er that he had been suspected of
scribbling verses, which he burned. What schoolboy has not done the
like? We know how the biographers of great painters point out to us
that their hero early showed the bent of his mind by drawing the
figures of animals on doors and walls with a piece of chalk; as to
which it may be observed that, if every schoolboy who scribbled verses
and sketched in chalk on a brick wall, were to grow up a genius, poems
and pictures would be plentiful enough. However, there is the
apparently authenticated anecdote of young Goldsmith's turning the
tables on the fiddler at his uncle's dancing-party. The fiddler,
struck by the odd look of the boy who was capering about the room,
called out "AEsop!" whereupon Goldsmith is said to have instantly
replied,

"Our herald hath proclaimed this saying,
See AEsop dancing and his monkey playing!"

But even if this story be true, it is worth nothing as an augury; for
quickness of repartee was precisely the accomplishment which the adult
Goldsmith conspicuously lacked. Put a pen into his hand, and shut him
up in a room: then he was master of the situation--nothing could be
more incisive, polished, and easy than his playful sarcasm. But in
society any fool could get the better of him by a sudden question
followed by a horse-laugh. All through his life--even after he had
become one of the most famous of living writers--Goldsmith suffered
from want of self-confidence. He was too anxious to please. In his
eager acquiescence, he would blunder into any trap that was laid for
him. A grain or two of the stolid self-sufficiency of the blockheads
who laughed at him would not only have improved his character, but
would have considerably added to the happiness of his life.

As a natural consequence of this timidity, Goldsmith, when opportunity
served, assumed airs of magnificent importance. Every one knows the
story of the mistake on which _She Stoops to Conquer_ is founded.
Getting free at last from all the turmoil, and anxieties, and
mortifications of school-life, and returning home on a lent hack, the
released schoolboy is feeling very grand indeed. He is now sixteen,
would fain pass for a man, and has a whole golden guinea in his
pocket. And so he takes the journey very leisurely until, getting
benighted in a certain village, he asks the way to the "best house,"
and is directed by a facetious person to the house of the squire. The
squire by good luck falls in wit