other fault is hinted at: his love of drink, so that the moral poet was not so exemplary in his life as in his works; but he was honest, truth-telling, a good friend and master, as well as a clever, imaginative, and cultivated writer.
It is curious to note how many poets have been bachelors. Gray, too, was one. The son of a well-to-do London citizen, he was sent to Eton and Cambridge, and at the latter place spent many years of his later life. He was emphatically a student, rather cold and fastidious in manner, but a devoted son and a true friend. His mother “cheerfully maintained him [at college] on the scanty produce of her separate industry.” He travelled with Horace Walpole, and learned modern languages in his wanderings, and was one of the first English sight-seers at Herculaneum. On his return to England his father died, and he and his mother lived at West Stoke, near Windsor, where he wrote his famous Elegy. One of his early friends, Richard West, son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, a kindred spirit, learned, young, and poetical, but indolent, writes affectionately to Gray: “Next to seeing you is the pleasure of seeing your handwriting; next to hearing you is the pleasure of hearing from you.” Soon after the premature death of his young friend Gray went to live at Cambridge, and ten years later his happy, quiet life was disturbed by the death of his mother—a blow he never recovered. Towards the close of his life, thirteen years later, he writes to a friend: “I had written to you to inform you that I had discovered a thing very little known, which is that in one’s whole life one can never have more than a single mother. You may think this obvious,
and what you call a trite observation. You are a green gosling! I was, at the same age, very near as wise as you; and yet I never discovered this with full evidence and conviction—I mean till it was too late. It is thirteen years ago, and seems but as yesterday, and every day I live it sinks deeper into my heart.”
His favorite study at Cambridge—first at Peter-house College, then at Pembroke Hall, between which places he spent nearly forty years of his life—was Greek, taking, as he said, “verse and prose together, like bread and cheese”; but his only public office was the professorship of modern history, the duties of which he was, through ill-health, unable to fulfil. The stiffness of his bearing and fastidiousness of his dress made him a favorite butt of the undergraduates, and his real attainments, intellectual as well as moral, were wholly powerless to restrain within due bounds that spirit of mischief which the gravest “dons” themselves confess to in their own far-off youth and heyday. One of these jokes was the reason of his leaving Peter-house in indignation and removing to Pembroke Hall. Gray had a nervous dread of fire, and always kept a rope-ladder by him in case of danger. One night the “boys” “placed exactly under his bedroom window a large tub full of water, and some who were in the plot raised a cry of ‘fire’ at his door. Gray, terrified by the report of the calamity he most dreaded, rushed from his bed, threw himself hastily out of the window with his rope-ladder, and descended exactly into the tub.” The two bars to which he fastened his ladder are still to be seen at the window of the chambers he used. But in later years, when the fame
of his scholarship was greater, the men crowded to see him when he walked out. “Intelligence ran from college to college, and the tables in the different halls, if it happened to be the hour of dinner, were thinned by the desertion of young men thronging to behold him.” He is said to have been thoroughly versed in almost every branch of knowledge then cultivated. Besides the classics, European modern history and languages, painting, architecture, and gardening occupied his thoughts, and the more modern studies of criticism, political economy, and archæology were not forgotten. Metaphysics also were familiar to him. His taste in natural scenery was of a noble kind; mountains and heaths were his favorites. When in the Scottish Highlands, he writes to a friend: “A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen that have not been among them; their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet-ditches, shell grottoes, and Chinese rails.”
