Born, at Pallas, Co. Longford, 10 Nov. 1728. Family removed to Lissoy, 1730. At village school, 1734–35; at school at Elphin, 1736–39; at Athlone, 1739–41; at Edgeworthstown, 1741–44. To Trin. Coll., Dublin, as Sizar, 11 June 1744; Symth Exhibition, 1747; B.A., 27 Feb. 1749. With his mother at Ballymahon, 1749–51. Rejected as a clergyman, 1751. Private tutorship, 1751–52. To Edinburgh to study medicine, autumn of 1752. To Leyden, 1754. Travelled on the Continent, 1755–56. Possibly took M.B. degree at Louvain or Padua. Returned to London, Feb. 1756. Set up in practice as physician. Master at school at Peckham, winter of 1756 to 1757. Contrib. to “Monthly Review,” April to Sept. 1757, Dec. 1758; to “Literary Mag.,” Jan. 1757, Jan. to May, 1758; to “Critical Review,” Nov. 1757, Jan. to Aug. 1759, March 1760; to “The Busybody,” Oct. 1759. Ed. “Lady’s Mag.,” 1759–60. Friendship with Johnson begun, 1761. Contrib. to “The Public Ledger,” Jan. to Feb. 1760; to “The British Mag.,” Feb. 1760 to Jan. 1763. Visit to Bath for health, 1762. Removed to Islington, winter of 1762. Tried again to set up as physician, 1765. Settled in Temple, 1767; lived there till death. “The Good-natured Man” produced at Covent Garden, 29 Jan. 1768; “She Stoops to Conquer,” Covent Garden, 15 March 1773; “The Grumbler” (adapted from Sedley), Covent Garden, 8 May 1773. Contrib. to “Westminster Mag.,” Jan. to Feb. 1773; to “Universal Mag.,” April 1774. Died, in London, 4 Apr. 1774. Buried in the Temple. Works: “Memoirs of a Protestant” (anon.), 1758; “Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning” (anon.), 1759; “The Bee” (anon.; 8 nos.), 1759; “A History of the Seven Years’ War,” 1761; “A Poetical Dictionary” (anon.), 1761; “History of Mecklenburgh,” 1762; “The Mystery Revealed,” 1742 (1762); “A Citizen of the World” (anon.), 1762; “Life of Richard Nash” (anon.), 1762; “The Art of Poetry on a new Plan” (anon.; attrib. to Goldsmith), 1762; “The Martial Review” (anon.), 1763; “An History of England” (anon.), 1764; “The Traveller,” 1765; “Essays,” 1765; “The Vicar of Wakefield” (2 vols.), 1766; “History of Little Goody Two-Shoes” (anon., attrib. to Goldsmith), 1766; “The Good-natured Man,” 1768; “The Roman History” (2 vols.), 1769 (abridged by Goldsmith, 1772); “The Deserted Village,” 1770; “The Life of Thomas Parnell,” 1770; “Life of … Viscount Bolingbroke” (anon.), 1770; “The History of England” (4 vols.), 1771 (abridged, 1774); “Threnodia Augustalis,” 1772; “She Stoops to Conquer,” 1773; “Retaliation,” 1774 (2nd to 5th edns. same year); “The Grecian History” (2 vols.), 1774; “A History of the Earth” (8 vols.), 1774. Posthumous: “Miscellaneous Works,” 1775; “The Haunch of Venison,” 1776; “A Survey of Experimental Philosophy” (2 vols.), 1776, “Poems and Plays,” 1777; “Poetical and Dramatic Works,” 1780; “The Captivity,” 1836; “Asem, the Man-Hater,” 1877. He translated: (under pseud. of “James Willington”) Bergeracs’ “Memoirs of a Protestant,” 1758; Plutarch’s “Lives” (with J. Collyer), 1762; Formey’s “Concise History of Philosophy,” 1766; Scarron’s “Comic Romance,” 1776; and edited: Newbery’s “Art of Poetry,” 1762; “Poems for Young Ladies” (anon.), 1767; “Beauties of English Poesy,” 1767; “T. Parnell’s Poems,” 1770.

Personal

  Of all solemn coxcombs Goldsmith is the first; yet sensible—but affects to use Johnson’s hard words in conversation.

