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 Java Cookbook
FOURTH EDITION
Problems and Solutions for Java Developers

Ian F. Darwin
Java Cookbook
by Ian F. Darwin Copyright © 2020 RejmiNet Group, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein
Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business,
or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available
for most titles (http://oreilly.com). For more information,
contact our corporate/institutional sales department: 800-
998-9938 or [email protected].
Acquisition Editor: Zan McQuade
Development Editor: Corbin Collins
Production Editor: Beth Kelly
Copyeditor: Amanda Kersey
Proofreader: Charles Roumeliotis
Indexer: Potomac Indexing, LLC
Interior Designer: David Futato
Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery
Illustrator: Rebecca Demarest
June 2001: First Edition
June 2004: Second Edition
July 2014: Third Edition
March 2020: Fourth Edition
Revision History for the Fourth Edition
2020-03-17: First Release
See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?
isbn=9781492072584 for release details.
The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly
Media, Inc. Java Cookbook, the cover image, and related
trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
The views expressed in this work are those of the author,
and do not represent the publisher’s views. While the
publisher and the author have used good faith efforts to
ensure that the information and instructions contained in
this work are accurate, the publisher and the author
disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions, including
without limitation responsibility for damages resulting from
the use of or reliance on this work. Use of the information
and instructions contained in this work is at your own risk.
If any code samples or other technology this work contains
or describes is subject to open source licenses or the
intellectual property rights of others, it is your
responsibility to ensure that your use thereof complies with
such licenses and/or rights.
978-1-492-07258-4
[LSI]
Dedication
In Memoriam
Andrej Cerar Darwin 1989-2014
Son, friend, fellow writer, and craftsman.
Preface

Like any of the most-used programming languages, Java

has its share of detractors, advocates, issues, quirks,1 and a
learning curve. The Java Cookbook aims to help the Java
developer get up to speed on some of the most important
parts of Java development. I focus on the standard APIs and
some third-party APIs, but I don’t hesitate to cover
language issues as well.
This is the fourth edition of this book, and it has been
shaped by many people and by the myriad changes that
Java has undergone over its first two decades of popularity.
Readers interested in Java’s history can refer to Appendix
A.
Java 11 is the current long-term supported version, but
Java 12 and 13 are out. Java 14 is in early access and
scheduled for final release the very same day as this book’s
fourth edition. The new cadence of releases every six
months may be great for the Java SE development team at
Oracle and for click-driven, Java-related news sites, but it
“may cause some extra work” for Java book authors, since
books typically have a longer revision cycle than Java now
does! Java 9, which came out after the previous edition of
this book, was a breaking release, the first release in a very
long time to break backwards compatibility, primarily the
Java module system. Everything in the book is assumed to
work on any JVM that is still being used to develop code.
Nobody should be using Java 7 (or anything before it!) for
anything, and nobody should be doing new development in
Java 8. If you are, it’s time to move on!
The goal of this revision is to keep the book up to date with
all this change. While cutting out a lot of older material,
I’ve added information on new features such as Modules
and the interactive JShell, and I’ve updated a lot of other
information along the way.
Who This Book Is For
I’m going to assume that you know the basics of Java. I
won’t tell you how to println a string, nor how to write a
class that extends another and/or implements an interface.
I presume you’ve taken a Java course such as Learning
Tree’s Introduction or that you’ve studied an introductory
book such as Head First Java, Learning Java, or Java in a
Nutshell (O’Reilly). However, Chapter 1 covers some
techniques that you might not know very well and that are
necessary to understand some of the later material. Feel
free to skip around! Both the printed version of the book
and the electronic copy are heavily cross-referenced.

What’s in This Book?

Java has seemed better suited to “development in the
large,” or enterprise application development, than to the
one-line, one-off script in Perl, Awk, or Python. That’s
because it is a compiled, object-oriented language.
However, this suitability has changed somewhat with the
appearance of JShell (see Recipe 1.4). I illustrate many
techniques with shorter Java class examples and even code
fragments; some of the simpler ones will be shown using
JShell. All of the code examples (other than some one- or
two-liners) are in one of my public GitHub repositories, so
you can rest assured that every fragment of code you see
here has been compiled, and most have been run recently.
Some of the longer examples in this book are tools that I
originally wrote to automate some mundane task or
another. For example, a tool called MkIndex (in the javasrc
repository) reads the top-level directory of the place where
I keep my Java example source code, and it builds a
browser-friendly index.html file for that directory. Another
example is XmlForm, which was used to convert parts of the
manuscript from XML into the form needed by another
publishing software. XmlForm also handled—by use of
another program, GetMark—full and partial code insertions
from the javasrc directory into the book manuscript. XmlForm
is included in the Github repository I mentioned, as is a
later version of GetMark, though neither of these was used in
building the fourth edition. These days, O’Reilly’s Atlas
publishing software uses Asciidoctor, which provides the
mechanism we use for inserting files and parts of files into
the book.

Organization of This Book

Let’s go over the organization of this book. Each chapter
consists of a handful of recipes, short sections that describe
a problem and its solution, along with a code example. The
code in each recipe is intended to be largely self-contained;
feel free to borrow bits and pieces of any of it for use in
your own projects. The code is distributed with a Berkeley-
style copyright, just to discourage wholesale reproduction.
I start off Chapter 1, Getting Started: Compiling and
Running Java, by describing some methods of compiling
your program on different platforms, running them in
different environments (browser, command line, windowed
desktop), and debugging.
Chapter 2, Interacting with the Environment, moves from
compiling and running your program to getting it to adapt
to the surrounding countryside—the other programs that
live in your computer.
The next few chapters deal with basic APIs. Chapter 3,
Strings and Things, concentrates on one of the most basic
but powerful data types in Java, showing you how to
assemble, dissect, compare, and rearrange what you might
otherwise think of as ordinary text. This chapter also
covers the topic of internationalization/localization so that
your programs can work as well in Akbar, Afghanistan,
Algiers, Amsterdam, and Angleterre as they do in Alberta,
Arkansas, and Alabama.
Chapter 4, Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions,
teaches you how to use the powerful regular expressions
technology from Unix in many string-matching and pattern-
matching problem domains. Regex processing has been
standard in Java for years, but if you don’t know how to use
it, you may be reinventing the flat tire.
Chapter 5, Numbers, deals both with built-in numeric types
such as int and double, as well as the corresponding API
classes (Integer, Double, etc.) and the conversion and testing
facilities they offer. There is also brief mention of the “big
number” classes. Because Java programmers often need to
deal in dates and times, both locally and internationally,
Chapter 6, Dates and Times, covers this important topic.
The next few chapters cover data processing. As in most
languages, arrays in Java are linear, indexed collections of
similar objects, as discussed in Chapter 7, Structuring Data
with Java. This chapter goes on to deal with the many
Collections classes: powerful ways of storing quantities of
objects in the java.util package, including use of Java
Generics.
Despite some syntactic resemblance to procedural
languages such as C, Java is at heart an Object-Oriented
Programming (OOP) language, with some important
Functional Programming (FP) constructs skilfully blended
in. Chapter 8, Object-Oriented Techniques, discusses some
of the key notions of OOP as it applies to Java, including the
commonly overridden methods of java.lang.Object and the
important issue of design patterns. Java is not, and never
will be, a pure FP language. However, it is possible to use
some aspects of FP, increasingly so with Java 8 and its
support of lambda expressions (a.k.a. closures). This is
discussed in Chapter 9, Functional Programming
Techniques: Functional Interfaces, Streams, and Parallel
Collections.
The next chapter deals with aspects of traditional input and
output. Chapter 10, Input and Output: Reading, Writing,
and Directory Tricks, details the rules for reading and
writing files (don’t skip this if you think files are boring;
you’ll need some of this information in later chapters). The
chapter also shows you everything else about files—such as
finding their size and last-modified time—and about
reading and modifying directories, creating temporary files,
and renaming files on disk.
Big data and data science have become a thing, and Java is
right in there. Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and much
more of the big data infrastructure is written in, and
extensible with, Java, as described in Chapter 11, Data
Science and R. The R programming language is popular
with data scientists, statsticians, and other scientists.
There are at least two reimplementations of R coded in
Java, and Java can also be interfaced directly with the
standard R implementation in both directions, so this
chapter covers R as well.
Because Java was originally promulgated as the
programming language for the internet, it’s only fair to
spend some time on networking in Java. Chapter 12,
Network Clients, covers the basics of network
programming from the client side, focusing on sockets.
Today so many applications need to access a web service,
primarily RESTful web services, that this seemed to be
necessary. I’ll then move to the server side in Chapter 13,
Server-Side Java, wherein you’ll learn some server-side
programming techniques.
One simple text-based representation for data interchange
is JSON, the JavaScript object notation. Chapter 14,
Processing JSON Data, describes the format and some of
the many APIs that have emerged to deal with it.
Chapter 15, Packages and Packaging, shows how to create
packages of classes that work together. This chapter also
talks about deploying (a.k.a. distributing and installing)
your software.
Chapter 16, Threaded Java, tells you how to write classes
that appear to do more than one thing at a time and let you
take advantage of powerful multiprocessor hardware.
Chapter 17, Reflection, or “A Class Named Class”, lets you
in on such secrets as how to write API cross-reference
documents mechanically and how web servers are able to
load any old Servlet—never having seen that particular
class before—and run it.
Sometimes you already have code written and working in
another language that can do part of your work for you, or
you want to use Java as part of a larger package. Chapter
18, Using Java with Other Languages, shows you how to
run an external program (compiled or script) and also
interact directly with native code in C/C++ or other
languages.
There isn’t room in a book this size for everything I’d like
to tell you about Java. The Afterword presents some closing
thoughts and a link to my online summary of Java APIs that
every Java developer should know about.
Finally, Appendix A, Java Then and Now, gives the storied
history of Java in a release-by-release timeline, so whatever
version of Java you learned, you can jump in here and get
up to date quickly.
So many topics, and so few pages! Many topics do not
recieve 100% coverage; I’ve tried to include the most
important or most useful parts of each API. To go beyond,
check the official javadoc pages for each package; many of
these pages have some brief tutorial information on how
the package is to be used.
Besides the parts of Java covered in this book, two other
platform editions, Java ME and Java EE, have been
standardized. Java Micro Edition (Java ME) is concerned
with small devices such as handhelds, cell phones, and fax
machines. At the other end of the size scale—large server
machines—there’s Eclipse Jakarta EE, replacing the former
Java EE, which in the last century was known as J2EE.
Jakarta EE is concerned with building large, scalable,
distributed applications. APIs that are part of Jakarta EE
include Servlets, JavaServer Pages, JavaServer Faces,
JavaMail, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), Container and
Dependency Injection (CDI), and Transactions. Jakarta EE
packages normally begin with “javax” because they are not
core packages. This book mentions but a few of these;
there is also a Java EE 8 Cookbook by Elder Moraes
(O’Reilly) that covers some of the Jakarta EE APIs, as well
as an older Java Servlet & JSP Cookbook by Bruce Perry
(O’Reilly).
This book doesn’t cover Java Micro Edition, Java ME. At all.
But speaking of cell phones and mobile devices, you
probably know that Android uses Java as its language.
What should be comforting to Java developers is that
Android also uses most of the core Java API, except for
Swing and AWT, for which it provides Android-specific
replacements. The Java developer who wants to learn
Android may consider looking at my Android Cookbook
(O’Reilly), or the book’s website.

