or the ministry. He tried teaching, and failed.
Then his fancy turned to America, and, provided with money and a good
horse, he started off for Cork, where he was to embark for the New World.
He loafed along the pleasant Irish ways, missed his ship, and presently
turned up cheerfully amongst his relatives, minus all his money, and riding
a sorry nag called Fiddleback, for which he had traded his own on the
way.[203] He borrowed fifty pounds more, and started for London to study
law, but speedily lost his money at cards, and again appeared, amiable and
irresponsible as ever, among his despairing relatives. The next year they
sent him to Edinburgh to study medicine. Here for a couple of years he
became popular as a singer of songs and a teller of tales, to whom medicine
was only a troublesome affliction. Suddenly the _Wanderlust_ seized him and
he started abroad, ostensibly to complete his medical education, but in
reality to wander like a cheerful beggar over Europe, singing and playing
his flute for food and lodging. He may have studied a little at Leyden and
at Padua, but that was only incidental. After a year or more of vagabondage
he returned to London with an alleged medical degree, said to have been
obtained at Louvain or Padua.

The next few years are a pitiful struggle to make a living as tutor,
apothecary's assistant, comedian, usher in a country school, and finally as
a physician in Southwark. Gradually he drifted into literature, and lived
from hand to mouth by doing hack work for the London booksellers. Some of
his essays and his _Citizen of the World_ (1760-1761) brought him to the
attention of Johnson, who looked him up, was attracted first by his poverty
and then by his genius, and presently declared him to be "one of the first
men we now have as an author." Johnson's friendship proved invaluable, and
presently Goldsmith found himself a member of the exclusive Literary Club.
He promptly justified Johnson's confidence by publishing _The Traveller_
(1764), which was hailed as one of the finest poems of the century. Money
now came to him liberally, with orders from the booksellers; he took new
quarters in Fleet Street and furnished them gorgeously; but he had an
inordinate vanity for bright-colored clothes, and faster than he earned
money he spent it on velvet cloaks and in indiscriminate charity. For a
time he resumed his practice as a physician, but his fine clothes did not
bring patients, as he expected; and