  Jarvis. A few of our usual cards of compliment—that’s all. This bill from your tailor; this from your mercer; and this from the little broker in Crooked Lane. He says he has been at a great deal of trouble to get back the money you borrowed. Honeywood. That I don’t know: but I am sure we were at a great deal of trouble in getting him to lend it. Jarvis. He has lost all patience. Honeywood. Then he has lost a good thing. Jarvis. There’s that ten guineas you were sending to the poor man and his children in the Fleet. I believe that would stop his mouth for a while at least. Honeywood. Ay, Jarvis, but what will fill their mouths in the meantime?

  Honors to one in my situation are something like ruffles to one that wants a shirt.

	From our Goldsmith’s anomalous character, who
	Can withhold his contempt, and his reverence too?
	From a poet so polished, so paltry a fellow!
	From critic, historian, or vile Punchinello!
	From a heart in which meanness had made her abode,
	From a foot that each path of vulgarity trod;
	From a head to invent, and a hand to adorn,
	Unskilled in the schools, a philosopher born.
	By disguise undefended, by jealousy smit,
	This lusus naturæ, nondescript in wit,
	May best be compared to those Anamorphòses;
	Which for lectures to ladies th’ optician proposes;
	All deformity seeming, in some points of view,
	In others quite accurate, regular, true:
	Till the student no more sees the figure that shocked her,
	But all in his likeness,—our odd little doctor.

	Here, Hermes, says Jove, who with nectar was mellow:
	Go fetch me some clay—I will make an odd fellow:
	Right and wrong shall be jumbled, much gold and some dross,
	Without cause be he pleased, without cause be he cross;
	Be sure, as I work, to throw in contradictions,
	A great love of truth, yet a mind turn’d to fictions;
	Now mix these ingredients, which, warm’d in the baking,
	Turn’d to learning and gaming, religion and raking.
	With the love of a wench let his writings be chaste;
	Tip his tongue with strong matter, his lips with fine taste:
	That the rake and the poet o’er all may prevail,
	Set fire to the head and set fire to the tail;
	For the joy of each sex on the world I’ll bestow it,
	This scholar, rake, Christian, dupe, gamester and poet.
	Though a mixture so odd he shall merit great fame,
	And among brother mortals be Goldsmith his name;
	When on earth this strange meteor no more shall appear,
	You, Hermes, shall fetch him to make us sport here.

	OLIVARII GOLDSMITH,
	Poetæ, Physici, Historici,
	Qui nullum ferè scribendi genus
	Non tetigit,
	Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit:
	Sive risus essent movendi,
	Sive lacrymæ,
	Affectuum potens at lenis dominator:
	Ingenio sublimis, vividus, versatilis,
	Oratione grandis, nitidus, venustus:
	Hoc monumento memoriam coluit
	Sodalium amor,
	Amicorum fides,
	Lectorum veneratio,
	Natus in Hiberniâ Forniæ
	Longfordiensis,
	In loco cui nomen Pallas,
	Nov. xxix. MDCCXXXI;
	Eblanæ literis institutus;
	Obiit Londini,
	April iv, MDCCLXXIV.

  It may be improper to observe (as a kind of Apology for some particulars which are before related to have passed between me and Dr. Goldsmith), that he was bred a Physician, and therefore it was natural to converse with him on the subject of his disorder in a medical manner; but his attention had been so wholly absorbed by polite literature, that it prevented him from making any great progress in medical studies. As an elegant Writer, he will always be held in the highest esteem by persons of true taste. His “Traveller” and “Deserted Village” are deservedly numbered among the best poetical productions of the present age; and some of his essays, and other pieces, are very advantageously distinguished by general wit and native humour. It should also be remembered, that he was not only an excellent writer, but a most amiable man. His humanity and generosity greatly exceeded the narrow limits of his fortune; and those who were no judges of the literary merit of the Author, could not but love the Man for that benevolence by which he was so strongly characterised…. N. B. As my late respected and ingenious friend, Dr. Goldsmith, was pleased to honour Dr. Cogan and myself with his patronage and assistance in the Undertaking for the Recovery of persons apparently dead by Drowning, and other sudden accidents, now on the point of being established in this kingdom, I think I cannot shew a greater proof of my esteem for the deceased, than by applying the profits of this publication (if any should arise) to an institution, the design of which was favoured with his approbation.