Java Books
A lot of useful information is packed into this book.
However, due to the breadth of topics, it is not possible to
give book-length treatment to any one topic. Because of
this, the book contains references to many websites and
other books. In pointing out these references, I’m hoping to
serve my target audience: the person who wants to learn
more about Java.
O’Reilly publishes, in my opinion, the best selection of Java
books on the market. As the API continues to expand, so
does the coverage. Check out the complete list of O’Reilly’s
collection of Java books; you can buy them at most
bookstores, both physical and virtual. You can also read
them online through the O’Reilly Online Learning Platform,
a paid subscription service. And, of course, most are now
available in ebook format; O’Reilly ebooks are DRM free, so
you don’t have to worry about their copy-protection scheme
locking you into a particular device or system, as you do
with certain other publishers.
Though many books are mentioned at appropriate spots in
the book, a few deserve special mention here.
First and foremost, David Flanagan and Benjamin Evan’s
Java in a Nutshell (O’Reilly) offers a brief overview of the
language and API and a detailed reference to the most
essential packages. This is handy to keep beside your
computer. Head First Java by Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra
offers a much more whimsical introduction to the language
and is recommended for the less experienced developer.
Java 8 Lambdas (Warburton, O’Reilly) covers the Lambda
syntax introduced in Java 8 in support of functional
programming and more concise code in general.
Java 9 Modularity: Patterns and Practices for Developing
Maintainable Applications by Sander Mak and Paul Bakker
(O’Reilly) covers the important changes made in the
language in Java 9 for the Java module system.
Java Virtual Machine by Jon Meyer and Troy Downing
(O’Reilly) will intrigue the person who wants to know more
about what’s under the hood. This book is out of print but
can be found used and in libraries.
A definitive (and monumental) description of programming
the Swing GUI is Java Swing by Robert Eckstein et al.
(O’Reilly).
Java Network Programming and Java I/O, both by Elliotte
Harold (O’Reilly), are also useful references.
For Java Database work, Database Programming with JDBC
& Java by George Reese (O’Reilly) and Pro JPA 2: Mastering
the Java Persistence API by Mike Keith and Merrick
Schincariol (Apress) are recommended. Or my forthcoming
overview of Java Database.
Although the book you’re now reading doesn’t have much
coverage of the Java EE, I’d like to mention two books on
that topic:
Arun Gupta covers the Enterprise Edition in Java EE 7
Essentials (O’Reilly).
Adam Bien’s Real World Java EE Patterns: Rethinking
Best Practices offers useful insights in designing and
implementing an Enterprise application.
You can find more at the O’Reilly website.
Finally, although it’s not a book, Oracle has a great deal of
Java information on the web. This web page used to feature
a large diagram showing all the components of Java in a
“conceptual diagram.” An early version of this is shown in
Figure P-1; each colored box is a clickable link to details on
that particular technology.

Figure P-1. Java conceptual diagram from Oracle documentation

For better or for worse, newer versions of Java have

replaced this with a text page; for Java 13 the page is at
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/13.

General Programming Books

Donald E. Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming
(Addison-Wesley) has been a source of inspiration to
generations of computing students since its first
publication in 1968. Volume 1 covers Fundamental
Algorithms, Volume 2 is Seminumerical Algorithms, Volume
3 is Sorting and Searching, and Volume 4A is Combinatorial
Algorithms, Part 1. The remaining volumes in the projected
series are not completed. Although his examples are far
from Java (he invented the hypothetical assembly language
MIX for his examples), many of his discussions of
algorithms—of how computers ought to be used to solve
real problems—are as relevant today as they were years
ago.2
Though its code examples are quite dated now, the book
The Elements of Programming Style by Brian Kernighan
and P. J. Plauger (McGraw-Hill) set the style (literally) for a
generation of programmers with examples from various
structured programming languages. Kernighan and Plauger
also wrote a pair of books, Software Tools (Addison-Wesley)
and Software Tools in Pascal (Addison-Wesley), which
demonstrated so much good advice on programming that I
used to advise all programmers to read them. However,
these three books are dated now; many times I wanted to
write a follow-on book in a more modern language. Instead
I now defer to The Practice of Programming, Kernighan’s
follow-on—cowritten with Rob Pike (Addison-Wesley)—to
the Software Tools series. This book continues the Bell
Labs tradition of excellence in software textbooks. In
previous editions of this book, I had even adapted one bit of
code from their book, their CSV parser. Finally, Kernighan
recently published UNIX: A History and a Memoir, his take
on the story of Unix.
See also The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and
David Thomas (Addison-Wesley).

Design Books
Peter Coad’s Java Design (PTR-PH/Yourdon Press)
discusses the issues of object-oriented analysis and design
specifically for Java. Coad is somewhat critical of Java’s
implementation of the observable-observer paradigm and
offers his own replacement for it.
One of the most famous books on object-oriented design in
recent years is Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard
Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides (Addison-Wesley).
These authors are often collectively called the “Gang of
Four,” resulting in their book sometimes being referred to
as the GoF book. One of my colleagues called it “the best
book on object-oriented design ever,” and I agree; at the
very least, it’s among the best.
Refactoring by Martin Fowler (Addison-Wesley) covers a lot
of “coding cleanups” that can be applied to code to improve
readability and maintainability. Just as the GoF book
introduced new terminology that helps developers and
others communicate about how code is to be designed,
Fowler’s book provided a vocabulary for discussing how it
is to be improved. But this book may be less useful than
others; many of the refactorings now appear in the
Refactoring Menu of the Eclipse IDE (see Recipe 1.3).
Two important streams of methodology theories are
currently in circulation. The first is collectively known as
Agile methods, and its best-known members are Scrum and
Extreme Programming (XP). XP (the methodology, not that
really old flavor of Microsoft’s OS) is presented in a series
of small, short, readable texts led by its designer, Kent
Beck. The first book in the XP series is Extreme
Programming Explained (Addison-Wesley). A good overview
of all the Agile methods is Jim Highsmith’s Agile Software
Development Ecosystems (Addison-Wesley).
Another group of important books on methodology,
covering the more traditional object-oriented design, is the
UML series led by “the Three Amigos” (Booch, Jacobson,
and Rumbaugh). Their major works are the UML User
Guide, UML Process, and others. A smaller and more
approachable book in the same series is Martin Fowler’s
UML Distilled.

