Strange that such an idle and irresponsible youth should have been urged by his family to take holy orders; but such was the fact.  For two years more Goldsmith labored with theology, only to be rejected when he presented himself as a candidate for the ministry.  He tried teaching, and failed.  Then his fancy turned to America, and, provided with money and a good horse, he started off for Cork, where he was to embark for the New World.  He loafed along the pleasant Irish ways, missed his ship, and presently turned up cheerfully amongst his relatives, minus all his money, and riding a sorry nag called Fiddleback, for which he had traded his own on the way.[203] He borrowed fifty pounds more, and started for London to study law, but speedily lost his money at cards, and again appeared, amiable and irresponsible as ever, among his despairing relatives.  The next year they sent him to Edinburgh to study medicine.  Here for a couple of years he became popular as a singer of songs and a teller of tales, to whom medicine was only a troublesome affliction.  Suddenly the Wanderlust seized him and he started abroad, ostensibly to complete his medical education, but in reality to wander like a cheerful beggar over Europe, singing and playing his flute for food and lodging.  He may have studied a little at Leyden and at Padua, but that was only incidental.  After a year or more of vagabondage he returned to London with an alleged medical degree, said to have been obtained at Louvain or Padua.

The next few years are a pitiful struggle to make a living as tutor, apothecary’s assistant, comedian, usher in a country school, and finally as a physician in Southwark.  Gradually he drifted into literature, and lived from hand to mouth by doing hack work for the London booksellers.  Some of his essays and his Citizen of the World (1760-1761) brought him to the attention of Johnson, who looked him up, was attracted first by his poverty and then by his genius, and presently declared him to be “one of the first men we now have as an author.”  Johnson’s friendship proved invaluable, and presently Goldsmith found himself a member of the exclusive Literary Club.  He promptly justified Johnson’s confidence by publishing The Traveller (1764), which was hailed as one of the finest poems of the century.  Money now came to him liberally, with orders from the booksellers; he took new quarters in Fleet Street and furnished them gorgeously; but he had an inordinate vanity for bright-colored clothes, and faster than he earned money he spent it on velvet cloaks and in indiscriminate charity.  For a time he resumed his practice as a physician, but his fine clothes did not bring patients, as he expected; and presently he turned to writing again, to pay his debts to the booksellers.  He produced several superficial and grossly inaccurate schoolbooks,—­like his Animated Nature and his histories of England, Greece, and Rome,—­which brought him bread and more fine clothes, and his Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer, which brought him undying fame.