly volumes which then threatened to pour upon us to the crack of doom, had the advantages of convenient form and cheap price, accompanied with elegance of print, and not unfrequently with lavish ornament in the way of engraving; but, to say nothing of real thought or talent, they, with few exceptions, reflected little credit on the industry, and less on the honesty, of the compilers. That flimsy manufacture, the steam-tambouring of literature, seems to have made room for the less showy speculation of preparing, under the direction of graver persons, carefully annotated editions of those classics of our country, whose writings may afford manly aliment to the understanding, and pure examples to the taste of the rising generation. Among the undertakings of this better order which have recently come under our view, we must allow a distinguished place to these labours of Mr. Prior, whose Life of Burke was criticised at some length in one of our numbers for 1826. Ever since that time he has been sedulously engaged in collecting materials for a biography of Goldsmith, on a scale somewhat commensurate with his merits; and having, in the course of his researches, discovered many pieces, both in prose and verse, which, though worthy of his reputation, had never been included in any collection of his works, Mr. Prior at length resolved to prepare an enlarged and corrected edition of his distinguished countryman's Miscellanies, to be issued from the press at the same time with this Memoir. We have the two books now before us-and proceed to notice, more briefly than we could

VOL. LVII. NO. CXIV.

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wish

wish to have done, the very considerable accession to our knowledge for which this modest and diligent man may demand the thanks of every student of our literature.

It is not to the honour of England, least of all is it to the honour of Ireland, that sixty years should have passed after the death of Goldsmith before any attempt was made to give the events of his life in accurate detail. Till now, however, there had been put forth, professedly to gratify curiosity on this head, nothing more valuable than one of the most meagre of prefaces. It was drawn up, indeed, by a person who received some verbal communications from two or three of the poet's surviving friends; but, except their half dozen anecdotes, a single loose letter on his early adventures by his eldest sister, and such trivial specimens of his own familiar correspondence as hardly sufficed to fill three pages, the nameless preface-writer produced almost nothing that could throw any real light on his subject. In fact, the personal character of this delightful author has been abandoned to the casual notices of Boswell-who, for whatever reason, bore him little good will, sets down nothing that might tend to counterbalance the ludicrous stories in which he introduces his name, and betrays a lurking disposition to undervalue even the talents for which his own great idol took every opportunity of expressing the highest respect. Mr. Croker and his coadjutors, more especially Sir Walter Scott and Sir James Mackintosh, seem to agree that Boswell, among many more pardonable weaknesses, all along regarded Goldsmith with a fretful jealousy. He, to the last, envied him his fame; but in the beginning of their intercourse he envied him above all things the avowed esteem of Johnson. From an early date Boswell had resolved to attempt, if he should outlive Johnson, the task which he ultimately executed, in so far as Johnson was concerned, with inimitable success. But his Doctor Minor was twenty years his Doctor Major's junior; he found them living in habits of familiarity in London, while his own visits to the capital were, and were likely to be, but rare; and Mrs. Thrale's information, that when Johnson was asked who ought to write his life, the answer was, 'Goldy would, no doubt, do it the best,' seems not only to have hung and rankled in his mind while Goldsmith lived, but to have left its traces in the last, long subsequent, labours of his pen. This is a painful and pitiable feature in, what we consider as, on the whole, the best-natured, as well as the most amusing, of books. But we are conscious that when we devoured Boswell in our boyish days, we were little prepared to discriminate and cross-examine; and, we are sorry to add, we doubt whether all the counter-working of Mr. Prior's zeal will

be

be found sufficient to modify, to much extent, the impression which familiarity with the charming pages of Goldsmith's habitual detractor has spread over the minds of our own coevals. On the race that is preparing to push us from our stools, his labours will perhaps produce an effect more adequate to his anticipations.

Goldsmith happily called one of the arts in which he has never been surpassed, that of building a book;' but the most studious of his admirers does not shine as a compiler. We could hardly praise too highly the sagacity and patience with which he has hunted every hint of information, whether oral or documentary, but he has seldom shown skill in his manner of putting together the results. His minute accounts of the way in which he traced out every item of novelty that he presents ought to have been given in his preface: they belong-not to the history of Goldsmith-but to the history of Mr. Prior's book. His episodic chapters on Goldsmith's obscure literary associates and forgotten antagonists should have been first cut down very considerably-and then thrown into so many articles of an appendix; and the new and valuable illustrations of the early career of Burke, which he has crammed head and shoulders into the midst of Goldsmith's story, should have been reserved for another edition of his Life of Burke. There are, moreover, some clumsy repetitions and heavy disquisitions, both moral and critical, which it is impossible not to wish away altogether. To balance these defects and errors we recognise throughout Mr. Prior's main narrative a candid mind, kept active by a generous enthusiasm in the cause of virtue and genius, and a plain, unaffected style, never disfigured by tinsel garnishing, and now and then rising into a certain sober dignity which we are oldfashioned enough to prefer to either the point of wit or the pomp of rhetoric. But the solid worth of the biography consists in the striking anecdotes which Mr. Prior has gathered in the course of his anxious researches among Goldsmith's few surviving acquaintances, and the immediate descendants of his personal friends in London and relations in Ireland; above all, in the rich mass of the poet's own familiar letters, which, by the help of these allies, he has been enabled to bring together. No poet's letters in the world, not even those of Cowper, appear to us more interesting for the light they throw on the habits and feelings of the man that wrote them; and we think it will also be acknowledged that the simple gracefulness of their language is quite worthy of the author of the Vicar of Wakefield. We may differ from many of our readers as to all the rest, but we are confident that, if Mr. Prior had done, and should

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should do, nothing else, the services he has rendered to literature by recovering and recording these beautifully characteristic effusions, would be enough to secure honour to his memory. And who will not be rejoiced to hear that in one instance at least the best secondary monument of a great Irish genius has also been erected by an Irish hand?

