ties with the Established
Church, never showed the least sign of that contemptuous antipathy
with which, in his days, the ruling minority in Ireland too generally
regarded the subject majority. So far indeed was he from sharing in
the opinions and feelings of the caste to which he belonged, that he
conceived an aversion to the Glorious and Immortal Memory, and, even
when George the Third was on the throne, maintained that nothing but the
restoration of the banished dynasty could save the country.

From the humble academy kept by the old soldier Goldsmith was removed
in his ninth year. He went to several grammar schools, and acquired some
knowledge of the ancient languages. His life at this time seems to have
been far from happy. He had, as appears from the admirable portrait of
him at Knowle, features harsh even to ugliness. The small-pox had set
its mark on him with more than usual severity. His stature was small,
and his limbs ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to
personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver's appearance
was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder
which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and
masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as
a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who
had once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early
years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him,
and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter
of a century later, to indicate the powers which produced the "Vicar of
Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village."

In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity College, Dublin, as a
sizar. The sizars paid nothing for food and tuition, and very little for
lodging; but they had to perform some menial services from which they
have long been relieved. They swept the court: they carried up the
dinner to the fellows' table, and changed the plates and poured out the
ale of the rulers of the society. Goldsmith was quartered, not alone, in
a garret, on the window of which his name, scrawled by himself, is still
read with interest. (The glass on which the name is written has, as we
are informed by a writer in "Notes and Queries" (2d. S. ix. p. 91), been
inclosed in a frame and deposited in the Manuscript Room of the College
Library, where it is still to be seen.) From such garrets many men
of