Volume 1

A history of the earth, and animated nature / By Oliver Goldsmith. With an introductory view of the animal kingdom, tr. from the French by Baron Cuvier. And copious notes embracing accounts of new discoveries in natural history: And a life of the author by Washington Irving. And a carefully prepared index to the whole work.

  • Oliver Goldsmith
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of the earth, and animated nature / By Oliver Goldsmith. With an introductory view of the animal kingdom, tr. from the French by Baron Cuvier. And copious notes embracing accounts of new discoveries in natural history: And a life of the author by Washington Irving. And a carefully prepared index to the whole work. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SKETCH BIOGRAPHICAL OF OLIVEE GOLDSMITH. There are few writers for whom the reader feels such personal kindness as for Oliver Goldsmith, for few have so eminently possessed the magic gift of identifying themselves with their writ- ings. We read his character in every page, and grow into familiar intimacy with him as we read. The artless benevolence that beams throughout his works; the whimsical yet amiable views of human life and human nature; the unforced humour, blended so happily with good feeling and good sense, and singularly dashed at times with a pleasing melancholy ; even the very na- ture of his mellow, and flowing, and softly-tinted style, all seem to bespeak his moral as well as his intellectual qualities, and make us love the man at the same time that we admire the author. While the productions of writers of loftier pre- tension and more sounding names are suffered to moulder on our shelves, those of Goldsmith are cherished and laid in our bosoms. We do not quote them with ostentation, but they min- gle with our minds, sweeten our tempers, and harmonize our thoughts ; they put us in good humour with ourselves and with the world, and in so doing they make us happier and better men. An acquaintance with the private biography of Goldsmith lets us into the secret of his gifted pages. We there discover them to be little more than transcripts of his own heart and picturings of his fortunes. There he shows himself the same kind, artless, good-humoured, excursive, sensible, whimsical, intelligent being that he appears in his writings. Scarcely an adventure or charac- ter is given in his works that may not be traced to his own parti-coloured story. Many of his most ludicrous scenes and ridiculous incidents have been drawn from his own blunders and mischances, and he seems really to have been buffeted into almost every maxim imparted by him for the instruction of his reader.* • Some of the above remarks were introductory to a biography of Goldsmith which the author edited in Paris in 1825. That biography was not given as original, and was, in fact, a mere modification of an Oliver Goldsmith was born on the 10th [29th] of November 1728, at the hamlet of Pallas, county of Longford, in Ireland. He sprung from a respectable, but by no means a thrifty stock. Some families seem to inherit kindliness and in- competency, and to hand down virtue and pov- erty from generation to generation. Such was the case with the Goldsmiths. “ They were al- ways,” according to their own accounts, “a strange family ; they rarely acted like other peo- ple ; their hearts were in the right place, but their heads seemed to be doing anything but what they ought.”—“They were remarkable,” says another statement, “ for their worth, but of no cleverness in the ways of the world.” Oliver Goldsmith will be found faithfully to inherit the virtues and weaknesses of his race. His father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, with hereditary improvidence, married when very young and very poor, and starved along for sev- eral years on a small country curacy and the as- sistance of his wife’s friends. He inhabited an old, half-rustic mansion, that stood on a rising ground on a rough, lonely part of the country, overlooking a low tract occasionally flooded by the river Inny. In this house Goldsmith was born, and it was a birthplace worthy of a poet: for, by all accounts, it was haunted ground. A tradition handed down among the neighbouring peasantry states that, in after years, the house, remaining for some time untenanted, went to decay, the roof fell in, and it became so lonely and forloni as to be a resort for the “ good peo- ple” or fairies, who in Ireland are supposed to interesting Scottish memoir published in 1821. In the present article the author has undertaken, as a “labour of love,” to collect from various sources materials for a tribute to the memory of one whose writings were the delight of his childhood, and have been a source of enjoyment to him throughout life. He has principally been indebted for his facts, how- ever, to a recent copious work of Mr. James Prior, who has collected and collated the most minute par- ticulars of Goldsmith’s history with unwearied re- search and scrupulous fidelity, and given them in a voluminous form to the world.