CHAP. V.] TRAVELS.

It was common, talk at the dinner table of [Reynolds that the 1755,
wanderings of the philosophic vagabond in the Vicar of •3St-2T
Wakefield had been suggested by his own, and he often
admitted at that time, to various friends, the accuracy of
special details. " He frequently used to talk," says one *
who became very familiar with him in later life, " of his
" distresses on the continent, such as living on the hospi-
" talities of the friars in convents, sleeping in barns, and"
" picking up a kind of mendicant livelihood by the Grerman
" flute, with great pleasantry." f If he did not make more
open confession than to private friends, it was to please the
booksellers only; who could not bear that any one so popular
with their customers as Doctor Goldsmith had become,
should lie under the horrible imputation of a poverty so
deplorable. " Countries wear very different appearances,"
he had written in the first edition of the Polite Learning,
" to travellers of different circumstances. A man who
" is whirled through Europe in a post-chaise, and the
" pilgrim who walks the grand tour on foot, will form very
" different conclusions. Hand inexpertus loquor." In the
second edition, the hand inexpertus loguor disappeared; but
the experience had been already set down in the Vicar of
Wakefield.

Louvain attracted Mm of course, as he passed through
Flanders ; and here, according to his first biographer,! he took
the degree of medical bachelor, which, as early as 1763, is

* This was a young Irish law student named Oooke, who had chambers near
him in the Temple, who will have frequent mention in the course of my narrative,
and who contributed to the European Magazine not long after Goldsmith's death a
series of papers from which I have derived many most interesting and authentic
details. It is surprising to me that they should have escaped the attention of the
compilers and editor of the Percy Memoir.

•f1 European Magazine, xxiv. 91.

£ Life of Dr. 0. Goldsmith, printed for Swan, 17V4, 8vo. And Amual Register,
xvii, 29.o mlu of hk futiirn ivmiiuttt, But thw wHltKrtinnai »f Uto