Oliver had not completed his second year when the family moved to a respectable house and farm on the verge of the pretty little village of Lissoy, in West Meath.  Here the schoolmistress who first put a book into Oliver Goldsmith’s hands confessed, “Never was so dull a boy; he seemed impenetrably stupid.”

Yet all the charms of Goldsmith’s later style are to be traced in the letters of his youth, and he began to scribble verses when he could scarcely write.  At the age of eight he went to the Rev. Mr. Gilpin’s superior school of Elphin, in Roscommon, where he was considered “a stupid, heavy blockhead, little better than a fool, whom everyone made fun of.”  Indeed, from his earliest youth he was made to feel an intense, uneasy consciousness of supposed defects.  Later he went to school at Athlone and at Edgeworthstown, and was in every school trick, either as an actor or a victim.  On leaving the school at Edgeworthstown, Oliver entered Dublin University as a sizar, “at once studying freedom and practising servitude.”  Little went well with him in his student course.  He had a menial position, a savage brute for a tutor, and few inclinations to the study exacted.  But he was not without his consolations; he could sing a song well, and, at a new insult, could blow off excitement through his flute.  The popular picture of him in these days is of a slow, hesitating, somewhat hollow voice, a low-sized, thick, robust, ungainly figure, lounging about the college courts on the wait for misery and ill-luck.

In Oliver’s second year at college his father died suddenly, and the scanty sum required for his support stopped.  Squalid poverty relieved by occasional gifts was Goldsmith’s lot thenceforward.  He would write street-ballads to save himself from actual starving, sell them for five shillings a-piece, and steal out of the college at night to hear them sung.  It is said to have been a rare occurrence when the five shillings reached home with him.  It was more likely, when he was at his utmost need, to stop with some beggar on the road who had seemed to him even more destitute than himself.

He took his degree as bachelor of arts on February 27, 1749 and returning to his mother’s house, at Ballymahon, waited till he could qualify himself for orders.  This is the sunny time between two dismal periods of his life—­the day occupied in the village school, the winter nights in presiding at Conway’s inn, the summer evenings strolling up the banks of the Inny to play the flute, learning French from the Irish priests, or winning a prize for throwing a sledge-hammer at the fair.

When the time came for Goldsmith to take orders, one report says he did not deem himself good enough for it, and another says that he presented himself before the Bishop of Elphin in scarlet breeches; but in truth his rejection is the only certainty.

A year’s engagement as a tutor followed, and from it he returned home with thirty pounds in his pocket, and was the undisputed owner of a good horse.  Thus furnished and mounted he set off for Cork with a vision of going to America, but returned presently with only five shillings and a horse he had bought for one pound seventeen.