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bell summoned him to his master's apartment. There sat the rich man, lolling in a great easychair, with as much importance as if the globe were his own.

"Peter, hurry over to Cut and Fit's in

Row, and order them to furnish me a hundred suits of broadcloth, and a hundred suits for presentations, for I will see the king to-day. I must have them all by 12 o'clock to-day. Be off, and stop staring!"

And down went Peter, hardly knowing which to do, to laugh or to cry at the lamentable, yet grotesque exhibition made. He had barely time to hurry a servant after the solicitor when the bell was jerked once more, and he hurried back to the room. The master waved his hand majestically as he said, "Peter, have a hundred regiments of my life guards drawn up in full parade dress, for I am to meet my brother Napoleon, Emperor of the French, to-day, and I will be drawn thither by a hundred white horses! Hurry, Peter, and arrange the entire matter, so that England's monarch shall not be disparaged in this sublime meeting!"

Whether the next order would not have been for a hundred hippogriffs I cannot tell, for Peter was succeeded by Mr. Solicitor, who was stiffly, yet graciously bowed to as Prime Minister of England, and the monarch forthwith plunged into a sea of imaginary perplexities. Mr. Solicitor carried on the farce, and begging his majesty to grant him a moment's absence, he sent for a physician, and before the day was closed, Lewis Jay, just inheriting one of the finest fortunes in England, was occupying a room in the house of a physician celebrated for his treatment of the insane.

It was sad to see the once noble and sensible youth, whose excellencies won the admiration of all, a raving madman. Reason reeled under the press of good fortune, and now he gave way to every conceivable fancy of insanity. He even reached and occupied the throne of the Lord Jesus Christ, and issued the mandates of a God. Then he seemed sinking into hopeless idiocy. The contest was long and doubtful, but at length Providence smiled and Lewis Jay was again sane. His past good fortune he had forgotten. That lapse of time was only as a troubled dream which one cannot recall. No mention was made of it, and all pos

sible associations with the painful subject avoided. Months passed, and yet Lewis was an invalid. At length he was sufficiently restored to be approached carefully on the subject of his inheritance, and his physician one day said to him,

"Mr. Jay, you lost a kind friend when your pa

tron died."

At mention of that name Lewis wept. "A kind friend you may well say, for he unasked gave me money to complete my education. The day of his death was a sad one indeed to me."

"Mr. Jay, I think you are sufficiently recovered to walk out with me, and I wish to show you a neat little cottage near us."

And they examined a beautiful double cottage, around which flowers bloomed, and which was plainly furnished within. The physician continued:

"Your kind friend, before his death, bethought himself how nice a thing it would be for you to have a little property to start life with, and he ordered in his will that this should be given to you."

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'Oh, how kind!" exclaimed Lewis; "he blessed me while he lived, and I am not forgotten when he is dead."

"And now, Mr. Jay, I would advise you, in view of your small income, for the present to live in one part of the cottage and rent the remainder, which will be enough to support you with the common necessaries of life. And then to take care of the grounds will afford you good exercise."

The physician wished to let him gradually to a knowledge of his great possessions, and took this judicious mode of beginning. Forthwith Lewis entered on his inheritance, feeling how happy his lot was to have such a home, where, perhaps, he might bring his parents to share his happiness. Thus things worked on for some months, and Lewis gradually was improving, when his friend the physician took him in his carriage to see another house.

And thus, by skillfully unfolding his fortune to him, Lewis was again introduced, a sane man, to the fortune left him. The discipline had been of service, since it prevented that inordinate ascendency of money over his mind, which it might otherwise have acquired. He was now a grateful and an humble man, as well as a rich one.

Of all the laborers in the literary vineyard there is scarcely one whose name has a more familiar, household sound than that of Oliver Goldsmith. His character is endeared to us as much by its innate goodness as by its amiable weaknesses. "The epithet," says Washington Irving, "so of ten heard, and in such kindly tones, of 'Poor Goldsmith speaks volumes. Few, who consider the real compound of admirable and whimsical qualities which form his character, would wish to prune away its eccentricities, trim its grotesque luxuriance, and clip it down to the decent formalities of rigid virtue."

Goldsmith appears to us to have been the true type of an Irishman. The virtues and frailties of his countrymen distinguished him through life. He had the "happy knack of hoping;" the heedless charity, the thoughtless imprudence, the habit of blundering, for which Irishmen are proverbially famous. He was the descendant of a race who were little learned in lessons of worldly wisdom. The following sketch of his immediate ancestor, which Goldsmith has put into the mouth of the "Man in Black," is, we doubt not, true to the very life:- My father, the younger son of a good family, was possessed of a small living in the church. His education was above his fortune, and his generosity greater than his education. Poor as he was, he had his flatterers poorer than himself; for every dinner he gave them they returned him an equivalent in praise; and this was all he wanted. The same ambition that actuates a monarch at the head of his army influenced my father at the head of his table; he told the story of the ivytree, and that was laughed at; he repeated the jest of the two scholars and one pair of breeches, and the company laughed at that; but the story of Taffy in the sedan chair was sure to set the table in a roar. Thus his pleasure increased in proportion to the pleasure he gave; he loved all the world, and he fancied all the world loved him." What wonder was it that from such a father poor Oliver should inherit some genial peculiarities and harmless eccentricities at which worldly wise men shook their heads!

When Oliver had attained the age of sixteen,

on the 11th of June, 1745, he was entered as a "sizer," or "poor scholar," of Trinity College, Dublin.

When very young he had had a severe attack of small-pox, which had shockingly disfigured his originally not very handsome face; his figure was short, thick, and ungainly, and his manners awkward and embarrassed. His personal appearance was, therefore, anything but prepossessing, and, like many men of genius, he was an irregular and immethodical student. His college career was ultimately pronounced a wretched failure." On the 27th of February he took his bachelor's degree and his final leave of the University, and returned home to his friends.

