urn and
Wakefield with remembrances of Lissoy. Wander he must, but he carries away
a home-relic with him, and dies with it on his breast. His nature is
truant; in repose it longs for change: as on the journey it looks back for
friends and quiet. He passes to-day in building an air-castle for
to-morrow, or in writing yesterday's elegy; and he would fly away this
hour, but that a cage and necessity keep him. What is the charm of his
verse, of his style, and humour? His sweet regrets, his delicate
compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the weakness which he
owns? Your love for him is half pity. You come hot and tired from the
day's battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could harm the
kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon--save the
harp on which he plays to you; and with which he delights great and
humble, young and old, the captains in the tents, or the soldiers round
the fire, or the women and children in the villages, at whose porches he
stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty. With that sweet story
of the _Vicar of Wakefield_,(172) he has found entry into every castle and
every hamlet in Europe. Not one of us, however busy or hard, but once or
twice in our lives has passed an evening with him, and undergone the charm
of his delightful music.

Goldsmith's father was no doubt the good Doctor Primrose, whom we all of
us know.(173) Swift was yet alive, when the little Oliver was born at
Pallas, or Pallasmore, in the county of Longford, in Ireland. In 1730, two
years after the child's birth, Charles Goldsmith removed his family to
Lissoy, in the county Westmeath, that sweet "Auburn" which every person
who hears me has seen in fancy. Here the kind parson(174) brought up his
eight children; and loving all the world, as his son says, fancied all the
world loved him. He had a crowd of poor dependants besides those hungry
children. He kept an open table; round which sat flatterers and poor
friends, who laughed at the honest rector's many jokes, and ate the
produce of his seventy acres of farm. Those who have seen an Irish house
in the present day can fancy that one of Lissoy. The old beggar still has
his allotted corner by the kitchen turf; the maimed old soldier still gets
his potatoes and buttermilk; the poor cottier still asks his honour's
charity, and prays God bless his Reverence for the sixpence; the ragged
pensioner still takes his place by right and sufferance