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HEN Thackeray roamed through the Green Isle in search of material for his "Irish SketchBook," his route, for his sins, led him along a more dismal and uninteresting road" than he had ever before seen. That road brought him "through the old, inconvenient, ill-built and ugly town of Athlone.' The painter would find here, however, some good subjects for his sketch-book, in spite of the commination of the Guide-Book. Here, too," Thackeray continues, "great improvements are taking place for the Shannon navigation, which will render the town not so inconvenient as at present it is stated to be; and hard by lies a little village that is known and loved by all the world where English is spoken. It is called Lishoy, but its real name is Auburn, and it gave birth to one Noll Goldsmith, whom Mr. Boswell was in the habit of despising very heartily."

Thackeray was right to qualify what he calls the "commination of the GuideBook." Athlone, the most convenient starting point for a visit to Goldsmith's

"Deserted Village," is, on the whole, of all the many provincial towns I visited in a tour which embraced the greater part of Ireland, decidedly the most pleasing and picturesque. The most pleasing, even apart from its associations with Goldsmith. Starting from the one bridge of the town, which spans the broad Shannon and links the two parts of Athlone together, the main street of the place straggles gently upward, and soon merges into the charming country road which stretches out to Auburn. Thus far the citizens of the midland town have done little to cultivate the gentle art of laying traps for the literary pilgrim. "There are two hotels in Athlone," said an Irishman to me when I was miles away from the place, "and whichever one you go to, you will wish you had gone to the other." That main street in which those two lucky-bag hotels are situated, and the old castle, are much the same in objective appearance as they were during the two years which the boy Oliver Goldsmith spent in Athlone at that "school of repute" kept by the Rev. Mr. Campbell. No one knows the fate of

ATHLONE.

that school; its locality in the town and its history subsequent to the pupilage of its most famous scholar are as shrouded in mystery as the place of his burial in the Temple graveyard. Thwarted, then, of the pleasure of paying homage at that shrine, it only remains for the lover of Goldsmith to diffuse his adoration among those aspects of the town upon which the eyes of his hero must have fallen. There are, of course, many houses in the principal street which have survived the ravages of a century and a half, including one three-storied building, once occupied by some of Goldsmith's family; but probably the hand of time has rested with the most ineffective touch upon the sturdy walls of Athlone Castle. Some seven centuries have come and gone since those walls first saw their own outlines reflected in the placid waters of the Shannon, and between then and now the castle has played no inconspicuous part in Irish history.

But Athlone -"the ford of the moon," from Ath Luain, a name given because there was a ford here used in Pagan times by worshippers of the moon is of

GLASSEN.

primary interest just now as the starting point for a visit to that village hard by in which Thackeray makes Goldsmith to be born. Of course he was wrong in naming Lishoy as Goldsmith's natal place, for that honor belongs to Pallas in county Longford; but as Lishoy was the home of his boyhood it possesses quite equal interest for the literary pilgrim. Moreover, pace Lord Macaulay, there can be no question that it was in Lishoy he stored up those pictures of rural life which he afterward set in the framework of "The Deserted Village." Lord Macaulay's assertion that Auburn is not an Irish village is well met by Mr. William Black's remark that such a criticism overlooks one of the radical facts of human nature the magnifying delight of the mind in what is long remembered and remote. "What was it that the

imagination of Goldsmith, in his lifelong banishment, could not see when he looked back to the home of his childhood, and his early friends, and the sports and occupations of his youth? Lishoy was no doubt a poor enough Irish village, and perhaps the village preacher, who was so dear to all the country round, had to administer many a thrashing to a certain graceless son of his; and perhaps Paddy Byrne was something of a pedant; and no doubt pigs ran over the nicely sanded floor' of the inn; and no doubt the village statesmen occasionally indulged in a free fight. But do you think that was the Lishoy that Goldsmith thought of in dreary lodgings in Fleet Street courts? No. It was the Lishoy where the vagrant lad had first seen the 'primrose peep beneath the thorn; ' where he

