While Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided between squalid distress and squalid dissipation, his father died, leaving a mere pittance.The youth obtained his bachelor's degree, and left the university.During some time the humble dwelling to which his widowed mother had retired was his home.He was now in his twenty-first year; it was necessary that he should do something;and his education seemed to have fitted him to do nothing but to dress himself in gaudy colours, of which he was as fond as a magpie, to take a hand at cards, to sing Irish airs, to play the flute, to angle in summer, and to tell ghost stories by the fire in winter.He tried five or six professions in turn without success.He applied for ordination; but, as he applied in scarlet clothes, he was speedily turned out of the episcopal palace.He then became tutor in an opulent family, but soon quitted his situation in consequence of a dispute about play.
Then he determined to emigrate to America.His relations, with much satisfaction, saw him set out for Cork on a good horse with thirty pounds in his pocket.But in six weeks he came back on a miserable hack, without a penny, and informed his mother that the ship in which he had taken his passage, having got a fair wind while he was at a party of pleasure, had sailed without him.
Then he resolved to study the law.A generous kinsman advanced fifty pounds.With this sum Goldsmith went to Dublin, was enticed into a gaming house, and lost every shilling.He then thought of medicine.A small purse was made up; and in his twenty-fourth year he was sent to Edinburgh.At Edinburgh he passed eighteen months in nominal attendance on lectures, and picked up some superficial information about chemistry and natural history.Thence he went to Leyden, still pretending to study physic.He left that celebrated university, the third university at which he had resided, in his twenty-seventh year, without a degree, with the merest smattering of medical knowledge, and with no property but his clothes and his flute.
His flute, however, proved a useful friend.He rambled on foot through Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes which everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and which often procured for him a supper and a bed.He wandered as far as Italy.His musical performances, indeed, were not to the taste of the Italians; but he contrived to live on the alms which he obtained at the gates of the convents.It should, however, be observed that the stories which he told about this part of his life ought to be received with great caution; for strict veracity was never one of his virtues; and a man who is ordinarily inaccurate in narration is likely to be more than ordinarily inaccurate when he talks about his own travels.Goldsmith, indeed, was so regardless of truth as to assert in print that he was present at a most interesting conversation between Voltaire and Fontenelle, and that this conversation took place at Paris.Now it is certain that Voltaire never was within a hundred leagues of Paris during the whole time which Goldsmith passed on the Continent.
In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a shilling, without a friend, and without a calling.He had, indeed, if his own unsupported evidence may be trusted, obtained from the University of Padua a doctor's degree; but this dignity proved utterly useless to him.In England his flute was not in request: there were no convents; and he was forced to have recourse to a series of desperate expedients.He turned strolling player; but his face and figure were ill suited to the boards even of the humblest theatre.He pounded drugs and ran about London with phials for charitable chemists.He joined a swarm of beggars, which made its nest in Axe Yard.He was for a time usher of a school, and felt the miseries and humiliations of this situation so keenly that he thought it a promotion to be permitted to earn his bread as a bookseller's hack; but he soon found the new yoke more galling than the old one, and was glad to become an usher again.He obtained a medical appointment in the service of the East India Company; but the appointment was speedily revoked.
Why it was revoked we are not told.The subject was one on which he never liked to talk.It is probable that he was incompetent to perform the duties of the place.Then he presented himself at Surgeon's Hall for examination, as mate to a naval hospital.
Even to so humble a post he was found unequal.By this time the schoolmaster whom he had served for a morsel of food and the third part of a bed was no more.Nothing remained but to return to the lowest drudgery of literature.Goldsmith took a garret in a miserable court, to which he had to climb from the brink of Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flagstones called Breakneck Steps.The court and the ascent have long disappeared; but old Londoners will remember both.(A gentleman, who states that he has known the neighbourhood for thirty years, corrects this account, and informs the present publisher that the Breakneck Steps, thirty-two in number, divided into two flights, are still in existence, and that, according to tradition, Goldsmith's house was not on the steps, but was the first house at the head of the court, on the left hand, going from the Old Bailey.See "Notes and Queries" (2d.S.ix.280).) Here, at thirty, the unlucky adventurer sat down to toil like a galley slave.