liver Goldsmith was born at Pallas, County Longford, Ireland, November 10th, 1728. That was the year in which Pope issued his 'Dunciad,' Gay his 'Beggar's Opera,' and Thomson his 'Spring.' Goldsmith's father was a clergyman of the Established Church. In 1730 the family removed to Lissoy, a better living than that of Pallas. Oliver's school days in and around Westmeath were unsatisfactory; so also his course at Trinity, 1744 to 1749. For the next two years he loafed at Ballymahon, living on his mother, then a widow, and making vain attempts to take orders, to teach, to enter a law course, to sail for America. He was a bad sixpence. Finally his uncle Contarine, who saw good stuff in the awkward, ugly, humorous, and reckless youth, got him off to Edinburgh, where he studied medicine till 1754. In 1754 he is studying, or pretending to study, at Leyden. In 1755 and 1756 he is singing, fluting, and otherwise "beating" his way through Europe, whence he returns with a mythical M. B. degree. From 1756 to 1759 he is in London, teaching, serving an apothecary, practicing medicine, reading proof, writing as a hack, planning to practice surgery in Coromandel, failing to qualify as a hospital mate, and in general only not starving. In 1759 Dr. Percy finds him in Green Arbor Court amid a colony of washerwomen, writing an 'Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.' Next follows the appearance of that work, and his acquaintance with publishers and men of letters. In 1761, with Percy, comes Johnson to visit him. In 1764 Goldsmith is one of the members of the famous Literary Club, where he counts among his friends, besides Percy and Johnson, Reynolds, Boswell, Garrick, Burke, and others who shone with their own or reflected light. The rest of his life, spent principally in or near London, is associated with his literary career. He died April 4th, 1774, and was buried near the Temple Church. Goldsmith was an essayist and critic, a story-writer, a poet, a comic dramatist, and a literary drudge: the last all the time, the others "between whiles." His drudgery produced such works as the 'Memoirs of Voltaire,' the 'Life of Nash,' two Histories of England, Histories of Rome and Greece, Lives of Parnell and Bolingbroke. [Pg 6502] The 'History of Animated Nature' was undertaken as an industry, but it reads, as Johnson said, "like a Persian tale,"—and of course, the more Persian the less like nature. For the prose of Goldsmith writing for a suit of clothes or for immortality is all of a piece, inimitable. "Nothing," says he, in his 'Essay on Taste,' "has been so often explained, and yet so little understood, as simplicity in writing.... It is no other than beautiful nature, without affectation or extraneous ornament."