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10 OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMEB- |Hom4L
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1731. book into Oliver Goldsmith's hands. She taugU*
it~s. letters ; lived tiU it was matter of pride to remerftlx* » oiim
talked of it to Doctor Strean, Henry Goldsmith's successor in the curacy of Kilkenny West; and at the ripe age «f ninety, when the great writer had been thirteen years in JMB grave, boasted of it with her last breath. That her success i« the tfwk had not been much to boast of, she at other times confessed. " Never was so dull a boy : he seemed impenetrably stupid," * said the good Elizabeth Delap, when she bored lier fricnda, or answered curious enquirers, about the celebrated Boetor Goldsmith. " He was a plant that flowered late/' said. Johnson to Boswell ; " there appeared nothing remarkable about him " when he was young." t This, if true, would have Been only another confirmation of the saying that the richer a* aaatttM is, the harder and more slow its development is like *fco be ; but it may perhaps be doubted, in the meaning: it would ordinarily bear, for aU the charms of Goldsmith's later style are to be traced in' even the letters of Ms youth, and. his sister expressly tells us that he not only began to seriTbljlQ verses when he could scarcely write, but otherwise showed, a fond- ness for books and learning, and what she calls * * signs of "genius."!
1734. At the age of six, Oliver was handed over to "felie village!
^E*. 6, school, kept by Mr. Thomas Byrne. Looking baelc from tltln
distance of time, and penetrating through greater* obscurity than its own cabin-smoke into that Lissoy aeadoiuy, it in to be discovered that this excellent Mr. Byrnes, retired quarter-master of an Irish regiment that had served 111 Marlborough's Spanish wars, was more given to * * shoulder "a crutch and show how fields were won," and certainly |
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* The. rev. Edward Mangin's Essay on Ligkl Jhadlng (1808), 14 4, And
Prior, i. 22. f BoaweU's Life (Ed. 1839), yi, 800. :|: Percy ' Jkftmatf, 4, |
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