英国文学史及选读复习14EighteenthCenturyLiteratureIII.docVIP

Eighteenth Century Literature III 1. Oliver Goldsmith 1728—1774 Born in Ireland, the son of an Anglican clergyman whose geniality he inherited and whose improvidence he imitated. He was early disfigured by smallpox and grew up ugly of face, ungraceful of figure. After an unsatisfactory course in various schools, where he was regarded as stupid, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, as sizar. By his escapades he was brought into disfavor with the authorities. After three years of university life he ran away, in dime-novel fashion, and nearly starved to death before he was found and brought back in disgrace. Then he worked a little and obtained his degree in 1749. He tried theology but was rejected when he presented himself as a candidate for the ministry. He tried teaching and failed. He tried travel, also failed. He went to London to study law, but lost all his money at cards. His relatives sent him to study medicine, but a few years later he became a singer and story teller. The next few years are a pitiful struggle to make a living as tutor, apothecary’s assistant, comedian, usher in a country school, and finally as a physician in Southwark. Gradually he drifted into literature and lived from hand to mouth by doing hack work for the London booksellers. Some of his essays and his Citizen of the World brought him to the attention of Johnson. He promptly justified Johnson’s confidence by publishing The Traveler which was hailed as one of the finest poems of the century. Money now came to him liberally, with orders from the booksellers; he took new quarters in Fleet Street and furnished them gorgeously; he had a vanity for bright-colored clothes, and faster than he earned money he spent it on velvet cloaks and in indiscriminate charity. For a time he resumed his practice as a physician; but his fine clothes did not bring patients, as he expected; and presently he turned to writing again, to pay his debts to the booksellers. When in his forty-seventh year, he fell sic