his style and the easy flow of his narrative, have given his books currency as manuals of instruction.  And although as a writer of fiction, or of truth gracefully veiled in the garments of fiction, he stands unrivalled in his beautiful and touching story of the incorruptible Vicar, yet this is his only complete story, and presents but one side of his literary character.  Considering him first as a poet, we shall find that he is one of the Transition School, but that he has a beautiful originality:  his poems appeal not to the initiated alone, but to human nature in all its conditions and guises; they are elevated and harmonious enough for the most fastidious taste, and simple and artless enough to please the rustic and the child.  To say that he is the most popular writer in the whole course of English Literature thus far, is hardly to overstate his claims; and the principal reason is that, with a blundering and improvident nature, a want of dignity, a lack of coherence, he had a great heart, alive to human suffering; he was generous to a fault, true to the right, and ever seeking, if constantly failing, to direct and improve his own life, and these good characteristics are everywhere manifest in his works.  A brief recital of the principal events in his career will throw light upon his works, and will do the best justice to his peculiar character.

Oliver Goldsmith was born at the little village of Pallas, in Ireland, where his father was a poor curate, on the 10th of November, 1728.  There were nine children, of whom he was the fifth.  His father afterwards moved to Lissoy, which the poet described, in his Deserted Village, as

    Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
    Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain.

As his father was entirely unable to educate so numerous a family, Goldsmith owed his education partly to his uncle, the Rev. Thomas Contarini, and in part to his brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, whom he cherished with the sincerest affection.  An attack of the small-pox while he was a boy marked his face, and he was to most persons an unprepossessing child.  He was ill-treated at school by larger boys, and afterwards at Trinity College, Dublin, which he entered as a sizar, by his tutor.  He was idle, careless, and improvident:  he left college without permission, but was taken back by his brother, and was finally graduated with a bachelor’s degree, in 1749.  His later professional studies were spasmodic and desultory:  he tried law and medicine, and more than once gained a scanty support by teaching.  Seized with a rambling spirit, he went to the Continent, and visited Holland, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy; sometimes gaining a scanty livelihood by teaching English, and sometimes wandering without money, depending upon his flute to win a supper and bed from the rustics who lived on the highway.  He obtained, it is said, the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Padua; and on his