Conventions Used in This Book

This book uses the following conventions.

Programming Conventions
I use the following terminology in this book. A program
means any unit of code that can be run: from a five-line
main program, to a servlet or web tier component, an EJB,
or a full-blown GUI application. Applets were Java
programs for use in a web browser; these were popular for
a while but barely exist today. A servlet is a Java component
built using Jakarta EE APIs for use in a web server,
normally via HTTP. EJBs are business-tier components built
using Jakarta APIs. An application is any other type of
program. A desktop application (a.k.a. client) interacts with
the user. A server program deals with a client indirectly,
usually via a network connection (usually HTTP/HTTPS
these days).
The examples shown are in two varieties. Those that begin
with zero or more import statements, a javadoc comment,
and a public class statement are complete examples. Those
that begin with a declaration or executable statement, of
course, are excerpts. However, the full versions of these
excerpts have been compiled and run, and the online
source includes the full versions.
Recipes are numbered by chapter and number, so, for
example, Recipe 8.1 refers to the first recipe in Chapter 8.

Typesetting Conventions
The following typographic conventions are used in this
book:
Italic
Used for commands, filenames, and example URLs. It is
also used for emphasis and to define new terms when
they first appear in the text.

Constant width
Used in code examples to show partial or complete Java
source code program listings. It is also used for class
names, method names, variable names, and other
fragments of Java code.

Constant width bold

Used for user input, such as commands that you type on
the command line.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied
values or by values determined by context.

