capades in
the records of the eccentricities of adolescent genius. The enterprise
was attended with ceaseless difficulty, danger, and deprivation. Not
seldom the hedgeside yielded him his nightly rest. Places of learning
from time to time gave the wanderer a dinner. He could make the
monasteries havens of repose. For a little while he acted as guide and
tutor to the son of some wealthy manufacturer. This youth cared
nothing for architecture or antiquity, the histories of cities, or
natural scenery. His sole purpose seemed to be to save money on his
travels. The liberal and lively tutor left a pupil as dull as he was
mean. The love of wandering lay deep in Goldsmith's heart. This early
pilgrimage through much of Europe inspired his pen to write _The
Traveller_. In later years he had throughout this eager longing for a
roving life.

Notwithstanding his roaming, in some inexplicable manner, Goldsmith,
the pilgrim of improvidence and knight errant from the Order of
Chivalrous Carelessness, still pursued his medical studies, and
carried this training for the vocation of a doctor to some kind of
completion. Italy is supposed to have conferred his diploma as a
physician upon Goldsmith, and either Padua or Louvain has the honour.
_The Traveller_ must, indeed, long have been in all its grace and
beauty treasured in his heart, for he actually penned lines for this
fine poem during these boyish wanderings through Europe.

This sojourn on the Continent occupied two years or more. He reached
England in the year 1756, landing at Dover. This penniless pilgrim
made his way on foot, bravely trudging the highroad, with few hopes of
coming fame, but many pangs of very present poverty. Our minstrel
gathered a little money here and there by singing ditties and ballads,
spontaneous compositions, delightfully original, to cheer him and the
laughing rustic hearts he met and loved, lads and maids, old men and
children, and all, forthwith and henceforth and for ever, his friends.
Tramping from Dover, receiving a warm English welcome at many a
wayside farm, and the hearty hospitality of the cottage hearth and
home; anon sleeping in barns, or, if need be, making the hedgerow his
haven and shelter for the night, passing village after village--the
days went by, and then he sighted the great town of great trial. He
entered London, the city of cities, with its innumerable multitudes
and its untold loneliness.

No one can read the opening line in _