n's estate.

With Goldsmith now one eager and despairing quest for work followed
hard upon another, and disappointments in rapid and relentless
succession. After wandering on from door to door, and hope to its
scattering, and chance to its dispelling, he obtained his first
situation as a dispenser in a chemist's shop. He lost opportunities
and failed to create confidence, more than anything through the
forlornness of his appearance, and the too obvious simplicity of his
bearing. Then he heard of an old friend, a warm-hearted Edinburgh
student, a certain Dr. Sleigh. To this generous man he bent his steps.
As soon as he was recognized, he was received into the home of his
former companion, and welcomed with all that brotherliness of which
sterling friendship is capable.

The old apothecary, with whom Goldsmith worked as a dispenser for a
time, deserves the grateful honour that we now can pay his kindly
heart. His name was Jacobs. He appears to have been an old man of
benign mien and inclination. He recognized the superior learning and
credentials of his young assistant. He thought that a qualified doctor
should not be serving drugs in a shop, but in greater dignity visiting
his patients. Largely through this man's kindly exertions, and also
with a little help from Dr. Sleigh, who soon left London and was lost
to his former friend, and with the sympathy and good wishes of more
than one old Edinburgh comrade, remembered and met again, Goldsmith
was set up in a mean and meagre manner as a physician, in a very poor
and dingy neighbourhood--Bank Side, Southwark. The whole prospect was
neither pleasant nor propitious. Hidden in his desolute obscurity,
friends lost, for a time at all events, all thought of Goldsmith. The
poor doctor soon seemed quite alone, and, what was worse, forgotten.

From the moment that Oliver Goldsmith entered London, penury and
meanness had dogged his steps. It is piteous to dwell upon these
squalid scenes. We need not recall the second-hand wardrobe that
decked him out as a physician in this practice, unimaginably poor and
dark and dingy. Fancy cannot conceive a greater dreariness or deeper
destitution. He was so poor that his poorest patients felt compassion
for his even greater poverty. Seeing one day his doctor's pockets
bulging with papers, so that he looked like the man of letters in a
then clever and popular caricature, an invalid, a journeyman printer,
who had sought this physician's aid and