TIP
This element signifies a tip or suggestion.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
that part of England were already converted; and that he had begun
to pray and strive some months too late.
Then he was harassed by doubts whether the Turks were not in
the right, and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was troubled by
a maniacal impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a
broomstick, to the parish bull. As yet, however, he was only entering
the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker.
Hideous forms floated before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing
were in his ears. His way ran through stench and fire, close to the
mouth of the bottomless pit. He began to be haunted by a strange
curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and by a morbid longing to
commit it. But the most frightful of all the forms which his disease
took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to
renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption. Night and day,
in bed, at table, at work, evil spirits, as he imagined, were repeating
close to his ear the words, “Sell him, sell him.” He struck at the
hobgoblins; he pushed them from him; but still they were ever at his
side. He cried out in answer to them, hour after hour: “Never, never;
not for thousands of worlds; not for thousands.” At length, worn out
by this long agony, he suffered the fatal words to escape him, “Let
him go, if he will.” Then his misery became more fearful than ever.
He had done what could not be forgiven. He had forfeited his part of
the great sacrifice. Like Esau, he had sold his birthright; and there
was no longer any place for repentance. “None,” he afterwards
wrote, “knows the terrors of those days but myself.” he has
described his sufferings with singular energy, simplicity, and pathos,
he envied the brutes; he envied the very stones in the street, and
the tiles on the houses. The sun seemed to withhold its light and
warmth from him. His body, though cast in a sturdy mould, and
though still in the highest vigour of youth, trembled whole days
together with the fear of death and judgment. He fancied that this
trembling was the sign set on the worst reprobates, the sign which
God had put on Cain. The unhappy man’s emotion destroyed his
power of digestion. He had such pains that he expected to burst
asunder like Judas, whom he regarded as his prototype.
 Neither the books which Bunyan read, nor the advisers whom he
consulted, were likely to do much good in a case like his. His small
library had received a most unseasonable addition, the account of
the lamentable end of Francis Spira. One ancient man of high repute
for piety, whom the sufferer consulted, gave an opinion which might
well have produced fatal consequences. “I am afraid,” said Bunyan,
“that I have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost.”
“Indeed,” said the old fanatic, “I am afraid that you have.”
At length the clouds broke; the light became clearer and clearer;
and the enthusiast, who had imagined that he was branded with the
mark of the first murderer, and destined to the end of the arch
traitor, enjoyed peace and a cheerful confidence in the mercy of
God. Years elapsed, however, before his nerves, which had been so
perilously overstrained, recovered their tone.
When he had joined a Baptist society at Bedford, and was for the
first time admitted to partake of the Eucharist, it was with difficulty
that he could refrain from imprecating destruction on his brethren
while the cup was passing from hand to hand. After he had been
some time a member of the congregation, he began to preach; and
his sermons produced a powerful effect. He was indeed illiterate; but
he spoke to illiterate men. The severe training through which he had
passed had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the
modes of religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from
books; and his vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of
devotion, enabled him, not only to exercise a great influence over
the vulgar, but even to extort the half contemptuous admiration of
scholars. Yet it was long before he ceased to be tormented by an
impulse which urged him to utter words of horrible impiety in the
pulpit.
Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physical
diseases. It should seem that Bunyan was finally relieved from the
internal sufferings which had embittered his life by sharp persecution
from without. He had been five years a preacher, when the
Restoration put it in the power of the Cavalier gentlemen and
clergymen all over the country to oppress the Dissenters; and, of all
the Dissenters whose history is known to us, he was perhaps the
most hardly treated. In November 1660, he was flung into Bedford
gaol; and there he remained, with some intervals of partial and
precarious liberty, during twelve years. His persecutors tried to
extort from him a promise that he would abstain from preaching; but
he was convinced that he was divinely set apart and commissioned
to be a teacher of righteousness: and he was fully determined to
obey God rather than man. He was brought before several tribunals,
laughed at, caressed, reviled, menaced, but in vain. He was
facetiously told that he was quite right in thinking that he ought not
to hide his gift: but that his real gift was skill in repairing old kettles.
He was compared to Alexander the coppersmith. he was told that, if
he would give up preaching, he should be instantly liberated. He was
warned that, if he persisted in disobeying the law, he would be liable
to banishment, and that, if he were found in England after a certain
time, his neck would be stretched. His answer was, “If you let me
out to-day, I will preach again tomorrow.” Year after year he lay
patiently in a dungeon, compared with which the worst prison now
to be found in the island is a palace. His fortitude is the more
extraordinary, because his domestic feelings were unusually strong.
Indeed, he was considered by his stern brethren as somewhat too
fond and indulgent a parent. He had several small children, and
among them a daughter who was blind, and whom he loved with
peculiar tenderness. He could not, he said, bear even to let the wind
blow on her; and now she must suffer cold and hunger: she must
beg; she must be beaten; “yet,” he added, “I must, I must do it.”
While he lay in prison he could do nothing in the way of his old trade
for the support of his family. He determined, therefore, to take up a
new trade. He learned to make long tagged thread laces; and many
thousands of these articles were furnished by him to the hawkers.
While his hands were thus busied, he had other employment for his
mind and his lips. He gave religious instruction to his fellow-captives,
and formed from among them a little flock, of which he was himself
the pastor. He studied indefatigably the few books which he
possessed. His two chief companions were the Bible and Fox’s Book
of Martyrs. His knowledge of the Bible was such that he might have
been called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of
the Book of Martyrs are still legible the ill spelt lines of doggrel in
which he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his
implacable enmity to the mystical Babylon.
At length he began to write; and, though it was some time before
he discovered where his strength lay, his writings were not
unsuccessful. They were coarse, indeed; but they showed a keen
mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an
intimate knowledge of the English Bible, and a vast and dearly
bought spiritual experience. They therefore, when the corrector of
the press had improved the syntax and the spelling, were well
received by the humbler class of Dissenters.
Much of Bunyan’s time was spent in controversy. He wrote sharply
against the Quakers, whom he seems always to have held in utter
abhorrence. It is, however, a remarkable fact that he adopted one of
their peculiar fashions: his practice was to write, not November or
December, but eleventh month and twelfth month.
He wrote against the liturgy of the Church of England. No two
things, according to him, had less affinity than the form of prayer
and the spirit of prayer. Those, he said with much point, who have
most of the spirit of prayer are all to be found in gaol; and those
who have most zeal for the form of prayer are all to be found at the
alehouse. The doctrinal articles, on the other hand, he warmly
praised, and defended against some Arminian clergymen who had
signed them. The most acrimonious of all his works is his answer to
Edward Fowler, afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, an excellent man,
but not free from the taint of Pelagianisin.
Banyan had also a dispute with some of the chiefs of the sect to
which he belonged. He doubtless held with perfect sincerity the
distinguishing tenet of that sect; but he did not consider that tenet
as one of high importance, and willingly joined in communion with
quiet Presbyterians and Independents. The sterner Baptists,
therefore, loudly pronounced him a false brother. A controversy
arose which long survived the original combatants. In our own time
the cause which Bunyan had defended with rude logic and rhetoric
against Kiffin and Danvers was pleaded by Robert Hall with an
ingenuity and eloquence such as no polemical Writer has ever
surpassed.
During the years which immediately followed the
Restoration, Bunyan’s confinement seems to have been strict. But,
as the passions of 1660 cooled, as the hatred with which the
Puritans had been regarded while their reign was recent gave place
to pity, he was less and less harshly treated. The distress of his
family, and his own patience, courage, and piety softened the hearts
of his persecutors. Like his own Christian in the cage, he found
protectors even among the crowd of Vanity Fair. The bishop of the
diocese, Dr. Barlow, is said to have interceded for him. At length the
prisoner was suffered to pass most of his time beyond the walls of
the gaol, on condition, as it should seem, that he remained within
the town of Bedford.
He owed his complete liberation to one of the worst acts of one of
the worst governments that England has ever seen. In 1671 the
Cabal was in power. Charles II. had concluded the treaty by which
he bound himself to set up the Roman Catholic religion in England.
The first step which he took towards that end was to annul, by an
unconstitutional exercise of his prerogative, all the penal statutes
against the Roman Catholics; and, in order to disguise his real
design, he annulled at the same time the penal statutes against
Protestant nonconformists. Bunyan was consequently set at large. In
the first warmth of his gratitude he published a tract in which he
compared Charles to that humane and generous Persian king who,
though not himself blessed with the light of the true religion,
favoured the chosen people, and permitted them, after years of
captivity, to rebuild their beloved temple. To candid men, who
consider how much Bunyan had suffered, and how little he could
guess the secret designs of the court, the unsuspicious thankfulness
with which he accepted the precious boon of freedom will not
appear to require any apology.
Before he left his prison he had begun the book which has made
his nane immortal. The history of that book is remarkable. The
author was, as he tells us, writing a treatise, in which he had
occasion to speak of the stages of the Christian progress. He
compared that progress, as many others had compared it, to a
pilgrimage. Soon his quick wit discovered innumerable points of
similarity which had escaped his predecessors. Imams came
crowding on his mind faster than he could put them into words,
quagmires and pits, steep hills, dark and horrible glens, soft vales,
sunny pastures, a gloomy castle of which the courtyard was strewn
with the skulls and bones of murdered prisoners, a town all bustle
and splendour, like London on the Lord Mayor’s Day, and the narrow
path, straight as a rule could make it, running on up hill and down
hill, through city and through wilderness, to the Black River and the
Shining Gate. He had found out, as most people would have said, by
accident, as he would doubtless have said, by the guidance of
Providence, where his powers lay. He had no suspicion, indeed, that
he was producing a masterpiece. He could not guess what place his
allegory would occupy in English literature; for of English literature
he knew nothing. Those who suppose him to have studied the Fairy
Queen might easily be confuted, if this were the proper place for a
detailed examination of the passages in which the two allegories
have been thought to resemble each other. The only work of fiction,
in all probability, with which he could compare his pilgrim, was his
old favourite, the legend of Sir Bevis of Southampton. He would
have thought it a sin to borrow any time from the serious business
of his life, from his expositions, his controversies, and his lace tags,
for the purpose of amusing himself with what he considered merely
as a trifle. It was only, he assures us, at spare moments that he
returned to the House Beautiful, the Delectable Mountains, and the
Enchanted Ground. He had no assistance. Nobody but himself saw a
line till the whole was complete. He then consulted his pious friends.
Some were pleased. Others were much scandalised. It was a vain
story, a mere romance, about giants, and lions, and goblins, and
warriors, sometimes fighting with monsters and sometimes regaled
by fair ladies in stately palaces. The loose atheistical wits at Will’s
might write such stuff to divert the painted Jezebels of the court: but
did it become a minister of the gospel to copy the evil fashions of
the world? There had been a time when the cant of such fools would
have made Bunyan miserable. But that time was passed; and his
mind was now in a firm and healthy state. He saw that, in employing
fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, he was only
following the example which every Christian ought to propose to
himself; and he determined to print.
The Pilgrim’s Progress stole silently into the world. Not a single
copy of the first edition is known to be in existence. The year of
publication has not been ascertained. It is probable that, during
some months, the little volume circulated only among poor and
obscure sectaries. But soon the irresistible charm of a book which
gratified the imagination of the reader with all the action and
scenery of a fairy tale, which exercised Ins ingenuity by setting him
to discover a multitude of curious analogies, which interested his
feelings for human beings, frail like himself, and struggling with
temptations from within and from without, which every moment
drew a smile from him by some stroke of quaint yet simple
pleasantry, and nevertheless left on his mind a sentiment of
reverence for God and of sympathy for man, began to produce its
effect. In puritanical circles, from which plays and novels were
strictly excluded, that effect was such as no work of genius, though
it were superior to the Iliad, to Don Quixote, or to Othello, can ever
produce on a mind accustomed to indulge in literary luxury. In 1678
came forth a second edition with additions; and then the demand
became immense. In the four following years the book was reprinted
six times. The eighth edition, which contains the last improvements
made by the author, was published in 1682, the ninth in 1684, the
tenth in 1685. The help of the engraver had early been called in;
and tens of thousands of children looked with terror and delight on
execrable copperplates, which represented Christian thrusting his
sword into Apollyon, or writhing in the grasp of Giant Despair. In
Scotland, and in some of the colonies, the Pilgrim was even more
popular than in his native country. Bunyan has told us, with very
pardonable vanity, that in New England his dream was the daily
subject of the conversation of thousands, and was thought worthy to
appear in the most superb binding. He had numerous admirers in
Holland, and amoung the Huegonots of France. With the pleasures,
however, he experienced some of the pains of eminence. Knavish
booksellers put forth volumes of trash under his name; and envious
scribblers maintained it to be impossible that the poor ignorant
tinker should really be the author of the book which was called his.
He took the best way to confound both those who counterfeited
him and those who slandered him. He continued to work the gold-
field which he had discovered, and to draw from it new treasures,
not indeed with quite such ease and in quite such abundance as
when the precious soil was still virgin, but yet with success which left
all competition far behind. In 1684 appeared the second part of the
“Pilgrim’s Progress.” It was soon followed by the “Holy War,” which, if
the “Pilgrim’s Progress” did not exist, would be the best allegory that
ever was written.
Bunyan’s place in society was now very different from what it had
been. There had been a time when many Dissenting ministers, who
could talk Latin and read Greek, had affected to treat him with
scorn. But his fame and influence now far exceeded theirs. He had
so great an authority among the Baptists that he was popularly
called Bishop Banyan. His episcopal visitations were annual. From
Bedford he rode every year to London, and preached there to large
and attentive congregations. From London he went his circuit
through the country, animating the zeal of his brethren, collecting
and distributing alms, and making up quarrels. The magistrates
seem in general to have given him little trouble. But there is reason
to believe that, in the year 1685, he was in some danger of again
occupying his old quarters in Bedford gaol. In that year the rash and
wicked enterprise of Monmouth gave the Government a pretext for
prosecuting the Nonconformists; and scarcely one eminent divine of
the Presbyterian, Independent, or Baptist persuasion remained
unmolested. Baxter was in prison: Howe was driven into exile: Henry
was arrested. Two eminent Baptists, with whom Bunyan had been
engaged in controversy, were in great peril and distress. Danvers
was in danger of being hanged: and Kiffin’s grandsons were actually
hanged. The tradition is that, during those evil days, Bunyan was
forced to disguise himself as a waggoner, and that he preached to
his congregation at Bedford in a smock-frock, with a cart-whip in his
hand. But soon a great change took place. James the Second was at
open war with the church, and found it necessary to court the
Dissenters. Some of the creatures of the government tried to secure
the aid of Bunyan. They probably knew that he had written in praise
of the indulgence of 1672, and therefore hoped that he might be
equally pleased with the indulgence of 1687. But fifteen years of
thought, observation, and commerce with the world had made him
wiser. Nor were the cases exactly parallel. Charles was a professed
Protestant: James was a professed Papist. The object of Charles’s
indulgence was disguised: the object of James’s indulgence was
patent. Bunyan was not deceived, he exhorted his hearers to
prepare themselves by fasting and prayer for the danger which
menaced their civil and religious liberties, and refused even to speak
to the courtier who came down to remodel the corporation of
Bedford, and who, as was supposed, had it in charge to offer some
municipal dignity to the Bishop of the Baptists.
Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution. In the summer of 1688
he undertook to plead the cause of a son with an angry father, and
at length prevailed on the old man not to disinherit the young one.
This good work cost the benevolent intercessor his life. He had to
ride through heavy rain. He came drenched to his lodgings on Snow
Hill, was seized with a violent fever, and died in a few days. He was
buried in Bunhill Fields; and the spot where he lies is still regarded
by the Nonconformists with a feeling which, seems scarcely in
harmony with the stern spirit of their theology. Many puritans, to
whom the respect paid by Roman Catholics to the reliques and
tombs of saints seemed childish or sinful, are said to have begged
with their dying breath that their coffins might be placed as near as
possible to the coffin of the author of the “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
The fame of Bunyan during his life, and during the century which
followed his death, was indeed great, but was almost entirely
confined to religious families of the middle and lower classes. Very
seldom was he during that time mentioned with respect by any
writer of great literary eminence. Young coupled his prose with the
poetry of the wretched D’Urfey. In the Spiritual Quixote, the
adventures of Christian are ranked with those of Jack the Giant-Killer
and John Hickathrift. Cowper ventured to praise the great allegorist,
but did not venture to name him. It is a significant circumstance
that, till a recent period, all the numerous editions of the “Pilgrim’s
Progress” were evidently meant for the cottage and the servants’
hall. The paper, the printing, the plates, were all of the meanest
description. In general, when the educated minority and the
common people differ about the merit of a book, the opinion of the
educated minority finally prevails. The “Pilgrim’s Progress” is perhaps
the only book about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the
educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common
people.
The attempts which have been made to improve and to imitate
this book are not to be numbered. It has been done into verse: it
has been done into modern English. “The Pilgrimage of Tender
Conscience,” the “Pilgrimage of Good Intent,” “The Pilgrimage of
Seek Truth,” “The Pilgrimage of Theophilus,” “The Infant Pilgrim,”
“The Hindoo Pilgrim,” are among the many feeble copies of the great
original. But the peculiar glory of Bunyan is that those who most
hated his doctrines have tried to borrow the help of his genius. A
Catholic version of his parable may be seen with the head of the
Virgin in the title page. On the other hand, those Antinomians for
whom his Calvinism is not strong enough may study the pilgrimage
of Hephzibah, in which nothing will be found which can be construed
into an admission of free agency and universal redemption. But the
most extraordinary of all the acts of Vandalism by which a fine work
of art was ever defaced was committed so late as the year 1853. It
was determined to transform the “Pilgrim’s Progress” into a
Tractarian book. The task was not easy: for it was necessary to
make the two sacraments the most prominent objects in the
allegory; and of all Christian theologians, avowed Quakers excepted,
Bunyan was the one in whose system the sacraments held the least
prominent place. However, the Wicket Gate became a type of
Baptism, and the House Beautiful of the Eucharist. The effect of this
change is such as assuredly the ingenious person who made it never
contemplated. For, as not a single pilgrim passes through the Wicket
Gate in infancy, and as Faithful hurries past the House Beautiful
without stopping, the lesson, which the fable in its altered shape
teaches, is that none but adults ought to be baptized, and that the
Eucharist may safely be neglected. Nobody would have discovered
from the original “Pilgrim’s Progress” that the author was not a
Pædobaptist. To turn his book into a book against Pædobaptism was
an achievement reserved for an Anglo-Catholic divine. Such blunders
must necessarily be committed by every man who mutilates parts of
a great work, without taking a comprehensive view of the whole.
 OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, February 1856.)