had listened to the mysterious call of the bittern by the unfrequented river; it was a Lishoy still ringing with the glad laughter of young people in the twilight hours; it was a Lishoy forever beautiful and tender, and far away. The grown-up Goldsmith had not to go to any Kentish vil

resque hamlet in all my travels through Ireland. Approached at either end through an avenue of spreading trees, the one street of the village is lined with neat little cottages, now roofed with thatch and anon with warm red tiles. Although abutting sharp upon the road, each house has its climbing rose or trailing vine, and it was the exception rather than the rule to note a window-sill without its box of flowers. A mile or so further, and the road dips down between rows of pines and beeches, the pronounced

lage for a model; the familiar scenes of his youth, regarded with all the wistfulness and longing of an exile, became glorified enough."

Lishoy, or "Auburn," as it is much oftener called, is about seven miles from Athlone. The drive thither, on a mellow end-of-the-summer day, lingers in my memory as a quietly moving panorama of subdued pastoral pictures. Athlone is no sooner lost behind bosky trees and gently swelling hills than, to the left, away down there at the edge of emerald fields, Killinure Lough holds up its mirror to catch the mingling glories of a cerulean sky shot with fleecy clouds. Slowly this picture fades away and gives place to another of the village of Glassen, than which I was to see no more pictu

THE "BUSY MILL."

THE GOLDSMITH HOUSE.

lines of the one accentuating the flowing outlines of the other. And so the jaunting-car bowls merrily on, pausing at last before the ruins of the Goldsmith house. Now the pilgrim seems to tread familiar ground. The journey has taken him through scenes which recall no associations, but at the sight of these falling walls, unseen before, the lips murmur almost unconsciously:

"Near yonder copse, where once the garden smiled,

And still where many a garden flower grows

wild,

Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow,

And quite forgot their vices in their woe;
Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began."

The house must have been a spacious one for a Protestant village parson in Ireland. It stands back some two hundred yards from the road, and is approached by a broad avenue of springy grass, bordered with fine old trees. Five windows and two stories give hints of ample accommodation, and the walls are so stoutly made that the building, considering its history, might well be restored to a habitable condition again.

Leaving the Goldsmith house on the left, a walk of a few hundred paces along the road that turns sharply round past its end brings the pilgrim to an admirable standpoint from which to gain an adequate impression of "Sweet Auburn " as a whole. Irregularly hedged pastures rise and fall in gentle undulations, and the road has that welcome grass-fringe so common in England and Ireland but so rare in Scotland. Here and there the

outline of the hedges is broken by tapering or spreading trees, and through those trees peep glimpses of the "sheltered cot, the cultivated farm." No wonder the memory of this peaceful spot became such a prized possession of the Londonpent Goldsmith. No wonder he broke forth into that pathetic apostrophe:

"O blest retirement, friend to life's decline, Retreat from care that never must be mine, How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these,

A youth of labor with an age of ease; Who quits the world, where strong temptations try,

And, since 'tis hard to combat, learns to fly!"

Of the many sights of Auburn that were familiar to Goldsmith's eyes, only a few remain. The "busy mill" is still there, but idle now for many a year, and roofless, and overgrown with tangled

weeds. Close by, too, is the " "glassy brook," more true to its name than would be imagined from the poem, so perfect is its reflection of hedge and sky. A mile or so away a "decent church" tops the hill, occupying the same site and doubtless perpetuating the outward image of the building in which the boy Oliver often listened to the sermons of the Vicar of Wakefield. Not far distant, on the summit of a modest hill that rises from the roadside, stands a rudely built circular stone pillar, which is said to mark the exact centre of Ireland. The wayfarer in these parts cannot resist the thought that in the near future, when Ireland gets its share of those who travel in search alike of the beautiful and the shrines of the great, this Goldsmith country will become indeed the centre of the Green Isle.