  He was such a compound of absurdity, envy, and malice, contrasted with the opposite virtues of kindness, generosity, and benevolence, that he might be said to consist of two distinct souls, and influenced by the agency of a good and bad spirit.

  Of Dr. Goldsmith he said, “No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had.”

  Goldsmith is well known by his writings to have been a man of genius and of very fine parts; but of his character and general deportment, it is the hardest task anyone can undertake to give a description…. He had some wit, but no humour, and never told a story but he spoiled it…. His poems are replete with fine moral sentiments, and bespeak a great dignity of mind; yet he had no sense of the shame, nor dread of the evils, of poverty. In the latter he was at one time so involved, that for the clamours of a woman, to whom he was indebted for lodging, and for bailiffs that waited to arrest him, he was equally unable, till he had made himself drunk, to stay within doors, or go abroad to hawk among the booksellers his “Vicar of Wakefield.” In this distress he sent for Johnson who immediately went to one of them, and brought back money for his relief.

  It has been generally circulated and believed that he was a mere fool in conversation; but, in truth, this has been greatly exaggerated. He had, no doubt, a more than common share of that hurry of ideas which we often find in his countrymen, and which sometimes produces a laughable confusion in expressing them. He was very much what the French call un étourdi, and from vanity and an eager desire of being conspicuous wherever he was, he frequently talked carelessly without knowledge of the subject, or even without thought. His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman. Those who were in any way distinguished, excited envy in him to so ridiculous an excess, that the instances of it are hardly credible. When accompanying two beautiful young ladies with their mother on a tour in France, he was seriously angry that more attention was paid to them than to him; and once at the exhibition of the “Fantoccini” in London, when those who sat next to him observed with what dexterity a puppet was made to toss a pike, he could not bear that it should have such praise, and exclaimed with some warmth, “Pshaw! I can do it better myself.” He, I am afraid, had no settled system of any sort, so that his conduct must not be strictly scrutinised; but his affections were social and generous, and when he had money he gave it away very liberally. His desire of imaginary consequence predominated over his attention to truth.

  Goldsmith, though quick enough at prose, was rather slow in his poetry—not from the tardiness of fancy, but the time he took in pointing the sentiment and polishing the versification…. His manner of writing poetry was this: he first sketched a part of his design in prose, in which he threw out his ideas as they occurred to him; he then sat carefully down to versify them, and add such other ideas as he thought better fitted to the subject. He sometimes would exceed his prose design by writing several verses impromptu, but these he would take uncommon pains afterwards to revise, lest they should be found unconnected with his main design. The writer of these memoirs called upon the Doctor the second morning after he had begun “The Deserted Village,” and to him he communicated the plan of his poem…. He then read what he had done of it that morning, beginning “Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,” and so on for ten lines. “Come,” says he, “let me tell you, this is no bad morning’s work; and now, my dear boy, if you are not better engaged, I should be glad to enjoy a Shoemaker’s holiday with you.”

  In person he was short; about five feet five or six inches; strong, but not heavy in make; rather fair in complexion, with brown hair; such, at least, as could be distinguished from his wig. His features were plain but not repulsive,—certainly not so when lighted up by conversation. His manners were simple, natural, and perhaps on the whole, we may say, not polished; at least without the refinement and good-breeding which the exquisite polish of his compositions would lead us to expect. He was always cheerful and animated, often, indeed, boisterous in his mirth; entered with spirit into convivial society; contributed largely to its enjoyments by solidity of information, and the naïveté and originality of his character; talked often without premeditation, and laughed loudly without restraint.

  A friend of his paying him a visit at the beginning of March 1759, found him in lodgings there so poor and uncomfortable that he should not think it proper to mention the circumstance, if he did not consider it as the highest proof of the splendour of Doctor Goldsmith’s genius and talents, that by the bare exertion of their powers, under every disadvantage of person and fortune, he could gradually emerge from such obscurity to the enjoyment of all the comforts and even luxuries of life, and admission into the best societies of London. The Doctor was writing his “Enquiry” &c., in a wretched dirty room in which there was but one chair, and when he, from civility, offered it to his visitant, himself was obliged to sit in the window. While they were conversing, some one gently rapped at the door and being desired to come in, a poor ragged little girl of very decent behaviour entered, who, dropping a curtsy, said “My mamma sends her compliments, and begs the favour of you to lend her a chamber-pot full of coals.”