In that age of artificiality this was a great step forward. Men affected to be appalled by the savageness of life away from the capital; they magnified the fleeting, ignoble gossip of their taverns and coffee-houses into affairs of sublime importance. A country-house to them was a doll’s house, a toy near London, tricked out with fantastic imitations of foreign curiosities; a full, healthy, natural life was their horror. But Gray, though of this age, was not of this clique; he lived outside the world of fashion and coffee-houses; his travels, and especially his studies, gave his mind a wider range. This cannot be said of poor, jovial, unlucky Goldsmith, the jest of Fortune, the Micawber among
poets. There is a wonderful disparity between his miserable, shiftless life and the fame of his works, both prose and poetry. He is one of the most popular of poets and novelists, and his life was one of the most checkered, though uniformly unlucky, that ever were. Before he was twenty he wrote street ballads to earn bread, but was ready to share his pittance with any one poorer than himself. One winter night he gave the blankets off his bed to a shivering creature, and “crept into the ticking to shelter himself from the cold.” Never did avarice come near his heart; indeed, his indiscriminate charity often brought him into sore straits. He was for two or three years a sizar at Dublin University—a sad position since the old generous days when the church protected and encouraged poor students, and foundations that still remain were made for their support. They indeed remain, but the spirit of charity and Christian brotherhood that inspired them has gone, and poor scholars find the universities as worldly a place as any other, and have to go through a fiery ordeal to gain knowledge. At last Goldsmith, goaded by the contempt and insults he met with, even from his tutor, who once knocked him down, ran away to Cork with one shilling in his pocket. He once told Sir Joshua Reynolds “that of all the exquisite meals he had ever tasted, the most delicious was a handful of gray peas given him by a girl, after twenty-four hours’ fasting.” Refusing to become a clergyman, for which career he felt unfitted, he studied medicine with small success, though he managed to get a degree after such a tour through Europe as reminds one of the mediæval students’ doings. He started with
a guinea in his pocket, one shirt to his back, and a flute in his hand. He led village dances on the green, and beguiled the evening hours of the gossips at the village inn, a barn being often his sleeping-place. But he had also another resource—the mediæval one of supporting theses before the learned faculties of foreign universities. Having thus, as it was laughingly said by his friends, “disputed” his way through Europe, he came back to London, still a beggar, and found a wretched home among beggars in Axe Lane. How often must that tragedy of disenchantment have been played out before the eyes of those human moths who come to London and other great centres “to seek their fortune”! For one that swims a thousand sink, and each success is built upon the accumulated failures of others perhaps no less intellectually endowed. The weary tramp after situations, the timid offer of services that no one wants, the despairing hint that the lowest wages will be more than welcome, the cold dissympathy that need and shabby clothes almost always involve, and all this repeated two, three, four times a year, is enough to break the spirit of any man not endowed with the eagle’s courage. There is hardly much to choose between the miserable avocations which poor Goldsmith was driven to take up to keep himself from starving. Once he was a chemist’s assistant in Monument Yard; then a poor doctor on his own account, in the still poorer neighborhood of Southwark; then, worse than all, an usher (or under-master) in a small school. “I was up early and late; I was browbeat by the master, hated for my ugly face by the mistress, worried by the boys within, and never permitted to stir out to
meet civility abroad.” Then he turned to that most uncertain yet fascinating pursuit—letters, his old love. It barely kept him alive; he was dunned and worried; lived in a wretched attic, and wore clothes too shabby to go out in, except after nightfall. In these days of brilliant gas-lit shops and streets even that comfort would have been denied him. He was a bookseller’s hack, and wrote to order, and was naturally delighted at the chance of an appointment as surgeon on the coast of Coromandel; but this fell through, unluckily for himself, though not for posterity. Goldsmith had a dog, to whom he taught simple tricks, which were as great a vexation to the poor animal as his own troubles were to the master (selfish human beings, how little we follow the lesson. ‘Put yourself in his place’!), and this faithful companion was a great solace to him.
The way in which the Vicar of Wakefield was given to the world is too well known to be more than glanced at. Version and counterversion of the scene have been given by Johnson and others; it is pitiful to think that such a book should have depended upon the chance of his being able to get out to offer it to a publisher. While Goldsmith sat a prisoner in his own room (it is still shown at Islington, London) Johnson took the treasure and sold it for sixty pounds. It is to be hoped the author changed his landlady after her behavior to him in arresting him for his rent; but perhaps she had some provocation, for when he had money he did not always put it to the wisest purposes. Others, too, must have been either foolishly trusting or deliberately kind; for he owed £2,000 at his death, one of the bills being the