Goldsmith’s verse is all clean, sweet and wholesome, and I do not wonder that he was everywhere a favorite with women.  This was true in his very babyhood.  For he was the pet of several good old dames, one of whom taught him to count by using cards as object-lessons He proudly said that when he was three years of age he could pick out the “ten-spot.”  This love of pasteboard was not exactly an advantage, for when he was sixteen he went to Dublin to attend college, and carried fifty pounds and a deck of cards in his pocket.  The first day in Dublin he met a man who thought he knew more about cards than Oliver did—­and the man did:  in three days Oliver arrived back in Sweet Auburn penniless, but wonderfully glad to get home and everybody glad to see him.  “It seemed as if I ’d been away a year,” he said.

But in a few weeks he started out with no baggage but a harp, and he played in the villages and the inns, and sometimes at the homes of the rich.  And his melodies won all hearts.

The author of “Vanity Fair” says:  “You come hot and tired from the day’s battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you.  Who could harm the kind vagrant harper?  Whom did he ever hurt?  He carries no weapon—­only the harp on which he plays to you; and with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the captains in the tent or the soldiers round the fire, or the women and children in the villages at whose porches he stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty.”

* * * * *

When Goldsmith arrived in London in Seventeen Hundred Fifty-six, he was ragged, penniless, friendless and forlorn.  In the country he could always make his way, but the city to him was new and strange.  For several days he begged a crust here and there, sleeping in the doorways at night and dreaming of the flowery wealth of gentle Lissoy, where even the poorest had enough to eat and a warm place to huddle when the sun went down.

He at length found work as clerk or porter in a chemist’s shop, where he remained until he got money enough to buy a velvet coat and a ruffled shirt, and then he moved to the Bankside and hung out a surgeon’s sign.  The neighbors thought the little doctor funny, and the women would call to him out of the second-story window that it was a fine day, but when they were ill they sent for some one else to attend them.

Goldsmith was twenty-eight, and the thought that he could make a living with his pen had never come to him.  Yet he loved books, and he would loiter about bookshops, pricing first editions, and talking poetry to the patrons.  He chanced in this way to meet Samuel Richardson, who, because he wrote the first English romance, has earned the title of Father of Lies.  In order to get a very necessary loaf of bread, Doctor Goldsmith asked Richardson to let him read proof.  So Richardson gave him employment, and in correcting proof the discovery was made that the Irish doctor could turn a sentence, too.