Seven years had elapsed between the birth of Oliver and the child that preceded him. His elder brother Henry had superior qualities which were early marked. To these his father gave great attention, lavishing his means upon this boy's education. Oliver was destined for commercial life in the paternal projection of those affairs and eventualities of which men imagine they are masters. The force of impressions that fall upon the mind in childhood must be strongest in those children whose imaginations are most vivid. Listening to Paddy Byrne made Oliver in heart and mind a wayward rover all his life. Something of the imprudence of the little man came, it might be said, from this dash of the recklessness of the old soldier and adventurer infused into imaginative infant hopefulness. From this same instructor he also gathered his devotion to books and poetry, which proved a revelation that changed his father's purpose of fitting him for a commercial calling. Henry Goldsmith is known and remembered now through the poetic expressions of honour and affection bestowed upon him by his brother. One cannot tell at this hour whether the deeper sense of reverence should fall upon his character or upon that gratitude through which alone it lives. In the childhood of Oliver Goldsmith, his brightness and the foreshadowings of future force were not alone among the elements within the little heart which lay neglected by those he loved and whose lives he lighted, though they knew it not. In due course he was despatched to another school, thirty miles away. He lived with his uncle, Mr. John Goldsmith, a landed gentleman, and attended the school at Elphin; and at eleven years of age was sent to another and a more reputed Academy nearer home, at Athlone. Two years here and four at Edgeworthstown completed his schooling at the age of seventeen. Of the Vicar of Wakefield, and thence of the father of little Oliver, it was said that all his adventures were by his own fireside, and all his travels from one room to another. He was in all likelihood a delicate man, and certainly deeply religious, with a high sense of honour and common moral obligation. The _Vicar of Wakefield_, his best portrait, stands an honourable and an imperishable filial tribute, the fairest ever paid by son to sire.