O
liver Goldsmith, one of the most pleasing English writers of
the eighteenth century. He was of a Protestant and Saxon
family which had been long settled in Ireland, and which had,
like most other Protestant and Saxon families, been, in troubled
times, harassed and put in fear by the native population. His father,
Charles Goldsmith, studied in the reign of Queen Anne at the
diocesan school of Elphin, became attached to the daughter of the
schoolmaster, married her, took orders, and settled at a place called
Pallas in the county of Longford. There he with difficulty supported
his wife and children on what he could earn, partly as a curate and
partly as a farmer.
At Pallas Oliver Goldsmith was born in November 1728. The spot
was then, for all practical purposes, almost as remote from the busy
and splendid capital in which his later years were passed, as any
clearing in Upper Canada or any sheep-walk in Australasia now is.
Even at this day those enthusiasts who venture to make a pilgrimage
to the birthplace of the poet are forced to perform the latter part of
their journey on foot. The hamlet lies far from any high road, on a
dreary plain which, in wet weather, is often a lake. The lanes would
break any jaunting ear to pieces; and there are ruts and sloughs
through which the most strongly built wheels cannot be dragged.
While Oliver was still a child, his father was presented to a living
worth about 200l. a year, in the county of Westmeath. The family
accordingly quitted their cottage in the wilderness for a spacious
house on a frequented road, near the village of Lissoy. Here the boy
was taught his letters by a maid-servant, and was sent in his
seventh year to a village school kept by an old quartermaster on
half-pay, who professed to teach nothing but reading, writing and
arithmetic, but who had an inexhaustible fund of stories about
ghosts, banshees and fairies, about the great Rapparee chiefs,
Baldearg O’Donnell and galloping Hogan, and about the exploits of
Peterborough and Stanhope, the surprise of Monjuich, and the
glorious disaster of Brihuega.
This man must have been of the Protestant religion; but he was of
the aboriginal race, and not only spoke the Irish language, but could
pour forth unpremeditated Irish verses. Oliver early became, and
through life continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish music,
and especially of the compositions of Carolan, some of the last notes
of whose harp he heard. It ought to be added that Oliver, though by
birth one of the Englishry, and though connected by numerous ties
with the Established Church, never showed the least sign of that
contemptuous antipathy with which, in his days, the ruling minority
in Ireland too generally regarded the subject majority. So far indeed
was he from sharing in the opinions and feelings of the caste to
which he belonged, that he conceived an aversion to the Glorious
and Immortal Memory, and, even when George the Third was on the
throne, maintained that nothing but the restoration of the banished
dynasty could save the country.
From the humble academy kept by the old soldier Goldsmith was
removed in his ninth year. He went to several grammar-schools, and
acquired some knowledge of the ancient languages. His life at this
time seems to have been far from happy. He had, as appears from
the admirable portrait of him at Knowle, features harsh even to
ugliness. The small-pox had set its mark on him with more than
usual severity. His stature was small, and his limbs ill put together.
Among boys little tenderness is shown to personal defects; and the
ridicule excited by poor Oliver’s appearance was heightened by a
peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which he retained to
the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was
pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in
the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who had
once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early
years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from
him, and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a
quarter of a century later, to indicate the powers which produced the
“Vicar of Wakefield” and the “Deserted Village.”
In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity College, Dublin,
as a sizar. The sizars paid nothing for food and tuition, and very little
for lodging; but they had to perform some menial services from
which they have long been relieved. They swept the court: they
carried up the dinner to the fellows’ table, and changed the plates
and poured out the ale of the rulers of the society. Goldsmith was
quartered, not alone, in a garret, on the window of which his name,
scrawled by himself, is still read with interest. (1) From such garrots
many men of less parts than his have made their way to the wool-
sack or to the episcopal bench. But Goldsmith, while he suffered all
the humiliations, threw away all the advantages, of his situation. He
neglected the studies of the place, stood low at the examinations,
was turned down to the bottom of his class for playing the buffoon
in the lecture room, was severely reprimanded for pumping on a
constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor for giving a ball in the
attic story of the college to some gay youths and damsels from the
city.
While Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided between squalid
distress and squalid dissipation, his father died, leaving a mere
pittance. The youth obtained his bachelor’s degree, and left the
university. Durum some time the humble dwelling to which his
widowed mother had retired was his home. He was now in his
twenty-first year; it was necessary that he should do something; and
his education seemed to have fitted him to do nothing but to dress
himself in gaudy colours, of which he was as fond as a magpie, to
take a hand at cards, to sing Irish airs, to play the flute, to angle in
summer, and to tell ghost stories by the fire in winter. He tried five
or six professions in turn without success. He applied for ordination;
but, as he applied in scarlet clothes, he was speedily turned out of
the episcopal palace. He then became tutor in an opulent family, but
soon quitted his situation in consequence of a dispute about play.
Then he determined

(1) The glass on which the name is written has, as we are

informed by a writer in Notes and Queries (2nd S. ix. p.
91), been inclosed in a frame and deposited in the
Manuscript Room of the College Library, where it is still to
be seen.

