n a widow, and making vain attempts to take orders, to
teach, to enter a law course, to sail for America. He was a bad
sixpence. Finally his uncle Contarine, who saw good stuff in the
awkward, ugly, humorous, and reckless youth, got him off to Edinburgh,
where he studied medicine till 1754.

In 1754 he is studying, or pretending to study, at Leyden. In 1755 and
1756 he is singing, fluting, and otherwise "beating" his way through
Europe, whence he returns with a mythical M. B. degree. From 1756 to
1759 he is in London, teaching, serving an apothecary, practicing
medicine, reading proof, writing as a hack, planning to practice surgery
in Coromandel, failing to qualify as a hospital mate, and in general
only not starving. In 1759 Dr. Percy finds him in Green Arbor Court amid
a colony of washerwomen, writing an 'Enquiry into the Present State of
Polite Learning in Europe.' Next follows the appearance of that work,
and his acquaintance with publishers and men of letters. In 1761, with
Percy, comes Johnson to visit him. In 1764 Goldsmith is one of the
members of the famous Literary Club, where he counts among his friends,
besides Percy and Johnson, Reynolds, Boswell, Garrick, Burke, and others
who shone with their own or reflected light. The rest of his life, spent
principally in or near London, is associated with his literary career.
He died April 4th, 1774, and was buried near the Temple Church.

Goldsmith was an essayist and critic, a story-writer, a poet, a comic
dramatist, and a literary drudge: the last all the time, the others
"between whiles." His drudgery produced such works as the 'Memoirs of
Voltaire,' the 'Life of Nash,' two Histories of England, Histories of
Rome and Greece, Lives of Parnell and Bolingbroke. The 'History of
Animated Nature' was undertaken as an industry, but it reads, as Johnson
said, "like a Persian tale,"--and of course, the more Persian the less
like nature. For the prose of Goldsmith writing for a suit of clothes or
for immortality is all of a piece, inimitable. "Nothing," says he, in
his 'Essay on Taste,' "has been so often explained, and yet so little
understood, as simplicity in writing.... It is no other than beautiful
nature, without affectation or extraneous ornament."

This ingenuous elegance is the accent of Goldsmith's work in verse and
prose. It is nature improved, not from without but by exquisite and
esoteric art, the better to prove its innate virtue and display its
artless cha