As a matter of fact, Maurice died early in the winter of 1792-3, as appears from a letter written by Dr. Thomas Campbell, who first attempted Oliver’s biography, to the Bishop of Dromore—then in London—on 12 June, 1793 (Nichols’ Literary Illustrations, VII, 790). Campbell says: “Alas! poor Maurice, He is to receive no comfort from your Lordship’s labours in his behalf. He departed from a miserable life early last winter, and luckily has left no children: but he has left a widow, and faith a very nice one, who called on me one of the few days I spent in Dublin after Christmas, so that you will not want claimants.”
The numerous letters from Maurice to the Bishop which have been preserved appear to show that he had really made sustained efforts to collect in Ireland such of the original letters written by Oliver to his relatives as were procurable. One such letter, and that of the greatest interest, viz.: the letter written to Uncle Contarine from Leyden in 1754 was not retrieved until nine years after the letter of 15 July, 1776, already quoted, for Maurice writes to the Bishop on 9 June, 1785, “I send your Lordship a letter from my brother to his Uncle Contarine dated from Lydon.”
Vol. VIII of Nichols’ Literary Illustrations (published in 1858) contains at pp. 236-240, extracts from correspondence between the Bishop and Edmund Malone from which it appears that on 16 June, 1785, Percy was urging that the Members of the Club (of which Oliver was an original Member) should show “our regard for the departed Bard by relieving his only brother, and so far as I hear, the only one of his family that wants relief.” (This was by no means the case, as Percy was afterwards to learn by bitter experience.) He wrote again to Malone on 17 October, 1786, “I must entreat you to exert all your influence among the gentlemen of The Club, and particularly urge it on Sir Joshua Reynolds, to procure subscriptions for the relief of poor Maurice Goldsmith, who is suffering great penury and distress being not only poor but very unhealthy.... A guinea a piece from the members of the Club would be a great relief to him.”
Maurice’s subsequent appointment in 1787 as the Mace-bearer to the Royal Irish Academy and his place in the Licence Office appears to have eased somewhat the final years of his chequered life, but when he died in 1792, a new appeal for the Bishop’s help came from his widow, Esther Goldsmith.
11a. ESTHER GOLDSMITH, WIDOW OF MAURICE.
All that is known about her is that she is described in a Petition to the Lord Lieutenant (the draft of which in Percy’s writing was left amongst his papers) as “the daughter of a respectable clergyman,” and as “left wholly destitute” by the death of her husband Maurice Goldsmith. She got various grants from a fund in the gift of the Lord Lieutenant known as the Concordatum, and on the last page of Prior’s Life (Vol. II, 576) is a letter from her dated Rushport, Elphin, 19 June, 1793, to Mr. J. C. Walker asking his influence in favour of her appointment as housekeeper to the Royal Irish Academy.
There are two unpublished later letters (1794) from Rushport to Bishop Percy, in one of which Esther wants to know about the subscription to the Memoir, and in the other she thanks the Bishop for £15 which she had received from the Concordatum Fund. A later letter dated 17 October, 1801, from Catherine, daughter of the Revd. Henry Goldsmith, to the Bishop seems to show that Esther had remarried. “She thinks she is as well entitled to the money arising from the publication of my Uncle’s works as I am, but there I must beg leave to differ in opinion with her.” Catherine gives some more particulars which she thinks the Bishop ought to know, but “if Mrs. Goldsmith knew the information came to your Lordship through me, ’twou’d bring her tongue upon me, which she can use well.”
12. CHARLES GOLDSMITH.
(Oliver’s Brother.)
Charles Goldsmith (born 1717, died 1805) the youngest but one of the Revd. Charles Goldsmith’s children, comes on the scene earlier than the others. Encouraged by the accounts which had reached Ireland of his brother Oliver’s arrival in England and growing literary fame, he ventured to the Metropolis in the year 1757, and as Northcote says in his Life of Reynolds (I, 332-3): “Having heard of his brother Noll mixing in the first society in London, he took it for granted that his fortune was made, and that he could soon make a brother’s also: he therefore left home without notice: but soon found, on his arrival in London, that the picture he had formed of his brother’s situation was too highly coloured, that Noll could not introduce him to his great friends, and in fact that, although out of a jail, he was often out of a lodging.”