  That he was fantastically and whimsically vain all the world knows, but there was no settled and inherent malice in his heart. He was tenacious to a ridiculous extreme of certain pretensions, that did not and by human nature could not, belong to him, and at the same time inexcusably careless of the fame, which he had powers to command. His table-talk was, as Garrick aptly compared it, like that of a parrot, whilst he wrote like Apollo; he had gleams of eloquence, and at times a majesty of thought, but in general his tongue and his pen had two very different styles of talking. What foibles he had he took no pains to conceal, the good qualities of his heart were too frequently obscured by the carelessness of his conduct, and the frivolity of his manners.

  Much of the attention which even Goldsmith personally met with was undoubtedly owing to the patronage of his admired friend; yet Sir Joshua used to say, that Goldsmith looked at, or considered, public notoriety, or fame as one great parcel, to the whole of which he laid claim, and whoever partook of any part of it, whether dancer, singer, slight-of-hand man, or tumbler, deprived him of his right, and drew off the attention of the world from himself, and which he was striving to gain. Notwithstanding this, he lamented that whenever he entered into a mixed company, he struck a kind of awe on them, which deprived him of the enjoyment and freedom of society, and which he then made it his endeavour to dispel by playing wanton and childish pranks in order to bring himself to the wished-for level…. Sir Joshua was much affected by the death of Goldsmith, to whom he had been a very sincere friend. He did not touch the pencil for that day, a circumstance most extraordinary for him, who passed no day without a line.

  The greatest real fault of Dr. Goldsmith was, that, if he had thirty pounds in his pocket, he would go into certain companies in the country, and, in hopes of doubling the sum, would generally return to town without any part of it.

  Of his loves we know nothing; they were probably the reverse of poetical, and may have had some influence on his purse and respectability, but none on his literary character and productions.

  His death, it has been thought, was hastened by “mental inquietude.” If this supposition be true, never did the turmoils of life subdue a mind more warm with sympathy for the misfortunes of our fellow-creatures. But his character is familiar to every one who reads: in all the numerous accounts of his virtues and his foibles, his genius and absurdities, his knowledge of nature and his ignorance of the world, his “compassion for another’s woe” was always predominant; and my trivial story of his humouring a froward child weighs but as a feather in the recorded scale of his benevolence.

  “An inspired-idiot,” Goldsmith, hangs strangely about him; though, as Hawkins says, “he loved not Johnson, but rather envied him for his parts; and once entreated a friend to desist from praising him, ‘for in doing so,’ said he, ‘you harrow-up my very soul!’” Yet, on the whole, there is no evil in the “gooseberry-fool;” but rather much good; of a finer, if of a weaker, sort than Johnson’s; and all the more genuine that he himself could never become conscious of it,—though unhappily never cease attempting to become so; the Author of the genuine “Vicar of Wakefield,” nill he, will he, must needs fly towards such a mass of genuine Manhood; and Dr. Minor keep gyrating round Dr. Major, alternately attracted and repelled.

  His associates seem to have regarded him with kindness, which, in spite of their admiration of his writings, was not unmixed with contempt. In truth, there was in his character much to love, but very little to respect. His heart was soft, even to weakness: he was so generous, that he quite forgot to be just; he forgave injuries so readily, that he might be said to invite them, and was so liberal to beggars, that he had nothing left for his tailor and his butcher. He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident.

  He was privately interred in the Temple burying-ground, and a tabular monument to his honor placed on the walls of Westminster Abbey. That great and noble building does not hold the remains of a nobler or better heart. Oliver Goldsmith was a true Irishman, generous, impulsive, and improvident; but he was more, he was a true man and true poet. Whether we laugh with him or weep with him, we are still better for it.

