The Sun.
London, England, 1855-11-23 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith. A New
Edition in One Volume. By John Forster.
Bradbury and Evans.

Heartily glad are we to welcome in this goodly
volume a popular reprint of Mr. Forster's "Life
and Times of Oliver Goldsmith" —a charming
biography, which has gradually expanded into one
of the nobler classics of our national literature.

The original edition, published in the spring of
1848, was literally the merest rough draft or out-
line sketch of what became six years afterwards a
finished masterpiece. Goldsmith's memoirs had
been previously written by other admirers, but
never before se compietely and satisfactorily. Mr.
Prior had prosed about the poet to the dreariest
extent imaginable—drawing his portrait somewhat
as Traddles- would have done had he tried, namely,
as the veriest scarecrow of a skeleton. Mr. Irving
again had more recently romanced to his heart's
content, and for that matter let us confess to our
own also, about the "Captain in Lace,"•and dear
"Little Comedy " and the " Jessamy Bride," until
he had so contrived under the influence of this
same delightful romancing that our sympathies
embraced at last the whole pleasant family of the
Hornecks, for the sake of a grateful remembrance
of their affectionate regard for Oliver Goldsmith.
Scattered lights, too, had been thrown upon the
same comparatively brief but very memorable ex-
istence by other writers, such as Percy, and Cooke,
and Boswell, and Davis, and Glover, and Hawkins
—Percy, for example, through the suggestive but
inadequate "memoir" prefixed to the Miscellaneous
Writings, and Cooke through his interesting but
fragmentary papers in the European Magazine.
It was left for Mr. Forster, however, to distance
every one of his competitors, Washington Irving
inclusively, by the production of those two masterly
volume , issued immediately at the commencement
of 1854—volumes which the original edition of 1
1848 may be said to have prematurely fore-
shadowed, and of which the present popular reprint
of 1855 may be accurately enough described as the
ingenious and comprehensive abridgment. Hence-
forth Forster will be regarded as pre-eminently the
biographer of " Goldsmith"—precisely as Southey
was of "Nelson," and Mackintosh of "More,"
and Cavendish of " Wolsey," and Johnson of
"Savage," and Boswell (in his turn) of "John-
son." Companion classics upon our bookshelves
from this time forth, indeed, must now be ranged
together side by side—the last mentioned and the
first men tioned—Boswell's Johnson and Forster's
Goldsmith. Higher praise than this we know
not, but praise it is to which Mr. Forster appears
to us to be eminently well entitled. His portrait
of our glorious dramatist-poet-novelist, as here
pencilled in every lineament with such exquisite
delicacy and discrimination, must be accepted as
altogether more valuable and life-like of its kind
than even the famous painting by which Sir Joshua
has perpetuated upon canvas the familiar and be-
loved features of the author of She Stoops to Con-
quer, and of The Deserted Village, and of The Vicar
of Wakefield. Reynolds drew the form ; Forster
has, so to speak, literally eallotyped not merely the
form, but with it the intellect, the character, the
living and breathing individuality. Reading the
four books of this enthralling memorial, we seem
to follow poor Oliver—stepping, close at his
heels, in his warm broad footprints. Beginning
with his birth, ou the 10th of November, 1728,
we track the chequered progress of that " strange
eventful history" to the very moment of its hero's
death, at a quarter to five o'clock on that sad Mon-
day morning, the 4th of April, 1774. A space of
45 years and five months—the last decade of which
has proved so very memorable in the annals of our
popular literature. The pathway worn by the
weary feet of Goldsmith in that memorable pil-
grimage—from the cradle, at Pallasmore, the little
Irish village on the banks of the river Inny, in the
county of Longford, to the grave in the Temple,
commemorated soon afterwards by the marble
monument in the Abbey at Westminster—devious
though it was throughout, and obscure at its com-
mencent, has here been traced, almost step by step,
with a loving pertinacity of research, very admirable
to witness. It has been described too by the hand of
Mr. Forster in characters we believe to be (so far as
anything like this can be predicated of any bin-
graphy in our language) imperishable. Oliver's 1
schooldays, at the knees of Elizabeth Delap, learn-
ing his letters from a horn-book, or at the desk of
Thomas Byrne, doga'earing his grammar and dic-
tionary—Oliver's holidays, listening to the songs
of blind old Carolan, or dancing a pas scut at uncle
John's merrymaking— Oliver's advance from school
to college, from the Academy at El phin to the Dublin
University—Oliver as he was from 1728 to 1757,
from nothing to twenty-nine : here is the whole
story recounted in Book One, showing us the un-
friended adventurer in his various situations, as