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His father was now dead; his mother dwelt in a small cottage, "where she had to practice the severest frugality." His brother Henry, seven years his senior, but who had married early and improvidently, with a curacy of £40 a year, eked out a subsistence by school-keeping. None of his relatives could offer him more than a temporary home. What could Oliver do? His friends recommended the church; but the youth had conscientious scruples. These were, however, at length overruled, and he agreed to qualify himself for his sacred functions.

But when Goldsmith presented himself before the bishop of the diocese for ordination, his usual ill-luck attended him. Whether it was that the bishop was displeased at his unclerical costumefor, to do honor to the occasion, the ill-starred candidate had arrayed himself in scarlet inexpressibles-or that he showed himself deficient in theological information, or that reports of his academical irregularities had preceded him-too true it is, that he returned home rejected. After another brief interval, (during which Oliver officiated as tutor in a neighboring family, and, moreover, overcome by his wandering propensity, with thirty pounds in his pocket, made a ridiculous sally in quest of adventures,) his family again took counsel together, and it was resolved that he should make trial of the law. He accordingly started for Dublin, on his way to London, where he was to keep the usual terms common to Irish students; for which purpose his friends

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had furnished him with £50. But he spent the money in Dublin-some say he was stripped of it in a gaming-house-and after a few weeks, penniless, dejected, disheartened, and penitent, trudged back to his friends. Physic was the next experiment. For the purpose of studying the healing art he set out for Edinburgh, and arrived there in the autumn of 1752. Having passed two winters at Edinburgh, Goldsmith made up his mind to finish his medical education on the Continent. After some of his usual mishaps, he made his way to Leyden, (his goodnatured uncle, Contarine, providing the funds,) where he remained about a year; and attended the lectures of Gaubius on Chemistry, and Albinus on Anatomy. From Leyden he is supposed to have set out on his famous Continental tour, which he commenced in February, 1755, furnished, it has been said, "with one spare shirt, a flute, and a single guinea."

We shall not attempt to follow him in his wanderings. He passed an evening in the society of Voltaire at Paris; at Geneva he became traveling tutor to "a mongrel young gentleman, son of a London pawnbroker;" and at length, after a variety of adventures, returned to England in 1756. It seems quite true, that the greater part of his journey was performed on foot, and that he was often indebted to his flute for lodging and a meal. And the well-known lines in the "Traveler" are doubtless as true as they are expressive and beautiful :

How often have I led thy sportive choir,

With tuneless pipe, beside the murmuring Loire !
Where shading elms along the margin grew,
And freshened from the wave the Zephyr flew;
And haply, though my harsh touch, faltering still,
But mock'd all tune and marr'd the dancer's skill,
Yet would the village praise my wond'rons power,
And dance forgetful of the noontide hour."

On his arrival in England, Goldsmith appears to have found himself worse off than whilst vagabondizing on the Continent. But poverty made him fertile in shifts and expedients. It is rumored that about this time he became a strolling player. Then he went to London; called at the apothe caries' shops, and asked for employment to run with their medicines, spread their plaisters, and, in the language of advertisements, make himself generally useful. Homeless and friendless, he wandered about the streets at night with a few halfpence in his pocket. "Ten or twelve years later," writes Mr. Forster, "Goldsmith startled a brilliant circle at Sir Joshua's, with an anecdote of When I lived among the beggars in Axe Lane,' just as Napoleon, fifty years later, appalled the party of crowned heads at Dresden,

with his story of, When I was a lieutenant in the regiment of La Fère!" At last he became an usher in a school, a miserable, browbeaten, worried, and despised drudge; where he was "up early and late," and was the “laughing. stock of the boys." He soon quitted this wretched vocation, and was houseless and penniless again. In his dismal poverty he was found out by an Edinburgh fellow-student, who furnished him with funds to commence the practice of medicine, in a small way, among the poor in Bankside, Southwark.

He did not probably remain long in this situa tion. At Edinburgh he had formed an intimacy with the son of a Doctor Milner, who kept a large classical academy at Peckham; and young Milner, having found out his old acquaintance, made him a liberal offer to assist in the management of the school. He was here kindly treated, but his habits were not those of the pedagogue. The scholars entertained little respect for him; and, though he spent his money in buying them sweetmeats, played all sorts of tricks upon him. At the table of Dr. Milner, he frequently met with one Griffiths, the proprietor of the Monthly Review." Griffiths, a shrewd, hard man of business, saw that Goldsmith was clever and very poor, that he was just the animal for hack authorship, and might be had cheap. He accordingly offered him a permanent engagement as a contributor to the Review, with board and lodging, and a small fixed salary. Poor Oliver suffered the bookseller to make his own terms, and, in his twenty-ninth year," in the words of Mr. Forster, "sat down to the precarious task-work of Author by Profession." This literary vassalage lasted five months. Even to poor spiritbroken Goldsmith it was too humiliating to be long endured. The connection with Griffiths was dissolved, but Oliver was now fairly embarked in the profession of authorship. He had become a bookseller's hack and a Grub-street scribe, and for many years to come, he was destined to the hardest species of garret-toil and mental drudgery.

We have hitherto traced his fortunes somewhat minutely; but we cannot pretend to follow him in every stage of his literary career. That career is now commemorated as one of the world's great facts. It commenced in poverty and obscurity, and terminated in triumph and celebrity. His privations at first were great, but his ultimate success was splendid.

Better days were in store for him. In March, 1759, he published his "Enquiry into the present State of Polite Learning in Europe," and his reputation among the booksellers being now estab