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. (The glass on which the name is
written has, as we are informed by a writer in "Notes and
Queries" (2d. 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.) From such garrets many men of less parts
than his have made their way to the woolsack 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