GOLDEN LEGEND, a collection of lives of saints and other tales, such as that of the “Seven Sleepers” and “St. George and the Dragon,” made in the 13th century by Jacques de Voragine, a Dominican monk, to the glory especially of his brotherhood.

GOLDEN ROSE, a cluster of roses on a thorny stem, all of gold; perfumed, and blessed by the Pope on the fourth Sunday in Lent, and sent to a prince who has during the year shown most zeal for the Church.

GOLDONI, CARLO, the founder of Italian comedy, born at Venice; in his youth he studied medicine and subsequently law, but in 1732 appeared as a dramatist with his tragedy “Belisario”; moving from place to place as a strolling-player, he in 1736 returned to Venice, and finding his true vocation in comedy-writing, turned out a rapid succession of sparkling character plays after the manner of Moliere; in 1761 he went to Paris as a playwright to the Italian theatre; became Italian master to Louis XV.’s daughters, and subsequently was pensioned; his comedies displaced the burlesques and farces till then in vogue on the stage in Italy (1707-1793).

GOLDSCHMIDT, MADAME.  See LIND, JENNY.

GOLDSMITH, OLIVER, English man of letters, born at Pallas or Pallasmore, co.  Longford, Ireland, and celebrated in English literature as the author of the “Vicar of Wakefield”; a born genius, but of careless ways, and could not be trained to any profession, either in the Church, in law, or in medicine, though more or less booked for all three in succession; set out on travel on the Continent without a penny, and supported himself by his flute and other unknown means; came to London, tried teaching, then literature, doing hack-work, his first work in that department being “An Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe,” which was succeeded by his “Citizen of the World”; became a member of the “Literary Club,” and associated with Johnson, Reynolds, Burke, and others; produced poems, “The Traveller” and the “Deserted Village,” besides comedies, such as “She Stoops to Conquer”; lived extravagantly, and died in debt; wrote histories of Greece and Rome, and “Animated Nature”; was a charming writer (1728-1774).

GOLF, a game played with a bent club and a small ball on commons with short grass, in which the player who drives the ball into a succession of small holes in the ground, usually 18, with the fewest strokes, or who reckons up the most holes in the round by taking them with the fewest strokes, is the winner; an old popular Scotch game, and first introduced into English on Blackheath by James I., which has of late years been revived, and in connection with which clubs have established themselves far and wide over the globe, even at Bagdad.

GOLIATH, a Philistine giant of Gath slain by David with pebbles from a brook by a sling (1 Sam. xvii.).

GOMARISTS, a sect of Calvinists in Holland, so called from their leader Gomarus (1563-1641), a bitter enemy of ARMINIUS (q. v.).