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Oliver Goldsmith was born in 1728 in Pallas, a little out-of-the- way Irish village. His father was a clergyman and farmer, with a large family and very little money. He was a dear, simple, kindly man. "A man he was to all the country dear, And passing rich with forty pounds a year." Two years after Oliver was born his father moved to Lissoy, another and better parish.
Now the landlord, who owned every rood of the village of Lissoy, lived in London. He lived well. He gambled a little, and as the cards did not run his way he got into debt. So he wrote to his agent in Lissoy to raise the rents. He did so, threatened, applied the screws, and the inhabitants packed up and let the landlord have his village all to himself.
The following article, which appeared in a London periodical, shows the effect of Goldsmith's poem in renovating the fortunes of Lissoy. "About three miles from Ballymahon, a very central town in the sister kingdom, is the mansion and village of Auburn, so called by their present possessor, Captain Hogan.
Much of that poem, we are told, was composed this summer, in the course of solitary strolls about the green lanes and beautifully rural scenes of the neighborhood; and thus much of the softness and sweetness of English landscape became blended with the ruder features of Lissoy.
If I climb Hampstead Hill, than where nature never exhibited a more magnificent prospect, I confess it fine; but then I had rather be placed on the little mount before Lissoy gate, and there take in, to me, the most pleasing horizon in nature. "Before Charles came hither my thoughts sometimes found refuge from severer studies among my friends in Ireland.
The poem tells the story of a village which had once been happy and flourishing, but which is now quite deserted and fallen to ruins. The village is thought by some people to have been Lissoy, where Oliver had lived as a boy, but others think this cannot be, for they say no Irish village was ever so peaceful and industrious as Goldsmith pictures his village to have been.
If I go to the opera, where Signora Columba pours out all the mazes of melody, I sit and sigh for Lissoy fireside, and Johnny Armstrong's 'Last Good-night' from Peggy Golden.
Lissoy is confidently cited as the original of his "Auburn" in the Deserted Village; his father's establishment, a mixture of farm and parsonage, furnished hints, it is said, for the rural economy of the Vicar of Wakefield; and his father himself, with his learned simplicity, his guileless wisdom, his amiable piety, and utter ignorance of the world, has been exquisitely portrayed in the worthy Dr.
He had been educated for a pedagogue, but had enlisted in the army, served abroad during the wars of Queen Anne's time, and risen to the rank of quartermaster of a regiment in Spain. At the return of peace, having no longer exercise for the sword, he resumed the ferule, and drilled the urchin populace of Lissoy.
He now returned to his friends, no longer the student to sport away the happy interval of vacation, but the anxious man, who is henceforth to shift for himself and make his way through the world. In fact, he had no legitimate home to return to. At the death of his father, the paternal house at Lissoy, in which Goldsmith had passed his childhood, had been taken by Mr.
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