to emigrate to America. His relations, with much satisfaction, saw

him set out for Cork on a good horse, with thirty pounds in his
pocket. But in six weeks he came back on a miserable hack, without
a penny, and informed his mother that the ship in which he had
taken his passage, having got a fair wind while he was at a party of
pleasure, had sailed without him. Then he resolved to study the law.
A generous kinsman advanced fifty pounds. With this sum Goldsmith
went to Dublin, was enticed into a gaming house, and lost every
shilling. He then thought of medicine. A small purse was made up;
and in his twenty-fourth year he was sent to Edinburgh. At
Edinburgh he passed eighteen months in nominal attendance on
lectures, and picked up some superficial information about chemistry
and natural history. Thence he went to Leyden, still pretending to
study physic. He left that celebrated university, the third university at
which he had resided, in his twenty-seventh year, without a degree,
with the merest smattering of medical knowledge, and with no
property but his clothes and his flute. His flute, however, proved a
useful friend. He rambled on foot through Flanders, France, and
Switzerland, playing tunes which everywhere set the peasantry
dancing, and which often procured for him a supper and a bed. He
wandered as far as Italy. His musical performances, indeed, were
not to the taste of the Italians; but he contrived to live on the alms
whieh he obtained at the gates of convents. It should, however, be
observed that the stories which he told about this part of his life
ought to be received with great caution; for strict veracity was never
one of his virtues; and a man who is ordinarily inaccurate in
narration is likely to be more than ordinarily inaccurate when he
talks about his own travels. Goldsmith, indeed, was so regardless of
truth as to assert in print that he was present at a most interesting
conversation between Voltaire and Foutenelle, and that this
conversation took place at Paris. Now it is certain that Voltaire never
was within a hundred leagues of Paris during the whole time which
Goldsmith passed on the Continent.
In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a shilling, without
a friend, and without a calling. He had, indeed, if his own
unsupported evidence may be trusted, obtained from the university
of Padua a doctor’s degree; but this dignity proved utterly useless to
him. In England his flute was not in request: there were no
convents; and he was forced to have recourse to a series of
desperate expedients. He turned strolling player; but his face and
figure were ill suited to the boards even of the humblest theatre. He
pounded drugs and ran about London with phials for charitable
chemists. He joined a swarm of beggars, which made its nest in Axe
Yard. He was for a time usher of a school, and felt the miseries and
humiliations of this situation so keenly that he thought it a
promotion to be permitted to earn his bread as a bookseller’s hack;
but he soon found the new yoke more galling than the old one, and
was glad to become an usher again. He obtained a medical
appointment in the service of the East India Company; but the
appointment was speedily revoked. Why it was revoked we are not
told. The subject was one on which he never liked to talk. It is
probable that he was incompetent to perform the duties of the
place. Then he presented himself at Surgeons’ Hall for examination,
as mate to a naval hospital. Even to so humble a post he was found
unequal. By this time the schoolmaster whom he had served for a
morsel of food and the third part of a bed was no more. Nothing
remained but to return to the lowest drudgery of literature.
Goldsmith took a garret in a miserable court, to which he had to
climb from the brink of Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flag-stones
called Breakneck Steps. The court and the ascent have long
disappeared; but old Londoners will remember both. (1) Here, at
thirty, the unlucky adventurer sat down to toil like a galley slave.
 In the succeeding six years he sent to the press some things
which have survived and many which have perished. He produced
articles for reviews, magazines, and newspapers: children’s books
which, bound in gilt paper and adorned with hideous woodcuts,
appeared in the window of the once far-finned shop at the corner of
St. Paul’s Churchyard; “An Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning in
Europe,” which, though of little or no value, is still reprinted among
his works; a “Life of Beau Nash,” which is not reprinted, though it
well deserves to be so; (2) a superficial and incorrect, but very
readable, “History of England,” in a series of letters purporting to be
addressed by a nobleman to his son; and some very lively and
amusing “Sketches of London Society,” in a series of letters
purporting to be addressed by a Chinese traveller to his friends. All
these works were anonymous; but some of them were

(1) A gentleman, who states that he has known the

neighbourhood for thirty years, corrects this account, and
informs the present publisher that the Breakneck Steps,
thirty-two in number, divided into two flights, are still in
existence, and that, according to tradition, Goldsmith’s
house was not on the steps, but was the first house at the
head of the court, on the left hand, going from the Old
Bailey. See Notes and Queries (2nd S. ix. 280).

(2) Mr. Black has pointed out that this is inaccurate: the
life of Nash has been twice reprinted; once in Mr. Prior’s
edition (vol. iii. p. 249), and once in Mr. Cunningham’s
edition (vol. iv. p. 351.

