OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [UOOK i.

1745. The writer who discovered this marriage settlement attributes
^- 17. it to " the highest sense of honour ; " * but it must surely "be
doubted if an. act which, to elevate the pretensions of one
child, and adapt them to those of the man she had married,
inflicted beggary on the rest, should be so referred to.
Oliver was the first to taste its bitterness. It was announced
to him that he could not go to college as Henry had gone, a
pensioner ; but must consent to enter it, a sizar.

The first thing exacted of a sizar, in those days, was to give
proof of classical attainments. He was to show himself, to a
certain reasonable extent, a good scholar ; in return for which,
being clad in a black gown of coarse stuff without sleeves, lie
was marked with the servant's badge of a red cap, and put to
the servant's offices of sweeping courts in the morning, carry-
ing up dishes from the kitchen to the fellows' dining-table in
the afternoon, and waiting in the hall till the fellows had dined,
This,* — commons, teaching, and chambers, being on the
other hand greatly reduced, — is called by one of Goldsmith's
biographers " one of those judicious and considerate arrange -
" ments of the founders of such institutions, that gives to the
"less opulent the opportunity of cultivating learning at a
" trifling expense ; " f but it is called by Goldsmith himsolf,
in his Inquiry into the Present State of Polity Lenrn'mtj, I a
" contradiction " suggested by motives of pride, and a passion
which he thinks absurd, " that men should be at once learning
" the liberal arts, and at the same time treated as slaves ; at
•" once studying freedom and practising servitude."

To this contradiction he is now himself doomed ; and that
which to a stronger judgment and more resolute purpose

* Prior, i. 49. .

$ Gbap. xiii. Johnson himself condemns the practice not loan severely; atul an
pompously, on the other hand, Sir John Hawkins supportB it. »,,f ndvioK, Iwi