The origin of Goldsmith's family is obscure; the first ascertained ancestor being his great-great-grandfather, the Rev. John Goldsmith, rector of Borrishoull, in the county of Mayo, who narrowly escaped perishing in the Popish massacre of 1641. The then Bishop of Killala, with this gentleman and sixteen others of his clergy, having witnessed the shocking scene at Castlebar, betook themselves to the residence of the Viscount Bourke, a Roman Catholic peer, who had married a Protestant lady, and claimed his personal protection. Lord Bourke invited Mr. Goldsmith to remain in attendance on his wife, and thus he was safe. He then gave the rest of the party a safe-conduct to Galway, and himself accompanied them part of the way thither; but so soon as he left them they were set upon, and the Bishop and almost all his train murdered.* The services and losses of this rector of Borrishoull procured a small grant of land and considerable promotion in the church for his eldest son, who died in 1722 Dean of Elphin. His second son, Robert, the poet's grandfather, obtained also a beneficial lease of some crown land, and lived on it as a gentleman farmer. Charles Goldsmith, the poet's father, was Robert's second son, one of a family of thirteen children; he was of Trinity College, Dublin, took orders on leaving it, and immediately married the daughter of the Rev. Oliver Jones, master of a school at Elphin, where he had received his preliminary education and formed this attachment. The young couple married against the will of both their families, and without having any means of support at their own command; but Mr. Green, an uncle of the bride, who was rector of Kilkenny-West, provided them a farm-house in his parish to live in, and by and bye her mother, Mrs. Jones, made over to them fifty acres of land, procured at a nominal rent by the exertion of that species of address which an Irish tenant still sometimes plays off upon an Irish landlord.

The Rev. Oliver Jones had held these and other lands on a life-rent lease from Mr. Conolly, one of the Lords Justices. His wife, on his death, found that Mr. Conolly was not disposed to grant a renewal, and determined to try the effect of a personal application. She mounted on horseback behind her only son, and travelled straight to Dublin. Mr. Conolly persisted in his History of the Irish Rebellion, by Sir John Temple, 1698, p. 107.

*

refusal,

refusal, until the old lady drew out a bag and showered its contents, one hundred guineas, upon the table. This was a temptation not to be resisted; the landlord immediately granted a fresh lease of half the lands on the same easy terms as before-and she used afterwards to say that she wished she had taken another hundred with her, and so secured the whole. An accident on this journey cost the spirited dame the life of her son she returned home, as the old song says, 'Sitting single on her saddle;' and, in the mercy of sorrow, handed over the hard-earned lease to her rash daughter and son-in-law.

The farm-house in which they had found shelter was that of Pallismore, the property then and now of the Edgeworths of Edgeworthstown-and here they continued to live for about twelve years, on the scanty income of Mr. Conolly's fifty acres, which it adjoined. Five children were born to them at Pallismore, the last being Oliver, who, according to the first leaf of the family-bible, saw the light on the 10th of November, 1728, three years earlier than the date on his monument in Westminster Abbey. He had one brother, Henry, six years his senior, two younger brothers, and three sisters; but before all these came into the world, the father succeeded to the living of KilkennyWest, then worth from 150l. to 2001. a year, and removed to a good house at Lissoy, in that parish. Oliver was only two or three years old when they went to Lissoy; and in Lissoy tradition has uniformly pointed out, and Mr. Prior fondly recognizes, the original of

'Sweet Auburn, oveliest village of the plain.'

A relation of the Goldsmiths, one Elizabeth Delap, widow of a farmer, kept a little school in this village, and under her Oliver learned his letters. Dr. Strean, the present venerable rector of Athlone, remembers Mrs. Delap well; she outlived her celebrated pupil, and used, when boasting of their connexion in her latter days, to add, nevertheless, that he was one of the dullest boys she ever had to deal with. At six years of age he was transferred from the dame's school to one kept by Thomas Byrne, an old soldier, who had risen from the ranks to be quartermaster of a regiment in the wars of Marlborough. Byrne was, it seems, not only a fair scholar, but a wit, a humourist, the chief oracle of the village alehouse, and a poet. Mr. Prior quotes, without remark, the testimony of one of his pupils, given so late as 1790, that he could translate Virgil's Eclogues extemporaneously into Irish verse of at least equal elegance! Young Oliver listened to this original's stories of the wars with unwearied zeal, and appears to have imbibed all his enthusiasm about Carolan the Blind, the last and best of the Irish minstrels,' so designated in the little.

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