h the joke; and then we have a very
pretty comedy indeed--the impecunious schoolboy playing the part of a
fine gentleman on the strength of his solitary guinea, ordering a
bottle of wine after his supper, and inviting his landlord and his
landlord's wife and daughter to join him in the supper-room. The
contrast, in _She Stoops to Conquer_, between Marlow's embarrassed
diffidence on certain occasions and his audacious effrontery on
others, found many a parallel in the incidents of Goldsmith's own
life; and it is not improbable that the writer of the comedy was
thinking of some of his own experiences, when he made Miss Hardcastle
say to her timid suitor: "A want of courage upon some occasions
assumes the appearance of ignorance, and betrays us when we most want
to excel."

It was, perhaps, just as well that the supper, and bottle of wine, and
lodging at Squire Featherston's had not to be paid for out of the
schoolboy's guinea; for young Goldsmith was now on his way to college,
and the funds at the disposal of the Goldsmith family were not over
abundant. Goldsmith's sister having married the son of a well-to do
man, her father considered it a point of honour that she should have a
dowry: and in giving her a sum of L400 he so crippled the means of the
family, that Goldsmith had to be sent to college not as a pensioner
but as a sizar. It appears that the young gentleman's pride revolted
against this proposal; and that he was won over to consent only by the
persuasions of his uncle Contarine, who himself had been a sizar. So
Goldsmith, now in his eighteenth year, went to Dublin; managed somehow
or other--though he was the last in the list--to pass the necessary
examination; and entered upon his college career (1745.)

How he lived, and what he learned, at Trinity College, are both
largely matters of conjecture; the chief features of such record as we
have are the various means of raising a little money to which the
poor sizar had to resort; a continual quarrelling with his tutor, an
ill-conditioned brute, who baited Goldsmith and occasionally beat him;
and a chance frolic when funds were forthcoming. It was while he was
at Trinity College that his father died; so that Goldsmith was
rendered more than ever dependent on the kindness of his uncle
Contarine, who throughout seems to have taken much interest in his
odd, ungainly nephew. A loan from a friend or a visit to the
pawnbroker tided over the severer difficulties; and the