In a letter from his elder sister, Catherine, the wife of Daniel Hodson, Esq. inserted in the Life of Goldsmith, which an anonymous writer, whom I suppose to have been Cowper's friend, Mr. Rose, from a passage in Mr. Nichol's Literary Anecdotes, prefixed to his Miscellaneous Works, wonders are told of his early predilection for the poetical art; but those who have observed the amplification with which the sprightly sallies of childhood are related by domestic fondness, will listen to such narrations with some abatement of confidence. It seems probable, that a desire of literary distinction might have been infused into his youthful mind by hearing of the reputation of his countryman, Parnell, with whom, as we learn from his life of that poet, his father and uncle were acquainted. He received the first rudiments of learning from a school-master who taught in the village where his parents resided, and who had served as a quarter-master during the war of the Succession in Spain; and from the romantic accounts which this man delighted to give of his travels, Goldsmith is supposed, by his sister, to have contracted his propensity for a wandering life. From hence he was removed successively to the school at Elphin, of which the Rev. Mr. Griffin was master, and to that of Athlone; kept by the Rev. Mr. Campbell; and lastly, was placed under the care of the Rev. Patrick Hughes, of Edgeworthstown, in the county of Longford, to whose instruction he acknowledged himself to have been more indebted than to that of his other teachers. It was probably that untowardness in his outward appearance, which never afterwards left him, that made his schoolfellows consider him a dull boy, fit only to be the butt of their ridicule.