THE FAMILY LETTERS OF
OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
A PAPER READ BEFORE THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY,
OCTOBER 15, 1917.
BY
SIR ERNEST CLARKE, M.A., F.S.A.
LONDON:
REPRINTED BY BLADES, EAST & BLADES, FROM
THE SOCIETY’S TRANSACTIONS.
1920.
THE FAMILY LETTERS OF
OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
By SIR ERNEST CLARKE, M.A., F.S.A.
Read 15 October, 1917.
IN a paper which I was privileged to read before thishonourable Society three years ago as to “New Lightson Chatterton,” I mentioned incidentally that theresearches of which that paper was the outcome hadarisen out of the examination by me of a large bundleof papers that had been collected by Bishop Percy of Dromore, the editorof the famous Reliques of Ancient Poetry, and had apparently remainedunexplored since his death in 1811. The Chatterton documents wereby no means the most important and were certainly the least puzzling ofthe array of miscellaneous papers included in this bundle, which containednot only a variety of notes about Shakespeare and other subjects whichhad engaged the Bishop’s attention, but chiefly and most interestingly alarge quantity of original letters written by and about Oliver Goldsmith.
To discuss in detail the whole of the questions arising out of theseGoldsmith papers would really amount to writing a new life of that poet,which I have no intention of doing. There exist already many biographiesof Oliver by writers of the first rank, and no fact of salient importanceconcerning himself remains to be revealed, whatever may be said as to hiswritings. There are, it is true, side-lights of some literary interest andvalue afforded by the papers that have come unexpectedly my way through[4]the kindness and generosity of the great grand-daughter of the Bishop bywhose favour you have the advantage of personally inspecting the originalletters which I shall presently describe: but this is not the occasion forminutiæ concerning them.
What therefore with your permission I propose now to do is to dealonly with the letters written by Oliver Goldsmith at various periods of hislife to members of his own family and old friends of his boyhood residentin his native province, and to deduce from them some generalreflections as to the warmth of his affections and the simplicity of histypically Irish character.
Thomas Percy, to whom we mainly owe the preservation of theseletters, was almost an exact contemporary of Oliver Goldsmith. The latterwas born on 10 November, 1728; Percy on 13 April, 1729. They firstmet on Wednesday, 21 February, 1759, as fellow-guests of Dr. Grainger,the author of the “Sugar Cane,” at the Temple Exchange Coffee House,Temple Bar. Percy was then a bachelor clergyman with a college livingat Easton Maudit in Northamptonshire, but with literary associations thatkept him much in London; and Goldsmith was just emerging from thechrysalis stage of hack-work for the reviews and was lodging in a garretat Green Arbour Court near the