sizar, as student, as traveller, as apothecary's
journeyman as tutor, as poor physician ! The
sizar in his red cap and his coarse black gown with-
out sleeves—carrying dishes into the fellows' hall
and writing ditties on the sly for ragged ballad
singers ! The student decked out in claret-coloured
cloth and sky-blue shalloon—straddling home on
the lean barrel of Fiddleback ! The traveller in
rusty garments—warbling his way on the flute
through Holland, France, Germany, Italy, Swit-
zerland ! The apothecary's journeyman dingier
still and footsore from his long wanderings—trund-
ling the pestle and rolling the bolus, and mixing
the blackdraught ! The tutor, dingiest of all, and
heartsore at length as well as footsore—grinding
the propria quo maribus and the pothooks into
the youth at Peckham-rye The threadbare
Physician, in a suit of green and gold miserably
tarnished—holding his three-corner hat adroitly
over a patch in the rusty velvet So much for the
motley figure cut by poor Oliver Goldsmith in these
introductory chapters descriptive of his life and
adventures ! Chapters conducting us to Book
Two—where he is author .by compulsion : writing
for Griffith's Monthly Review, and for Hamilton's
Critical Review, penning at thirty a Life of Vol-
taire, and a thirty-one an Inquiry into Polite
Learning ! Afterwards leading us to Book Three—
where he is author by choice : writing in the Bee and
the Busy Body, editing the Lady's Magazine, and
penning The Citizen of the World, scribbling the
Memoirs of Beau Nash, and the nursery tale of
Goody Two Shoes—subsequently giving to the
world, at thirty-six, THE TRAVELLER, at thirty-eight
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD, at forty "The Good-
natured Man," at forty-two THE DESERTED VIL-
LAGE, at forty-three " The Haunch of Venison,"
and at forty five SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER and
" Retaliation. Book Four—revealing him to us
as Dramatist, and Novelist, and Poet, as the friend
of Reynolds, and Burke, and Johnson. Such is
the drift of this remarkable bioer aphy—carrying
us with it not merely through °the " Life," but
also through the "Times" of Oliver Goldsmith.
Nobly has Mr. Foster acquitted himself, from first
to last, in this self-imposed labour—obviously •to
him a very labour of love—the labour, that is, of
commemorating in adequate terms the most memo-
rable of Johnson's literary contemporaries.
It is observable that Goldsmith's biographer has
reason, during the course of his narrative, to speak
(page 215) of the well-known charges of plagi-
arism from Percy's Reliques directed against the
writer of the exquisite ballad of _Edwin and
Angelina. Is Mr. Forster himself unconscious
meanwhile that he himself has here inadvertently
allowed a plagiarism of a rather glaring kind to
flaw the symmetry of the fourteen lines of his
" Dedication 1" Unquestionably we regard him as
so unconscious. Yet the plagiarism to which we
are now compelled perforce to direct attention is
altogether as indisputable as we are satisfied it is
entirely unintentional. Briefly, however, to •
—ex-
-Alin Mr Forster writes in the graceful dedica-
tionr
of his book to Charles Dickens :
" Genius and its rewards are briefly told
A liberal nature and a niggard doom ;
A difficult journey to a splendid tomb, &e,
While, years ago, Coleridge wrote as the eleventh
1 verse of his celebrated " Monody on Chatterton"
—what ? Mr. Forster of all our readers will,
doubtless, be the most startled when he finds,
on reference to that Monody by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, as
given in every complete edi-
tion of his gc Poems," that that eleventh verse runs
actually thus—
" A prodigal nature and a niggard doom."
So liable is every man who reads much and writes
much to plagiarise unknowingly, and that, more-
over, at the very time when he is committing his
ideas to paper with the most conscientious credence
in his own scrupulous originality. It may be re-
membered by
some bow Lord Byron, himself
often charged with a like offence, jocularly repu-
diated the notion of any blame being evolved
from the accusation, by declaring that every such
lapsus calami must be regarded as a tribute to
the excellence of an author's memory as being
et once well stored and retentive ! Enough, how-
ever—the present unconscious vibration of a chord
in the well-stored and retentive memory of Mr.
Forster having now been directly traced to that
thrillingand sonorous verse of Coleridge—the
second line of this sonnet-dedication of Goldsmith's
" Life" to.lliekens will either have to be re-written
altogether, or, after the substitution of " prodigal"
for "liberal," explicitly marked byinverted commas
as au avowed quotation. Any way, we would on
no account have the sonnet in question eliminated
from these pages, regarding the dedication, as we
do, as the noble tribute of an earnest and affec-
tionate friendship. A memorial of genius, this ex-
quisite biography is, indeed, so eloquent, so true, so