reads more like a happily-adapted recollection than the actual impromptu of a boy of nine. But another, in which, after a painful silence, he replied to the brutal enquiry of a ne’er-do-well relative as to when he meant to grow handsome, by saying that he would do so when the speaker grew good,—is characteristic of the easily-wounded spirit and ‘exquisite sensibility of contempt’ with which he was to enter upon the battle of life. In June, 1744, after anticipating in his own person, the plot of his later play of _She Stoops to Conquer_ by mistaking the house of a gentleman at Ardagh for an inn, he was sent to Trinity College, Dublin. The special dress and semi-menial footing of a sizar or poor scholar—for his father, impoverished by the imprudent portioning of his eldest daughter, could not afford to make him a pensioner—were scarcely calculated to modify his personal peculiarities. Added to these, his tutor elect, Dr. Theaker Wilder, was a violent and vindictive man, with whom his ungainly and unhopeful pupil found little favour. Wilder had a passion for mathematics which was not shared by Goldsmith, who, indeed, spoke contemptuously enough of that science in after life. He could, however, he told Malone, ‘turn an Ode of Horace into English better than any of them.’ But his academic career was not a success. [Illustration: Goldsmith’s Autograph] PANE OF GLASS WITH GOLDSMITH’S AUTOGRAPH (Trinity College, Dublin)