Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, William Craig, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team OLIVER GOLDSMITH A Biography by Washington Irving PREFACE I. Birth and Parentage--Characteristics of the Goldsmith Race--Poetical Birthplace--Goblin House--Scenes of Boyhood--Lissoy--Picture of a Country Parson--Goldsmith's Schoolmistress--Byrne, the Village Schoolmaster-- Goldsmith's Hornpipe and Epigram--Uncle Contarine--School Studies and School Sports--Mistakes of a Night II. Improvident Marriages in the Goldsmith Family--Goldsmith at the University--Situation of a Sizer--Tyranny of Wilder, the Tutor--Pecuniary Straits--Street Ballads--College Riot--Gallows Walsh--College Prize--A Dance Interrupted III. Goldsmith rejected by the Bishop--Second Sally to see the World--Takes Passage for America--Ship sails without him--Return on Fiddleback--A Hospitable Friend--The Counselor IV. Sallies forth as a Law Student--Stumbles at the Outset--Cousin Jane and the Valentine--A Family Oracle--Sallies forth as a Student of Medicine--Hocus-pocus of a Boarding-house--Transformations of a Leg of Mutton--The Mock Ghost--Sketches of Scotland--Trials of Toryism--A Poet's Purse for a Continental Tour V. The agreeable Fellow-passengers--Risks from Friends picked up by the Wayside--Sketches of Holland and the Dutch--Shifts while a Poor Student at Leyden--The Tulip Speculation--The Provident Flute--Sojourn at Paris-- Sketch of Voltaire--Traveling Shifts of a Philosophic Vagabond VI. Landing In England--Shifts of a Man without Money--The Pestle and Mortar--Theatricals in a Barn--Launch upon London--A City Night Scene--Struggles with Penury--Miseries of a Tutor--A Doctor in the Suburb--Poor Practice and Second-hand Finery--A Tragedy in Embryo--Project of the Written Mountains VII. Life as a Pedagogue--Kindness to Schoolboys--Pertness In Return--Expensive Charities--The Griffiths and the "Monthly Review"--Toils of a Literary Hack--Rupture with the Griffiths VIII. Newbery, of Picture-book Memory--How to keep up Appearances--Miseries of Authorship--A Poor Relation--Letter to Hodson IX. Hackney Authorship--Thoughts of Literary Suicide--Return to Peckham-- Oriental Projects--Literary Enterprise to raise Funds--Letter to Edward Wells--To Robert Bryanton--Death of Uncle Contarine--Letter to Cousin Jane X. Oriental Appointment, and Disappointment--Examination at the College of Surgeons--How to procure a Suit of Clothes--Fresh Disappointment--A Tale of Distress--The Suit of Clothes in Pawn--Punishment for doing an act of Charity--Gayeties of Green-Arbor Court--Letter to his Brother--Life of Voltaire--Scroggins, an attempt at Hock Heroic Poetry XI. Publication of "The Inquiry"--Attacked by Griffith's "Review"--Kenrick, the Literary Ishmaelite--Periodical Literature--Goldsmith's Essays--Garrick as a Manager--Smollett and his Schemes--Change of Lodgings--The Robin Hood Club