THE FAMILY LETTERS OF
OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
By SIR ERNEST CLARKE, M.A., F.S.A.
Read 15 October, 1917.
IN a paper which I was privileged to read before this honourable Society three years ago as to “New Lights on Chatterton,” I mentioned incidentally that the researches of which that paper was the outcome had arisen out of the examination by me of a large bundle of papers that had been collected by Bishop Percy of Dromore, the editor of the famous Reliques of Ancient Poetry, and had apparently remained unexplored since his death in 1811. The Chatterton documents were by no means the most important and were certainly the least puzzling of the array of miscellaneous papers included in this bundle, which contained not only a variety of notes about Shakespeare and other subjects which had engaged the Bishop’s attention, but chiefly and most interestingly a large quantity of original letters written by and about Oliver Goldsmith.
To discuss in detail the whole of the questions arising out of these Goldsmith papers would really amount to writing a new life of that poet, which I have no intention of doing. There exist already many biographies of Oliver by writers of the first rank, and no fact of salient importance concerning himself remains to be revealed, whatever may be said as to his writings. There are, it is true, side-lights of some literary interest and value afforded by the papers that have come unexpectedly my way through the kindness and generosity of the great grand-daughter of the Bishop by whose favour you have the advantage of personally inspecting the original letters which I shall presently describe: but this is not the occasion for minutiæ concerning them.
What therefore with your permission I propose now to do is to deal only with the letters written by Oliver Goldsmith at various periods of his life to members of his own family and old friends of his boyhood resident in his native province, and to deduce from them some general reflections as to the warmth of his affections and the simplicity of his typically Irish character.
Thomas Percy, to whom we mainly owe the preservation of these letters, was almost an exact contemporary of Oliver Goldsmith. The latter was born on 10 November, 1728; Percy on 13 April, 1729. They first met on Wednesday, 21 February, 1759, as fellow-guests of Dr. Grainger, the author of the “Sugar Cane,” at the Temple Exchange Coffee House, Temple Bar. Percy was then a bachelor clergyman with a college living at Easton Maudit in Northamptonshire, but with literary associations that kept him much in London; and Goldsmith was just emerging from the chrysalis stage of hack-work for the reviews and was lodging in a garret at Green Arbour Court near the Old Bailey. Percy met Goldsmith again on 26 February, at Dodsley’s, for whom Oliver was preparing his “Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe,” and on Saturday, 3 March, before returning to Easton Maudit, he paid a visit to Goldsmith at Green Arbour Court with the result expressed thus in Percy’s own words: