advice, now feelingly
commended him to Samuel Richardson, his own master and employer, with
at first, at all events, apparently auspicious results. Leaving his
dubious practice, Goldsmith became proof reader to the printer,
publisher, and novelist who had also in his own good time befriended
the great Dr. Johnson. No ultimate advantage, however, accrued to
Goldsmith from this distinguished association with and employment by
one of the most successful authors of the day.

He met the poet Young, and other men. He never wrote for Richardson,
and soon left this place of books and business. His position can have
been neither dignified nor lucrative. The wanderer bent his weary
feet, neither knowing whither his steps might tend nor with the
wherewithal to meet the journey. He was almost starving in the
streets, when one day he met young Milner, another Edinburgh student,
who carried Noll off to his father, a learned Presbyterian divine, who
kept a school. Goldsmith then had, it seems, some vague dream about
being sent to the East to decipher ancient inscriptions, but in the
end he found occupation in Peckham, and not Palestine.

There is no particular reason, however wayward his studies, to
question that Goldsmith was, in the lighter order of that day, a
qualified physician. When he landed in England from the Continent in
all probability he had secreted in some loose pocket a foreign medical
diploma. Besides this certificate, granting him the right to practise,
but not the power to succeed, as a doctor, he carried other
papers--parts of poems, essays, notes for plays, and perhaps even then
the opening of a novel. He set great store on these precious papers.
He may have lost his diploma. He became an usher in Dr. Milner's
school at Peckham. He hated this work. In _The Vicar of Wakefield_, in
a few striking sentences, he shows the humiliations of the position.
Wherever we find him, he is always the same in the matter of worldly
prudence, and in his fondness for making those about him bright. He
spent his salary in giving treats to his pupils. The kindly
schoolmaster's wife said that she ought to keep Mr. Goldsmith's money
as well as the young gentlemen's. Dear Noll was full of fun and fine
humour for the boys about him, doing all he could for their delight,
and loving some like a brother. When years had passed and he had
attained his fame, he met one of his old scholars, knew him in an
instant, and although the lad had become