November 24.  The king passes into France, whither the queen and child were gone a few days before.

May 26, 1703.  This day died Mr. Sam Pepys, a very worthy, industrious, and curious person; none in England exceeding him in knowledge of the navy, in which he had passed through all the most considerable offices, all of which he performed with great integrity.  When King James II. went out of England, he laid down his office, and would serve no more; but, withdrawing himself from all public affairs, he lived at Clapham with his partner, Mr. Hewer, formerly his clerk, in a very noble house and sweet place, where he enjoyed the fruit of his labours in great prosperity.  He was universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music, a very great cherisher of learned men.  His library and collection of other curiosities were of the most considerable, the models of ships especially.

October 31, 1705.  I am this day arrived to the eighty-fifth year of my age.  Lord teach me so to number my days to come that I may apply them to wisdom!

* * * * *

JOHN FORSTER

Life of Goldsmith

John Forster is best remembered as writer of the biographies of the statesmen of the commonwealth, of Goldsmith, Landor, Dickens.  To his own generation he was for twenty years one of the ablest of London journalists.  In his later days, as a Commissioner in Lunacy, he had time to devote himself more closely to historical research.  He was born at Newcastle on April 2, 1812, was turned aside from the Bar by success in newspaper work, and became editor first of the “Foreign Quarterly Review,” then of the “Daily News,” on which he succeeded Dickens, and lastly of “The Examiner.”  His “Life of Goldsmith” was published in 1848, and enlarged in 1854.  Forster was different from all that he looked.  He seemed harsh, exacting, and stubborn.  He was one of the most loyal of friends, and tender-hearted towards all good fellows, alive or dead.  His picture of Goldsmith is an understanding defence of that strangely-speckled genius, written from the heart.  Forster died on February 1, 1876, two years after his retirement from official life.

I.—­Misery and Ill-luck

The marble in Westminster Abbey is correct in the place, but not in the time, of the birth of Oliver Goldsmith.  He was born at a small old parsonage house in an almost inaccessible Irish village called Pallas, in Longford, November 10, 1728.  His father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, was a Protestant clergyman with an uncertain stipend, which, with the help of some fields he farmed, averaged forty pounds a year.  They who have lived, laughed, and wept with the father of the man in black in the “Citizen of the World,” the preacher of “The Deserted Village,” or the hero of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” have given laughter, love, and tears to the Rev. Charles Goldsmith.