ORSTER

Life of Goldsmith

John Forster is best remembered as writer of the biographies
of the statesmen of the commonwealth, of Goldsmith, Landor,
Dickens. To his own generation he was for twenty years one of
the ablest of London journalists. In his later days, as a
Commissioner in Lunacy, he had time to devote himself more
closely to historical research. He was born at Newcastle on
April 2, 1812, was turned aside from the Bar by success in
newspaper work, and became editor first of the "Foreign
Quarterly Review," then of the "Daily News," on which he
succeeded Dickens, and lastly of "The Examiner." His "Life of
Goldsmith" was published in 1848, and enlarged in 1854.
Forster was different from all that he looked. He seemed
harsh, exacting, and stubborn. He was one of the most loyal of
friends, and tender-hearted towards all good fellows, alive or
dead. His picture of Goldsmith is an understanding defence of
that strangely-speckled genius, written from the heart.
Forster died on February 1, 1876, two years after his
retirement from official life.

_I.--Misery and Ill-luck_

The marble in Westminster Abbey is correct in the place, but not in the
time, of the birth of Oliver Goldsmith. He was born at a small old
parsonage house in an almost inaccessible Irish village called Pallas,
in Longford, November 10, 1728. His father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith,
was a Protestant clergyman with an uncertain stipend, which, with the
help of some fields he farmed, averaged forty pounds a year. They who
have lived, laughed, and wept with the father of the man in black in the
"Citizen of the World," the preacher of "The Deserted Village," or the
hero of "The Vicar of Wakefield," have given laughter, love, and tears
to the Rev. Charles Goldsmith.

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