  Oliver Goldsmith, whose life and adventures should be known to all who know his writings, must be held to have succeeded in nothing that his friends would have had him succeed in. He was intended for a clergyman, and was rejected when he applied for orders; he practised as a physician, and never made what would have paid for a degree. What he was not asked or expected to do, was to write: but he wrote, and paid the penalty. His existence was a continued privation. The days were few, in which he had resources for the night, or dared to look forward to the morrow. There was not any miserable want, in the long and sordid catalogue, which in its turn and in all its bitterness he did not feel. He had shared the experience of those to whom he makes affecting reference in his “Animated Nature,” “people who die really of hunger, in common language of a broken heart;” and when he succeeded at the last, success was but a feeble sunshine on a rapidly approaching decay, which was to lead him, by its flickering light, to an early grave.

  On examining narrowly the character of Goldsmith, we find, even in what are commonly regarded as its defects, and served to render him ridiculous in the circles of London, some clue to the enigma of the contrast between the habits of the man and the style of the writer. Goldsmith never, from the period at which he lounged at the college-gates as a sizar to the time when his peach-blossom coat attracted the mirth of Garrick, divested himself of the notion that he was a gentleman. This conviction was almost the strongest he possessed; the more it was invaded, the more he clung to it. He surrounded it with all the keenest susceptibilities of his sensitive nature. Nothing so galled and offended him as a hint to the contrary. To be liked as a jester, not companion—to be despised for his poverty—to be underrated as a sizar—to be taunted by a schoolboy with a question of his gentility—were cruelties beyond all others that fate could inflict…. Grasping at that respect of which he was so tenacious, he resorts to fine clothes to set off his homely person—to paradoxes in conversation to enforce attention; he gives breakfasts and suppers he can ill afford; he apologises for lodgings beneath his dignity. He is always keeping the hat off his head to hide some patch on his coat. This sensitiveness, proceeding from intense self-consciousness, is mixed up with the most amiable attributes of his nature, and has subjected even his lavish generosity, his cordial charity, to the imputation of a want of true feeling.

  My trust is that Goldsmith lived upon the whole a life which, though troubled, was one of average enjoyment. Unquestionably, when reading at midnight, in the middle watch of a century which he never reached by one whole generation, this record of one so guileless, so upright, or seeming to be otherwise only in the eyes of those who did not know his difficulties, nor could have understood them,—when recurring also to his admirable genius, to the sweet natural gaiety of his oftentimes pathetic humour, and to the varied accomplishments, from talent or erudition, by which he gave effect to endowments so fascinating,—one cannot but sorrow over the strife which he sustained, and over the wrong by which he suffered. A few natural tears fall from every eye at the rehearsal of so much contumely from fools, which he faced unresistingly as one bareheaded under a hailstorm; and worse to bear than the scorn of fools was the imperfect sympathy and jealous self-distrusting esteem which he received to the last from friends. Doubtless he suffered much wrong; but so, in one way or other, do most men: he suffered also this special wrong, that in his lifetime he never was fully appreciated by any one friend: something of a counter-movement ever mingled with praise for him; he never saw himself enthroned in the heart of any young and fervent admirer; and he was always overshadowed by men less deeply genial, though more showy than himself: but these things happen, and will happen forever, to myriads amongst the benefactors of earth. Their names ascend in songs of thankful commemoration, yet seldom until the ears are deaf that would have thrilled to the music. And these were the heaviest of Goldsmith’s afflictions: what are likely to be thought such—viz. the battles which he fought for his daily bread—I do not number amongst them.

  Goldsmith had no secrets: his follies, his weaknesses, his errors were all thrown to the surface; his heart was really too guileless and innocent to seek mystery and concealment…. He was no one’s enemy but his own; his errors, in the main, inflicted evil on none but himself, and were so blended with humorous and even affecting circumstances, as to disarm anger and conciliate kindness. Where eminent talent is united to spotless virtue, we are awed and dazzled into admiration, but our admiration is apt to be cold and reverential; while there is something in the harmless infirmities of a good and great, but erring individual, that pleads touchingly to our nature; and we turn more kindly towards the object of our idolatry, when we find that, like ourselves, he is mortal and is frail. The epithet so often heard, and in such kindly tones, of “poor Goldsmith,” speaks volumes. Few, who consider the real compound of admirable and whimsical qualities which form his character, would wish to prune away its eccentricities, trim its grotesque luxuriance, and clip it down to the decent formalities of rigid virtue. “Let not his frailties be remembered,” said Johnson; “he was a very great man.” But, for our part, we rather say, “Let them be remembered,” since their tendency is to endear; and we question whether he himself would not feel gratified in hearing his reader, after dwelling with admiration on the proofs of his greatness, close the volume with the kind-hearted phrase, so fondly and familiarly ejaculated, of “Poor Goldsmith.”

