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absurd to say he took the command, as the first officer never surrendered it, and continued to direct till the last. Where Sir Edward's exertions proved of the greatest service was in his inducing, by the waving of his hat and sword, and speaking through a trumpet, two boats to come alongside, which were lying off and afraid to approach nearer, to take out the sick women and children; and I cannot omit mentioning, that a young man from a merchant vessel (now Captain J. Coghlan, R.N.) was then first to come alongside, at least near enough to receive the women and children, who were thrown to him in blankets, and his conduct and intrepidity exceeded any praise which it is in the power of language to bestow. Sir Edward was sent on shore by the hawser, at his own entreaty, by myself and a quartermaster named Henderson, when there were seventeen or eighteen people left on board, and at the time only the poop-hawser working (the ship having parted a little abaft the mainmast), by which the remainder of the people were landed. When the number was reduced to five or six, viz. the first, second, and third officers, boatswain, and Henderson the quartermaster, Mr. Mitchell, the first, from previous severe indisposition, being in a very feeble state, was urged by all to permit himself to be slung to the hawser; but such was his sense of the duty that had devolved on him in the absence of his commander, who had landed the previous evening, also in a very weak state of health, that he firmly resisted all our entreaties until I consented to go before him; indeed, we were both so exhausted, that neither (alone) could have pulled the traveller on board; and that noble fellow Henderson, already mentioned, having confidence in his own strength, insisted on being the last, and was the last man who quitted the unfortunate Dutton.

"After such a statement of facts, which I shall be ready, if called upon, to attest by the most solemn asseveration, you will not be surprised at my being anxious to rescue my own character and that of my brother officers from such unmerited obloquy as is contained in the following extract from Mr. Osler's work, which is as devoid of truth as it is cruel and ungenerous, particularly to those who, having paid the debt of nature, cannot vindicate themselves: The principal officers of the ship had abandoned their charge and got on shore just as he (Sir Edward Pellew) arrived on the beach, having urged them, without success, to return to their duty. That the author had been grossly misled by those to whom he resorted for information I cannot for a moment doubt; nor can I but feel assured that he will gladly avail himself of the first opportunity that presents itself to render the amende honorable, and do justice to those he has traduced, by placing too implicit confidence in the correctness of those from whom he has collected his materials. The military officers behaved most nobly, and were handing the sick women and children from the orlop-deck, when the sea was pouring down on them; and when all the masts went, such was the order and discipline preserved, that out of about 500 people then on deck, not one was hurt, except two, who were drowned by getting entangled in the main rigging, when employed in cutting away the masts. I trust I have said enough to induce you to do an act of justice, by inserting any part of this communication in your next number, that you may consider essential for the cause of truth, and for correcting the error you were led into in your last.

"I am, Sir, your most obedient servant,

66

WILLIAM HAY,

"Late Commander of the East India Company's ship Charles Grant, and formerly Second Officer of the Dutton."

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. 1-1. 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. 1836. . 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.

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

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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

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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

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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,

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