In 1744 two remarkable boys entered Trinity College, strangely unlike in disposition and genius, both heirs of Fame, but destined to reach her temple by very different avenues. Their names were Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith. The life of the tender-hearted, vain, improvident, generous, altogether lovable author of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ and the _Deserted Village_, with all its vicissitudes, its hours of extravagant luxury, and years of hopeless poverty, is as well known to most children as are the works which his exquisite art left the world for “a perpetual feast of nectared sweets.” There is nothing to tell of him which has not been told and re-told, read and re-read, from the story of the young aspirant for ordination presenting himself to his Bishop in a pair of scarlet breeches, to that simple sentence of Johnson’s, when he heard of his death and his debts, “Let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man.” Goldsmith’s College career, like that of Swift, was not a brilliant one. Set him to turn an ode of Horace into English verse, and you might count on a version that would surprise the scholars; but give him a mathematical problem to solve, and he was a disgrace to his University. It was the same until the end. The mathematics of life--the simple additions and subtractions--were too much for him; but those marvellous versions of the tales of his experience or imagination we still delight in and wonder at. The charm of that delicate simplicity and ease of style has never been surpassed. Addison is justly honoured, and as a writer of English generally appraised higher than Goldsmith; but I cannot think that the Magdalen Scholar has a lightness of touch or a grace at all comparable to the poor Sizar of Trinity. In Addison’s best essays a fastidious critic, while he admires their chastened correctness, will observe a certain primness, an over-studied perfection of diction. Addison is a finished artist; but Goldsmith’s freedom gives greater pleasure, for he wrote under the direct inspiration of Nature. Posterity, too, has given its inexorable decree in favour of the Irishman. _Cato_ is forgotten, but _She Stoops to Conquer_ is with us still. The _Spectator_ is read in the study of the student of literature, but the _Vicar of Wakefield_ in every English home. “To be the most beloved of English writers”--as Thackeray says--“what a title that is for a man!” The Earl of Mornington, whose more illustrious son, the great Duke, vanquished the “World’s Victor” at Waterloo, was a contemporary of Goldsmith, and the first Professor of Music in the University. Malone, the editor of Shakespeare, and Toplady, the hymn-writer, graduated about the same time as the Earl, then a _filius nobilis_.