OLIYEE GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES.

1752. "who carries all Ms goods about Mm," lie describes Munro
mk as the one great professor, and the rest of the doctor-
teachers as only less afflicting to their students than they
must be to their patients. He makes whimsical mention of
a trip to the Highlands, for which he had hired a horse
about the size of a ram, who " walked away (trot he could
" not) as pensive as his master." Other passages have a
tendency to show within what really narrow limits he had
brought his wants; with how little he was prepared to be
cheerfully content; and that, for whatever advances were
sent him, though certainly it might have been desirable
that he should have turned them to more practical use, he
at least overflowed with gratitude.

There has been occasionally a harsh judgment of Gold-
smith for this money so wasted on abortive professional
undertakings: but the sacrifices cannot fairly be called very
great. Burke had an allowance of 300Z. a-year for leisure
to follow studies to which he never paid the least attention ;
and when his father anxiously expected to hear of his call
to the bar, he might have heard, instead, of a distress which
forced him to sell his books :* yet no one thinks, and rightly,
of exacting penalties from Burke on this ground. Poor
G-oldsmith's supplies were on the other hand small, irregular,
uncertain, and, in some two years at the furthest, exhausted
altogether.

1753. Here, in this letter ^ to his uncle, he says that lie has
-Et.25. drawn for six pounds, and that his next draft, five months
after this date, will be for but four pounds; pleading in
extenuation of these light demands, that he has been obliged
to buy everything since he came to Scotland, " shirts not
"even excepted:" while in another letter at the close of the
same year he accounts for money spent by the remark that

* Burte's Life by Mr. Prior, i.68, 69, volume. * Appendix (C) to this volume.ly exempt."