was named
Oliver, after Oliver Jones, his grandfather. Noll held that Miss Ann
Jones, his mother, was descended from a Huntingdon stock, and that the
name Oliver came from no ancestor less celebrated than the Great
Protector. Whilst this may be felicitously fanciful, and quite in
character with dear Noll, who, doting upon every form of finery,
whether it came from illustrious ancestry or coloured clothes,
certainly had a face not unlike in contour and feature, the rugged
countenance of Cromwell.

Goldsmith was born in the remote village of Pallasmore, in the county
of Longford, Ireland. This district has been called the very midmost
solitude. Oliver's father was the Vicar of the parish. Three daughters
and one son preceded the appearance of little Noll in the parsonage
at Pallasmore. He was followed by three more brothers, making in all a
happy family of eight, of whom two died in childhood.

In 1730 the Rev. Charles Goldsmith was preferred from Pallas to the
living of Kilkenny West. The parsonage connected with this better
benefice was situated at Lissoy, the Immortal Village. Here Oliver's
childhood was passed. Unlike Pallasmore, this was a picturesque place
in the centre of a fair and goodly land. No poem opens more sweetly
than that which heralds its message:

"Sweet Auburn, loveliest village."

The Vicar's meagre income as a country pastor was increased
by farming, and vastly diminished by his open-hearted, swift
responsiveness to every sudden or permanent appeal to his purse, the
family wardrobe, or the larder. In this excellent and honoured man,
whose very piety was as sublime as it was confused, rambling, and
paradoxical, we have the quaint original of Dr. Primrose, one of the
most lovable characters that has ever lived to charm the page of
lasting literature.

In the family life at Lissoy one little child strikes us all with
deepest interest and love, and yet he was an oddity to those who knew
him, not as we do now, but as he was--a dull boy, and quite a
"blockhead in book-learning."

The master at the village school had been a soldier under the Duke of
Marlborough ere he returned to what had been his earlier vocation,
that of a pedagogue. He was a rough diamond, yet most revered, with
great kindness in his heart. His love of poetry inspired his pupils as
much as his stories of campaigns. He had an excellent literary taste.
If Goldsmith even when a boy valued this old friend, Paddy Byrne not
less sa