well known to be Goldsmith’s: and he gradually rose in the

estimation of the booksellers for whom he drudged. He was, indeed,
emphatically a popular writer. For accurate research or grave
disquisition he was not well qualified by nature or by education, he
knew nothing accurately: his reading had been desultory; nor had he
meditated deeply on what he had read. He had seen much of the
world; but he had noticed and retained little more of what he had
seen than some grotesque incidents and characters which had
happened to strike his fancy. But, though his mind was very scantily
stored with materials, he used what materials he had in such a way
as to produce a wonderful effect. There have been many greater
writers; but perhaps no writer was ever more uniformly agreeable.
His style was always pure and easy, and, on proper occasions,
pointed and energetic. His narratives were always amusing, his
descriptions always picturesque, his humour rich and joyous, yet not
without an occasional tinge of amiable sadness. About everything
that he wrote, serious or sportive, there was a certain natural grace
and decorum, hardly to be expected from a man a great part of
whose life had been passed among thieves and beggars, street-
walkers and merry andrews, in those squalid dens which are the
reproach of great capitals.
As his name gradually became known, the circle of his
acquaintance widened. He was introduced to Johnson, who was then
considered as the first of living English writers; to Reynolds, the first
of English painters; and to Burke, who had not yet entered
parliament, but had distinguished himself greatly by his writings and
by the eloquence of his conversation. With these eminent men
Goldsmith became intimate. In 1763 he was one of the nine original
members of that celebrated fraternity which has sometimes been
called the Literary Club, but which has always disclaimed that
epithet, and still glories in the simple name of The Club.
By this time Goldsmith had quitted his miserable dwelling at the
top of Breakneck Steps, and had taken chambers in the more
civilised region of the Inns of Court. But he was still often reduced to
pitiable shifts. Towards the close of 1764 his rent was so long in
arrear that his landlady one morning called in the help of a sheriff’s
officer. The debtor, in great perplexity, despatched a messenger to
Johnson; and Johnson, always friendly, though often surly, sent back
the messenger with a guinea, and promised to follow speedily. He
came, and found that Goldsmith had changed the guinea, and was
railing at the landlady over a bottle of Madeira. Johnson put the cork
into the bottle, and entreated his friend to consider calmly how
money was to be procured. Goldsmith said that he had a novel ready
for the press. Johnson glanced at the manuscript, saw that there
were good things in it, took it to a bookseller, sold it for 60l, and
soon returned with the money. The rent was paid; and the sheriff’s
officer withdrew. According to one story, Goldsmith gave his landlady
a sharp reprimand for her treatment of him; according to another, he
insisted on her joining him in a bowl of punch. Both stories are
probably true. The novel which was thus ushered into the world was
the “Vicar of Wakefield.”
But, before the “Vicar of Wakefield” appeared in print, came the
great crisis of Goldsmith’s literary life. In Christmas week, 1764, he
published a poem, entitled the “Traveller.” It was the first work to
which he had put, his name; and it at once raised him to the rank of
a legitimate English classic. The opinion of the most skilful critics
was, that nothing finer had appeared in verse since the fourth book
of the “Dunciad.”
In one respect the “Traveller” differs from all Goldsmith’s other
writings. In general his designs were bad, and his execution good. In
the “Traveller,” the execution, though deserving of much praise, is far
inferior to the design. No philosophical poem, ancient or modern,
lias a plan so noble, and at the same time so simple. An English,
wanderer, seated on a crag among the Alps, near the point where
three great countries meet, looks down on the boundless prospect,
reviews his long pilgrimage, recalls the varieties of scenery, of
climate, of government, of religion, of national character, which he
has observed, and comes to the conclusion, just or unjust, that our
happiness depends little on political institutions, and much on the
temper and regulation of our own minds.
While the fourth edition of the “Traveller” was on the counters of
the booksellers, the “Vicar of Wakefield” appeared, and rapidly
obtained a popularity which has lasted down to our own time, and
which is likely to last as long as our language. The fable is indeed
one of the worst that ever was constructed. It wants, not merely
that probability which ought to be found in a tale of common English
life, but that consistency which ought to be found even in the
wildest fiction about witches, giants, and fairies. But the earlier
chapters have all the Sweetness of pastoral poetry, together with all
the vivacity of comedy. Moses and his spectacles, the vicar and his
monogamy, the sharper and his cosmogony, the squire proving from
Aristotle that relatives are related, Olivia preparing herself for the
arduous task of converting a rakish lover by studying the controversy
between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the great ladies with their
scandal about Sir Tomkyn’s amours and Dr. Burdock’s verses, and Mr.
Burchell with his “Fudge,” have caused as much harmless mirth as
has ever been caused by matter packed into so small a number of
pages. The latter part of the tale is unworthy of the beginning. As
we approach the catastrophe, the absurdities lie thicker and thicker;
and the gleams of pleasantry become rarer and rarer.
The success which had attended Goldsmith as a novelist
emboldened him to try his fortune as a dramatist. He wrote the
“Goodnatured Man,” a piece which had a worse fate than it
deserved. Garrick refused to produce it at Drury Lane. It was acted
at Covent Garden in 1768, but was coldly received. The author,
however, cleared by his benefit nights, and by the sale of the
copyright, no less than 500l., five times as much as he had made by
the “Traveller” and the “Vicar of Wakefield” together. The plot of the
“Good-natured Man” is, like almost all Goldsmith’s plots, very ill
constructed. But some passages are exquisitely ludicrous; much
more ludicrous, indeed, than suited the taste of the town at that
time. A canting, mawkish play, entitled “False Delicacy,” had just had
an immense run. Sentimentality was all the mode. During some
years, more tears were shed at comedies than at tragedies; and a
pleasantry which moved the audience to anything more than a grave
smile was reprobated as low. It is not strange, therefore, that the
very best scene in the “Goodnatured Man,” that in which Miss
Richland finds her lover attended by the bailiff and the bailiff’s
follower in full court dresses, should have been mercilessly hissed,
and should have been omitted after the first night.
In 1770 appeared the “Deserted Village.” In mere diction and
versification this celebrated poem is fully equal, perhaps superior, to
the “Traveller;” and it is generally preferred to the “Traveller” by that
large class of readers who think, with Bayes in the “Rehearsal,” that
the only use of a plan is to bring in fine things. More discerning
judges, however, while they admire the beauty of the details, are
shocked by one unpardonable fault which pervades the whole. The
fault we mean is not that theory about wealth and luxury which has
so often been censured by political economists. The theory is indeed
false: but the poem, considered merely as a poem, is not necessarily
the worse on that account. The finest poem in the Latin language,
indeed the finest didactic poem in any language, was written in
defence of the silliest and meanest of all systems of natural and
moral philosophy. A poet may easily be pardoned for reasoning ill;
but he cannot be pardoned for describing ill, for observing the world
in which he lives so carelessly that his portraits bear no resemblance
to the originals, for exhibiting as copies from real life monstrous
combinations of things which never were and never could be found
together. What would be thought of a painter who should mix
August and January in one landscape, who should introduce a frozen
river into a harvest scene? Would it be a sufficient defence of such a
picture to say that every part was exquisitely coloured, that the
green hedges, the apple-trees loaded with fruit, the waggons reeling
under the yellow sheaves, and the sun-burned reapers wiping their
foreheads, were very fine, and that the ice and the boys sliding were
also very fine? To such a picture the “Deserted Village” bears a great
resemblance. It is made up of incongruous parts. The village in its
happy days is a true English village. The village in its decay is an
Irish village. The felicity and the misery which Goldsmith has
brought close together belong to two different countries, and to two
different stages in the progress of society. He had assuredly never
seen in his native island such a rural paradise, such a seat of plenty,
content, and tranquillity, as his “Auburn.” He had assuredly never
seen in England all the inhabitants of such a paradise turned out of
their homes in one day and forced to emigrate in a body to America.
The hamlet he had probably seen in Kent; the ejectment he had
probably seen in Minister: but, by joining the two, he has produced
something which never was and never will be seen in any part of the
world.
 In 1778 Goldsmith tried his chance at Covent Garden with a
second play, “She Stoops to Conquer.” The manager was not without
great difficulty induced to bring this piece out. The sentimental
comedy still reigned: and Goldsmith’s comedies were not
sentimental. The “Goodnatured Man” had been too funny to
succeed; yet the mirth of the “Goodnatured? Man” was sober when
compared with the rich drollery# of “She Stoops to Conquer,” which
is, in truth, an incomparable farce in five acts. On this occasion,
however, genius triumphed. Pit, boxes, and galleries, were in a
constant roar of laughter. If any bigoted admirer of Kelly and
Cumberland ventured to hiss or groan, he was speedily silenced by a
general cry of “turn him out,” or “throw him over.” Two generations
have since confirmed the verdict which was pronounced on that
night.
While Goldsmith was writing the “Deserted Village” and “She
Stoops to Conquer,” he was employed on works of a very different
kind, works from which he derived little reputation but much profit,
he compiled for the use of schools a “History of Rome,” by which he
made 300l., a “History of England,” by which he made 500l., a
“History of Greece,” for which he received 250l., a “Natural History,”
for which the booksellers covenanted to pay him 800 guineas. These
works he produced without any elaborate research, by merely
selecting, abridging, and translating into his own clear, pure, and
flowing language what he found in books well known to the world,
but too bulky or too dry for boys and girls. He committed some
strange blunders; for he knew nothing with accuracy. Thus in his
“History of England” he tells us that Naseby is in Yorkshire; nor did
he correct this mistake when the book was reprinted. He was very
nearly hoaxed into putting into the “History of Greece” an account of
a battle between Alexander the Great and Montezuma. In his
“Animated Nature” he relates, with faith and with perfect gravity, all
the most absurd lies which he could find in books of travels about
gigantic Patagonians, monkeys that preach sermons, nightingales
that repeat long conversations. “If he can tell a horse from a cow,”
said Johnson, “that is the extent of his knowledge of zoology.” How
little Goldsmith was qualified to write about the physical sciences is
sufficiently proved by two anecdotes. He on one occasion denied
that the sun is longer in the northern than in the southern skies. It
was vain to cite the authority of Maupertuis. “Maupertuis!” he cried,
“I understand those matters better than Maupertuis.” On another
occasion he, in defiance of the evidence of his own senses,
maintained obstinately, and even angrily, that he chewed his dinner
by moving his upper jaw.
Yet, ignorant as Goldsmith was, few writers have done more to
make the first steps in the laborious road to knowledge easy and
pleasant. His compilations are widely distinguished from the
compilations of ordinary book-makers. He was a great, perhaps an
unequalled, master of the arts of selection and condensation. In
these respects his histories of Rome and of England, and still more
his own abridgments of these histories, well deserve to be studied.
In general nothing is less attractive than an epitome: but the
epitomes of Goldsmith, even when most concise, are always
amusing; and to read them is considered by intelligent children, not
as a task, but as a pleasure.
Goldsmith might now be considered as a prosperous man. He had
the means of living in comfort, and even in what to one who had so
often slept in barns and on bulks must have been luxury. His fame
was great and was constantly rising. He lived in what was
intellectually far the best society of the kingdom, in a society in
which no talent or accomplishment was wanting, and in which the
art of conversation was cultivated with splendid success. There
probably were never four talkers more admirable in four different
ways than Johnson, Burke, Beauclerk, and Garrick; and Goldsmith
was on terms of intimacy with all the four. He aspired to share in
their colloquial renown; but never was ambition more unfortunate. It
may seem strange that a man who wrote with so much perspicuity,
vivacity, and grace, should have been, whenever he took a part in
conversation, an empty, noisy, blundering rattle. But on this point
the evidence is overwhelming. So extraordinary was the contrast
between Goldsmith’s published works and the silly things which he
said, that Horace Walpole described him as an inspired idiot. “Noll,”
said Garrick, “wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Pol.” Charnier
declared that it was a hard exercise of faith to believe that so foolish
a chatterer could have really written the “Traveller.” Even Boswell
could say, with contemptuous compassion, that he liked very well to
hear honest Goldsmith run on. “Yes, sir,” said Johnson; “but he
should not like to hear himself.” Minds differ as rivers differ. There
are transparent and sparkling rivers from which it is delightful to
drink as they flow; to such rivers the minds of such men as Burke
and Johnson may be compared. But there are rivers of which the
water when first drawn is turbid and noisome, but becomes pellucid
as crystal, and delicious to the taste, if it be suffered to stand till it
has deposited a sediment; and such a river is a type of the mind of
Goldsmith. His first thoughts on every subject were confused even to
absurdity; but they required only a little time to work themselves
clear. When he wrote they had that time; and therefore his readers
pronounced him a man of genius: but when he talked he talked
nonsense, and made himself the laughing-stock of his hearers. He
was painfully sensible of his inferiority in conversation; he felt every
failure keenly: yet he had not sufficient judgment and self-command
to hold his tongue. His animal spirits and vanity were always
impelling him to try to do the one thing whieh he could not do. After
every attempt he felt that he had exposed himself, and writhed with
shame and vexation; yet the next moment he began again.
His associates seem to have regarded him with kindness, which, in
spite of their admiration of his writings, was not unmixed with
contempt. In truth, there was in Ins character much to love, but very
little to respect. His heart was soft even to weakness: he was so
generous that he quite forgot to be just; he forgave injuries so
readily that he might be said to invite them; and was so liberal to
beggars that he had nothing left for his tailor and his butcher. He
was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. One vice of a
darker shade was imputed to him, envy. But there is not the least
reason to believe that this bad passion, though it sometimes made
him wince and utter fretful exclamations, ever impelled him to injure
by wicked arts the reputation of any of his rivals. The truth probably
is, that he was not more envious, but merely less prudent, than his
neighbours. His heart was on his lips. All those small jealousies,
which are but too common among men of letters, but which a man
of letters who is also a man of the world does his best to conceal,
Goldsmith avowed with the simplicity of a child. When he was
envious, instead of affecting indifference, instead of damning with
faint praise, instead of doing-injuries slily and in the dark, he told
every body that he was envious. “Do not, pray, do not talk of
Johnson in such terms,” he said to Boswell; “you harrow up my very
soul.” George Steevens and Cumberland were men far too cunning
to say such a thing. They would have echoed the praises of the man
whom they envied, and then have sent to the newspapers
anonymous libels upon him. Both what was good and what was bad
in Goldsmith’s character was to his associates a perfect security that
he would never commit such villany. He was neither ill-natured
enough, nor longheaded enough, to be guilty of any malicious act
which required contrivance and disguise.
Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a man of genius,
cruelly treated by the world, and doomed to struggle with difficulties
which at last broke his heart. But no representation can be more
remote from the truth. He did, indeed, go through much sharp
misery before he had done anything considerable in literature. But,
after his name had appeared on the title-page of the “Traveller,” he
had none but himself to blame for his distresses. His average
income, during the last seven years of his life, certainly exceeded
400l. a year; and 400l. a year ranked, among the incomes of that
day, at least as high as 800l. a year would rank at present. A single
man living in the Temple with 400l. a year might then be called
opulent. Not one in ten of the young gentlemen of good families
who were studying the law there had so much. But all the wealth
which Lord Clive had brought from Bengal, and Sir Lawrence Dundas
from Germany, joined together, would not have sufficed for
Goldsmith. He spent twice as much as he had. He wore fine clothes,
gave dinners of several courses, paid court to venal beauties. He had
also, it should be remembered, to the honour of his heart, though
not of his head, a guinea, or five, or ten, according to the state of
his purse, ready for any tale of distress, true or false. But it was not
in dress or feasting, in promiscuous amours or promiscuous
charities, that his chief expense lay. He had been from boyhood a
gambler, and at once the most sanguine and the most unskilful of
gamblers. For a time he put off the day of inevitable ruin by
temporary expedients. He obtained advances from booksellers, by
promising to execute works which he never began. But at length this
source of supply failed. He owed more than 2000l. and he saw no
hope of extrication from his embarrassments. His spirits and health
gave way. He was attacked by a nervous fever, which he thought
himself competent to treat, It would have been happy for him if his
medical skill had been appreciated as justly by himself as by others.
Notwithstanding the degree which he pretended to have received at
Padua, he could procure no patients. “I do not practise,” he once
said; “I make it a rule to prescribe only for my friends.”
“Pray, dear Doctor,” said Beauclerk, “alter your rule; and prescribe
only for your enemies.” Goldsmith now, in spite of this excellent
advice, prescribed for himself. The remedy aggravated the malady.
The sick man was induced to call in real physicians; and they at one
time imagined that they had cured the disease. Still his weakness
and restlessness continued. He could get no sleep. He could take no
food. “You are worse,” said one of his medical attendants, “than you
should be from the degree of fever which you have. Is your mind at
ease?” “No, it is not,” were the last recorded words of Oliver
Goldsmith. He died on the third of April 1774, in his forty-sixth year.
He was laid in the churchyard of the Temple; but the spot was not
marked by any inscription, and is now forgotten. The coffin was
followed by Burke and Reynolds. Both these great men were sincere
mourners. Burke, when he heard of Goldsmith’s death, had burst
into a flood of tears. Reynolds had been so much moved by the
news that he had flung aside his brush and palette for the day.
 A short time after Goldsmith’s death, a little poem appeared,
which will, as long as our language lasts, associate the names of his
two illustrious friends with his own. It has already been mentioned
that he sometimes felt keenly the sarcasm which his wild blundering
talk brought upon him. He was, not long before his last illness,
provoked into retaliating. He wisely betook himself to his pen; and at
that weapon he proved himself a match for all his assailants
together. Within a small compass he drew with a singularly easy and
vigorous pencil the characters of nine or ten of his intimate
associates. Though this little work did not receive his last touches, it
must always be regarded as a masterpiece. It is impossible,
however, not to wish that four or five likenesses which have no
interest for posterity were wanting to that noble gallery, and that
their places were supplied by sketches of Johnson and Gibbon, as
happy and vivid as the sketches of Burke and Garrick.
Some of Goldsmith’s friends and admirers honoured him with a
cenotaph in Westminster Abbey. Nollekens was the sculptor; and
Johnson wrote the inscription. It is much to be lamented that
Johnson did not leave to posterity a more durable and a more
valuable memorial of his friend. A life of Goldsmith would have been
an inestimable addition to the Lives of the Poets. No man
appreciated Goldsmith’s writings more justly than Johnson: no man
was better acquainted with Goldsmith’s character and habits; and no
man was more competent to delineate with truth and spirit the
peculiarities of a mind in which great powers were found in company
with great weaknesses. But the list of poets to whose works Johnson
was requested by the booksellers to furnish prefaces ended with
Lyttleton, who died in 1773. The line seems to have been drawn
expressly for the purpose of excluding the person whose portrait
would have most fitly closed the series. Goldsmith, however, has
been fortunate in his biographers. Within a few years his life has
been written by Mr. Prior, by Mr. Washington Irving, and by Mr.
Forster. The diligence of Mr. Prior deserves great praise: the style of
Mr. Washington Irving is always pleasing; but the highest place
must, in justice, be assigned to the eminently interesting work of Mr.
Forster.
 SAMUEL JOHNSON.
(Encyclopodia Britannica, December 1856.)

