"In the course of a revised edition of my works I have come to a biographical sketch of Goldsmith, published several years since. It was written hastily, as introductory to a selection from his writings, and though the facts contained in it were collected from various sources, I was chiefly indebted for them to the voluminous work of Mr. James Prior, who had collected and collated the most minute particulars of the poet's history with unwearied research and scrupulous fidelity, but had rendered them, as I thought, in a form too cumbrous and overlaid with details and disquisition, and matters uninteresting to the general reader." 66 Mr. Irving, therefore, says he was induced by this cumbrous collection to undertake the revisal of his own hastily written sketch." One would naturally have thought that had any one anticipated him he would, with the true gentlemanly instinct, have abandoned the field-but Mr. Irving's genius is essentially imitative, and he appropriates, as a matter of course. "When I was about of late to revise my biographical sketch, preparatory to publication, a volume was put into my hands (sweet little twaddler, 'put into his hands,' as though he were fed with 'spoon meat,') recently given to the public by Mr. John Forster, of the Inner Temple, who likewise availing himself of the labors of the indefatigable Prior, and a few more lights, since colored, has produced a biography of the poet, executed with a spirit, a feeling, a grave bare eloquence that leaves nothing to be desired. Indeed, it would have been presumption in me to undertake the subject after it had been thus felicitously treated, did I not stand committed by my previous sketch. That sketch now appeared too meager and insufficient to satisfy public demand, yet it had to take its place in the second series of my works unless something more satisfactory could be substituted. "Under these circumstances, I have again taken up the subject, and gone into it with more fulness than formerly, omitting none of the facts, which I considered illustrative of the life and character of the poet, and giving them in as graphic a style as I could command. Still the hurried manner in which I have had to do this, amidst the pressure of other claims on my attention, and with the press dogging at my heels, has prevented me from giving some parts of the subject the thorough handling I could have wished. "Those who would like to see it treated still more at large, with the addition of critical disquisition, and the advantage of collateral facts, would do well to refer themselves to Mr. Prior's circumstantial volumes, or to the elegant and discursive pages of Mr. Forster. "For my own part, I can only regret my short comings, in which to me is a labor of love, for it is a tribute of gratitude to the memory of an author whose writings were the delight of my childhood, and have been a source of enjoyment to me throughout life, and to whom, of all others, I may address the beautiful apostrophe of Dante to Virgil: 'Tu se' lo mio maestro, e 'l mio autore: Te se' solo colui, da cu' io tolsi "Sunnyside, August 1, 1849. W. J." Thus finishes one of the most unique specimens of appropriation it has ever been our bad fortune to meet with: we say bad fortune, for proceedings like these, (though taken,) and the cry of inferior authors, have a tendency in the eye of the indiscriminating public to lower the whole republic of letters. : We cannot admit that the intention to reprint a hasty outline of a poet's life renders it incumbent upon the writer of the flimsy sketch to pillage the superior labors of another. What could be said of the man who, having promised himself or family to build a wooden shed, stripped the well furnished house of another to remedy his own poverty? It would have been far better for Mr. Irving's reputation had he not published this attempt to defend his plagiarism the plain truth of the whole matter is this. Mr. Irving had prepared a hasty sketch of Goldsmith, with which he intended to swell out this republication (usque ad nauseam) of his desultory writings. He acknowledges he derived the materials for this hastily written sketch from Prior. Just as the hastily written life was on the point of being sent to the printer, somebody "put into his hand" Mr. Forster's volume, "executed with a spirit, a feeling, a grace, and an eloquence, that leaves nothing to be desired." The temptation to Mr. Irving was irresistable, he coolly copied into his own book "the feeling, grace and eloquence" of this rival biographer, and struts about in peacock's feathers, like Oliver himself in his peach blossom coat: he may truly write, "In se lo mio maestro." The chief thing to be admired in this is the apparently unconscious innocence of Mr. Irving during this singular confession of one of the most glaring trespasses upon the rights of a brother author we ever remember. So far, however, as Goldsmith is concerned, Forster's life will ever bear Mr. Irving out of the field, and will very probably remain, for years to come, as the biography par excellence of that fine hearted genius. As specimens of genial feeling, hearty appreciation, and felicitous style, we select a few passages from this volume which contrast unmistakeably with the faded piracy, tame sentimentalism, and common-place suavity of Mr. Irving's book. "A year and a half after he had entered college, at the commencement of 1747, his father suddenly died. The scanty sums required for his support had been often intercepted, but this stopped them altogether. It may have been the least and most trifling loss connected with that sorrow: but 'squalid poverty,' relieved by occasional gifts, according to his small means, from uncle Contarine, by petty loans from Bryanton and Beatty, or by desperate pawning of his books of study, was Goldsmith's lot thenceforward. Yet even in the depths of that despair, arose the consciousness of faculties reserved for better fortune than continual contempt and failure. He would write Street-Ballads to save himself from actual starving; sell them at the Rein Deer