His shy and sensitive nature was affected by the inferior station
he was doomed to hold among his gay and opulent fellow-students, and he
became, at times, moody and despondent. A recollection of these early
mortifications induced him, in after years, most strongly to dissuade his
brother Henry, the clergyman, from sending a son to college on a like
footing. "If he has ambition, strong passions, and an exquisite sensibility
of contempt, do not send him there, unless you have no other trade for him
except your own."
To add to his annoyances the fellow of the college who had the peculiar
control of his studies, the Rev. Theaker Wilder, was a man of violent and
capricious temper, and of diametrically opposite tastes. The tutor was
devoted to the exact sciences; Goldsmith was for the classics. Wilder
endeavored to force his favorite studies upon the student by harsh means,
suggested by his own coarse and savage nature. He abused him in presence of
the class as ignorant and stupid; ridiculed him as awkward and ugly, and at
times in the transports of his temper indulged in personal violence. The
effect was to aggravate a passive distaste into a positive aversion.
Goldsmith was loud in expressing his contempt for mathematics and his
dislike of ethics and logic; and the prejudices thus imbibed continued
through life.
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