S
amuel Johnson, one of the most eminent English writers of the
eighteenth century, was the son of Michael Johnson, who was,
at the beginning of that century, a magistrate of Lichfield, and
a bookseller of great note in the midland counties. Michael’s abilities
and attainments seem to have been considerable. He was so well
acquainted with the contents of the volumes which he exposed to
sale, that the country rectors of Staffordshire and Worcestershire
thought him an oracle on points of learning. Between him and the
clergy, indeed, there was a strong religious and political sympathy.
He was a zealous churchman, and, though he had qualified himself
for municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in
possession, was to the last a Jacobite in heart. At his house, a house
which is still pointed out to every traveller who visits Lichfield,
Samuel was born on the 18th of September 1709. In the child, the
physical, intellectual, and moral peculiarities which afterwards
distinguished the man were plainly discernible; great muscular
strength accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmities;
great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth and
procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and
irritable temper. He had inherited from his ancestors a scrofulous
taint, which it was beyond the power of medicine to remove. His
parents were weak enough to believe that the royal touch was a
specific for this malady. In his third year he was taken up to London,
inspected by the court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains,
and stroked and presented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. One
of his earliest recollections was that of a stately lady in a diamond
stomacher and a long black hood. Her hand was applied in vain. The
boy’s features, which were originally noble and not irregular, were
distorted by his malady. His cheeks were deeply scarred. He lost for
a time the sight of one eye; and he saw but very imperfectly with
the other. But the force of his mind overcame every impediment.
Indolent as he was, he acquired knowledge with such ease and
rapidity that at every school to which he was sent he was soon the
best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he resided at home, and was
left to his own devices. He learned much at this time, though his
studies were without guidance and without plan. He ransacked his
father’s shelves, dipped into a multitude of books, read what was
interesting, and passed over what was dull. An ordinary lad would
have acquired little or no useful knowledge in such a way: but much
that was dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Samuel. He read
little Greek; for his proficiency in that language was not such that he
could take much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and
eloquence. But he had left school a good Latinist; and he soon
acquired, in the large and miscellaneous library of which he now had
the command, an extensive knowledge of Latin literature. That
Augustan delicacy of taste which is the boast of the great public
schools of England he never possessed. But he was early familiar
with some classical writers who were quite unknown to the best
scholars in the sixth form at Eton. He was peculiarly attracted by the
works of the great restorers of learning. Once, while searching for
some apples, he found a large folio volume of Petrarch’s works. The
name excited his curiosity; and he eagerly devoured hundreds of
pages. Indeed, the diction and versification of his own Latin
compositions show that he had paid at least as much attention to
modern copies from the antique as to the original models.
While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family was
sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael Johnson was much better
qualified to pore upon books, and to talk about them, than to trade
in them. His business declined; his debts increased; it was with
difficulty that the daily expenses of his household were defrayed. It
was out of his power to support his son at either university: but a
wealthy neighbour offered assistance; and, in reliance on promises
which proved to be of very little value, Samuel was entered at
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