OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. I.BOOK m.
1759. Gibber had raised tile curtain on the Mountforts, Nokeses,
.it. 31. and Bettertons of a past age, had any such just or lively
writing on the theatres been given to the world, as the
playhouse criticism of the Bee.
The first of his papers on this subject pointed out the
superiority of French comic acting over English, and its
the reader will find a brief mention of it not at all inappropriate to my present
subject. He was a Limerick man, and at the age of twenty, eager to make
a great dash npon the stage, he came up to London without a friend, but
with one tragedy finished in his pocket, and another rapidly forming in his brain.
The desperate craving of his youth was to force Ms way into the London theatres,
and he seems to have determined very resolutely to use the faculty of which he felt
himself possessed to that end, failure or neglect to the contrary notwithstanding.
Aguire, his first tragedy, making no way towards a hearing, he wrote a second.
This was Gisippus ; and, written as it was in his twentieth year, I do not hesitate
to call it one of the marvels of youthful production in literature. The solid grasp of
character, the manly depth of thought, the beauties as well as defects of the com-
position (more than I can here enumerate), wanted only right direction to have
given to our English drama another splendid and enduring name. In little London
cofiee-honses, on little slips of paper, this tragedy was written. But he could get
no hearing'for it. Still undaunted, he wrote a comedy, he wrote farces,—he tried
the stage at every avenue, and it would have none of him. Meanwhile, he had
been starving for two miserable years; writing all day within doors, and never
venturing out till darkness threw its friendly veil over his threadbare coat; to
use the common phrase, denying Mmself (because he could not get them.) the
common necessaries of life; passing "three days together without tasting food,"
in a small room in an obscure court near St. Paul's ; living for the most part, in
short, on such munificent booksellers' rewards as two guineas for the translation of
a volume and a half of a French novel. Something better presented itself at last,
however; and, emerging from his misery, he became a critic, a reporter, and,
stimulated by Banim's success, a writer of Irish tales ;—his dramatic dream was
dreamt, and he never turned to the stage again. But not without ill effects to
himself could he hope to keep thus dormant and unused the faculty which, as it
seems to me, he had received in greatest abundance. More even than the zeal of
God's House in his later years, this eat Mm up. What he wrote thereafter
achieved a reasonable success ; but, in the character of its pretension or achieve-
ment, bore so little proportion to the performances that shed lustre on his boyhood,
that a growing sense of the worthlessness of literary pursuit at last led to a desire
for the priesthood, and in his thirty-fifth year he entered a convent. He passed the
various grades of his noviciate, and after two years of rigorous monastic seclusion,
in which the monkish passion became more and more intense, fell into a sudden
fever, and died in 1840. Before he entered the convent, he had committed his
existing MSS. to the flames. Among them was Aguire, but (perhaps in touching
memory of his early hopes, and that some record might be left in vindication of
them) he saved Gisippus. It was produced during Mr, Macready's management of
Drury Lane in 1842, nineteen years after its first composition. See Appendix (D)
to this volume.