Repository in Mountrath Court for five shillings a piece; and then steal out of the college at night to hear them sung. "Happy night! worth all the dreary days! Hidden by some dusky wall, or creeping within darkling shadows of the ill-lighted streets, watched, and waited, this poor neglected sizer, for the only effort of his life which had not wholly failed. Few and dull, perhaps, the beggar's audience at first; more thronging, eager, and delighted, when he shouted the newly-gotten ware. Cracked enough his ballad-singing tones, I dare say; but harsh, discordant, loud or low, the sweetest music that this earth affords fell with them on the ear of Goldsmith. Gentle faces pleased, old men stopping by the way, young lads venturing a purchase with their last remaining farthing: why here was A World in little, with its Fame at the sizer's feet! The greater world will be listening one day,' perhaps he muttered, as he turned with a lighter heart to his dull home. "It is said to have been a rare occurrence when the five shillings of the Rein Deer Repository reached home along with him. It was the most likely, when he was at his utmost need, to stop with some beggar on the road who might seem to him more destitute even than himself. Nor this only. The money gone: often, for the naked shivering wretch, had he slipped off a portion of the scanty clothes he wore, to patch a misery he could not otherwise relieve. To one starving creature with five crying children, he gave at one time the blankets off his bed, and crept himself into the ticking for shelter from the cold. "It is not meant to insist on these things as examples of conduct. 'Sensibility is not Benevolence;' nor will this kind of agonized sympathy with distress, even when graced by an active self-denial, supply the solid duties or satisfactions of life. There are distresses, vast and remote, with which it behoves us still more to sympathise than with those, less really terrible, which only more attract us by intruding on our senses; and the conscience is too apt to discharge itself of the greater duty by instant and easy attention to the less. So much it is right to interpose when such anecdotes are told. To Goldsmith, all circumstances considered, they are honorable; and it is well to recollect them when the neglected opportunities' of his youth are spoken of. Doubtless there were better things to be done, by a man of stronger purpose. But the nature of men is not different from that of other living creatures. It gives the temper and disposition, but not the nurture and the culture. These Goldsmith never rightly had, except in such sort as he could himself provide; and now, assuredly, he had not found them in his college. That strong steady disposition which at once makes men great,' he avowed himself deficient in: but were other dispo sitions not worth the caring for? His imagination was too warm to relish the cold logic of Burgersdicius,' or the dreary subtleties of Smiglesius :' but with nothing less cold or dreary might a warm imagination have been cherished? When, at the house of Burke, he talked these matters over in after years with Edmond Malone, he said that, though he made no figure in mathematics, he could have turned an ode of Horace with any of them. His tutor, Mr. Theaker Wilder, would as soon have had him turn a lathe. 6 * "Goldsmith looked into his heart and wrote. From that great city in which his hard-spent life had been diversified with so much care and toil, he travelled back to the memory of lives more simply passed, of more cheerful labor, of less anxious care, of homely affections, and of humble joys, for which the world and all its successes offer nothing in exchange. "That hope is idle for him. Sweet Auburn is no more. But though he finds the scene deserted, for us he re-peoples it anew, builds up again its ruined haunts, and revives its pure enjoyments; from the glare of crow led cities, their exciting struggles and palling pleasures, carries us back to the season of natu ral pastimes and unsophisticate desires; adjures us all to remember, in our several smaller worlds, the vast world of humanity that breathes beyond; shows us that there is nothing too humble for the loftiest and most affecting associations; and that where human joys and interests have been, their memory is sacred for ever! "With darker shadows from the terrible and stony truths that are written in the streets of cities, the picture is afterwards completed; and here, too, the poet painted from his heart. His own experience, the suffering for which his heart had always bled, the misery his scanty purse was always ready to relieve, are in his contrast of the pleasures of the great, with innocence and health too often murdered to obtain them. Some of his distinguished friends' objected to these views, but he let them stand. They would have objected' to what was not uncommon with himself, abandoning his rest at night to give relief to the destitute. They would have thought the parish should have done what a yet more distinguished friend, Samuel Johnson, once did, and which will probably be remembered when all he wrote or said shall have passed away: his picking up a wretched ruined girl, who lay exhausted on the pavement; taking her upon his back, carrying her to his house, and placing her in his bed; not harshly upbraiding her; taking care of her, with all tenderness, for a long time; and endeavoring on her restoration to health to put her in a virtuous way of living." Mr. Forster is just on the turn of his fortieth year, lives a comfortable bachelor's life in Chambers, 46 Lincoln's Inn; is much in request with his literary friends, and is the chosen associate and adviser of Dickens and Macready. He is a fine critic; and if somewhat too fond of admiring prevailing celebrities, let it be borne in mind that the immortal John Smith, junior, in his famous work, says, "Let us regard with a bland benignity that admiration which, approximating to enthusiasm, somewhat officiously, like the departing light of eve, clings to the wheels of the descending day-god." |