Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 February 1886 — Goldsmith. [ARTICLE]

Goldsmith.

Oliver Goldsmith ran a great risk of being set down as a shiftless vagabond. His genius saved him, but his genius was discovered almost by accident. He became the mp§t illustrious of Bohemians. Few lives of forty-six years have compassed a greater variety of fortunes and misfortunes. He was born in Ireland, the son of a poor clergyman, which was calamity number one. In childhood small-pox marked him for its own. At Trinity College, Dublin, he had a “sizar’s” life, M'earing its badge of poverty and fulfilling its menial offices. At an early age he mastered the fine art of borrowing. The pair of scarlet breeches in which he presented himself to a bishop for examination for orders cost him his chances in the church, that color being considered fashionable but not canonical. Once his passage was paid to America, but the ship sailed, 1 earing him in the midst of a good time with friends inland. Again he was given £SO to go to London to study law, but he lost the money at play in Dublin on the way. Then he undertook to study law at Edinburgh, whence he was presently driven by his creditors to the continent. For the next year or two he “tramped it” through Holland, France, Germany, and Switzerland to Italy. Then he hurried himself in London, and at last came to the surface holding a pen in his hand with a drop of ink at Jhe end of it. It was the drowning m'an clutching at the straw. Thereafter Goldsmith Goldsmith—until he died, in 1774. An office-seeker, a hack-Avriter for the reviews and the booksellers, an unlucky publisher, and a jolly good fellow; hand and glove with Johnson, who afterward w rote his epitaph, Avith Smollet, and with Sir Joslma Reynolds ; and at last a successful author on liis oavu account ; he both conquered fate and tempted her; but fast as he made money, he spent it faster, and when he died his fame was about all that was left to him. But what a fame it was! In a score of witching traits no Avriter in the English language has ever equaled him, and few men have won in a fuller degree the sympathy and kindly regards of their race. With an inexhaustible fund of experience to draw upon; with a marvellous power of transmuting the real into the imaginary ; Avith every re-, finemant and delicacy of thought; with humor, tenderness, and grace; and with a style unapproachable in its charm of ease and simplicity, he left a store of Avritings in prose and vejse, the best of which are immortal.— Anon .