November 10, 1728

J. H. Plumb was a Cambridge don and in that capacity his historiography led to the 18th century, the period in which he specialized, being known as "Plumb's century." Oliver Goldsmith, (November 10, 1728 to April 4, 1774), an Irish writer, is the source of our cat reference this day.

Plumb drew a vivid picture of the novelist:

'Dr. Oliver Goldsmith was a very great man. This his contemporaries agreed on, yet none of them knew quite why. He baffled Dr. Johnson with his absurdities; Horace Walpole dismissed him as "an inspired idiot"; ....even Sir Joshua Reynolds, who saw further and deeper into Goldsmith's character than anyone else, realised that no man could get such a reputation for absurdity without there being reason for it.

'All agreed that the most absurd thing about Goldsmith, more absurd even than his asinine and inappropriate remarks, was his transparent envy. He could not bear praise of any man. The adulation rendered to Samuel Johnson gave him acute pain. Sometimes he tried to discharge his envy by making a joke of it and a mock of himself, as when he leaped onto a chair to show that he could deliver a better speech than Edmund Burke and dried up after two sentences. ... Solace he found for his strange nature in jokes, in absurdity, and in writing. He was driven by the deep urges of his personality as much as Dr. Johnson or James Boswell, but their urges were powerful, sensual, religious, locked in a massive, virile framework of passion. Oliver Goldsmith was blown about like a butterfly: his character seemed to lack core or mass. He longed for applause, love, affection, to be known to be good, to be wholesome, to be wanted. And the effect became ludicrous. The urgency of his desires, the immediacy of his responses, the unawareness of their excess, made him foolish; his features and his manner rendered him ludicrous. ...

'Yet despite the disintegration of his personality, the foolishness of his actions, his excessive drunkenness and incurable extravagance, Goldsmith was, and is, a great man — a man of rare talents that bordered on genius, one of the finest natural writers in the English language. This reputation is based on, and justified by, some half a dozen books, essays, plays, poems, and one novel, The Vicar Of Wakefield.

'He was an Irishman, born probably on November 10, 1728, at Pallas, in the County of Longford, the son of a clergyman in the Church of England. Goldsmith grew up in genteel poverty in rural isolation in a society in which the barriers of class were as firm as the Great Wall of China; in which riches and poverty, benevolence or tyranny, seemed as wayward as the winds of heaven. He acquired an education at Edgeworthstown School, and Trinity College, Dublin, but he got into scrapes, went wandering, and was somewhat lucky to get his B.A. in 1749. Off he went to Edinburgh to study medicine, and there he began to discover his true predicament — that he was a poor man, wretchedly poor, so poor that hunger lived with him like a wife ... And he was an ugly man, really ugly, and never desired. ....living hand to mouth, begging his bread by playing on his flute, giving lessons in English, entering into formal disputations for the sake of a meal. By such means he did the Grand Tour on foot — the Netherlands, France, and Italy — and finally washed up in 1756 at Peckham, a London suburb, as a junior schoolmaster, an experience which he so detested that the memory of it drove him into a passion.

'Yet his short stay at that school had been comparatively happy compared with the first few months after his return from Europe. He had eked out a living partly through practising medicine — usually his patients were poorer than he and could not pay — and partly through hack work with publishers..."Nothing," wrote Goldsmith, "is more apt to introduce us to the gates of the muses than Poverty."

'Once hunger had driven him through, the gates closed, and there was no other life for Goldsmith. Having thrown up his usher's job at the school, he became what was in effect an assistant editor of the Monthly Review. The work put him in a state of euphoria. He worked hard; reviewed everything — plays, satires, mythology, philosophy, botany; tired rapidly; evaded his work or did it in a slipshod way, and within five months had given it up — as feckless and as restless as ever. But literature had him in its grip. True, he went on with his medicine for a time, and even did another spell at Peckham, but it was too easy to make a sort of living in literary London of Goldsmith's day for him to be able to resist for long such a pleasurable, drifting, talking, drinking life....

'The London book market was expanding fast, very fast; publishers' profits might be uncertain, but they were usually large. The trouble was to get enough copy. Translations naturally were in great demand, and Goldsmith was willing to translate anything. The compilation of factual educational books of a general nature — histories, books on the natural world, compendiums of philosophy — helped to slake the middle-class thirst for knowledge.

'Goldsmith wrote with confidence, if slight accuracy, on all branches of knowledge. Subscription lists for innumerable projects floated about London, drawing in guineas for needy authors and prosperous publishers, and sometimes, but usually many, many years later, producing a set of volumes. For a man of Goldsmith's inventive genius, projects were a godsend. ... In 1760, Goldsmith began to publish The Citizen of the World in the Public Ledger, a magazine run by a really great publisher, John Newbery, whom Goldsmith afterwards introduced into The Vicar of Wakefield as the "philanthropic bookseller." These essays, purporting to be written by a Chinese philosopher — Lien Chi — about London and the English, established Goldsmith's reputation. The method was not original; not only had Montesquieu used it in his Lettres Persanes but so had Horace Walpole, as recently as 1757, in his Letter of Xo-Ho, a Chinese Philosopher in London. And often the matter was no more original than the method, for Goldsmith tired quickly and found deadlines odious, so he lifted passages wholesale from several writers on China or Persia. Nevertheless these essays deserved their success and they remain one of the most dexterous and ironic comments on society of Goldsmith's day. They are, like all that Goldsmith did, written with grace, and although they reek with commonplace morality, the general drift is towards tolerance, kindliness, a mitigation of savagery, tyranny, poverty, and pain. From this time on Goldsmith became a figure of literary London — the friend of Reynolds, Johnson, ...Burke, ....and almost everyone else who wrote or painted or talked about art and letters.

'His output the next fourteen years was as extensive as it was uneven and the quality of his books was almost in inverse proportion to their size. His eight-volume History of the Earth and Animated Nature, his four-volume History of England, and his two-volume History of Rome are now worthless and unreadable. In their day they provided a vast amount of information for the general reader, some accurate, but a great deal false, in easy, gracious prose. In them, there was little of Goldsmith but tens of thousands of other writers' words: few have plagiarised so remorselessly as Goldsmith. During these years, however, he created as well as compiled. He wrote two long poems, The Traveller (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770), both of enduring value; two plays, The Good Natured Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1773), that radically changed the direction of the English theatre; and one novel of genius, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). These works have lasted...'

It is from Goldsmith's Animated Nature, 1774 (we used the 1825 edition) that we quote, from the index actually:

'[T]he wild [cats] hunt for the squirrel or the mouse... The whole tribe seek their food alone and never unite for mutual defence nor for mutual support and except at certain seasons are enemies to each other... all of the cat kind devour nothing but flesh and starve upon any other provision... their greatest force lies in the claws... the cat goes with young fifty six days and seldom brings forth above five or six at a time... the male often devours the kittens before they are a year old ...[Also discussed is] why cats hunt the serpent in the isle of Cyprus ...a flagrant mark by which the cat discovers its natural malignity [is that] their eyes see better in darkness than light ....

'The race of cats [is] noxious in proportion to their power to do mischief [and] inhabit the most torrid latitudes of India Africa and America and have never been able to multiply beyond the torrid zone... of all animals these are the most sullen and to a proverb untameable ...'

What strikes me is the sober tone Goldsmith uses. I don't know who he is plagiarizing here but he picked perceptive facts. I suppose our sample size is too small to justify conclusions but I do not see "worthless and unreadable" text here.  I do see intellectual giants, and a convincing glimpse of an older Britain.