  Who, of the millions whom he has amused, does not love him? To be the most beloved of English writers, what a title that is for a man! A wild youth, wayward but full of tenderness and affection, quits the country village where his boyhood has been passed in happy musing, in idle shelter, in fond longing to see the great world out of doors, and achieve name and fortune—and after years of dire struggle, and neglect and poverty, his heart turning back as fondly to his native place, as it had longed eagerly for change when sheltered there, he writes a book and a poem, full of the recollections and feelings of home—he paints the friends and scenes of his youth, and peoples Auburn and Wakefield with remembrances of Lissoy. Wander he must, but he carries away a home-relic with him, and dies with it on his breast. His nature is truant; in repose it longs for change: as on the journey it looks back for friends and quiet. He passes to-day in building an air castle for to-morrow, or in writing yesterday’s elegy; and he would fly away this hour; but that a cage necessity keeps him. What is the charm of his verse, of his style, and humour? His sweet regrets, his delicate compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the weakness which he owns? Your love for him is half pity. You come hot and tired from the day’s battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could harm the kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon—save the harp on which he plays to you; and with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the Captains in the tents, or the soldiers round the fire, or the women and children in the villages, at whose porches he stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty.

	Forgettest thou thy bard who, hurried home
	From distant lands and, bent by poverty,
	Reposed among the quiet scenes he loved
	In native Auburn, nor disdain’d to join
	The village dancers on the sanded floor?
	No poet since hath Nature drawn so close
	To her pure bosom as her Oliver.

  It is his name only, not his dust, that is mingled with the Poets. He lies on the north side of the Temple Church, under a gravestone erected in this century. But “whatever he wrote, he did it better than any other man could do. He deserved a place in Westminster Abbey, and every year he lived would have deserved it better.” It had been intended that he should have his burial in the Abbey, but the money which a public funeral would have cost was reserved for his monument. It is on the south wall of the South Transept—in a situation selected by the most artistic, and with an inscription composed by the most learned, of his admirers. Sir Joshua Reynolds fixed the place. Dr. Johnson exemplified, in his inscription, the rule which he had sternly laid down for others, by writing it not in English, but in Latin. In vain was the famous round-robin addressed to him by all his friends.

  On this occasion [a trip to the Continent] he went as one of a family-party, with Mrs. Horneck, a widow lady, whose acquaintance he had recently made through Sir Joshua Reynolds, and her two daughters, beautiful girls of twenty and eighteen respectively. The elder, for whom Goldsmith had invented the playful name of “Little Comedy,” was engaged to be married to a Mr. Bunbury; the younger, Mary Horneck, or “The Jessamy Bride,” as Goldsmith called her, was unengaged, and—! Well, who knows? Of no feminine creature, at all events, save this “Jessamy Bride,” do we hear, in all Goldsmith’s life, so near to him, and in such circumstances, that the world can fancy he was in love with her and can wish that they had wedded. “The Jessamy Bride!” what a suggestion of the jasmine-flower, of gracefulness and white muslin, the very sound of her name! Poor, plain, mean-looking Goldy!—two-and-forty years of age, too!—did he only look and sigh, and know it to be hopeless?… When she was engaged, which was not till a year after Goldsmith’s death, it was to a Colonel Gwyn, whose wife she became about three years after that. She was alive as late as 1840, having survived Goldsmith sixty-six years. She talked of him fondly to the last.

  Of no man who has left so great a reputation, who was possessed of so much wit, who had in so eminent a degree the power to delight, is there so little testimony to his genius to be found outside his books. Though conscious of his own incapacity for conversation, he persisted in talking and blundering. He had little literature, yet his vanity was too great to allow him to disguise his ignorance. He argued when he had no facts; he doubted when there was no room for disbelief; he affirmed where he had not the means to prove. His generosity was attributed to vanity; and even vanity, his friends thought, was too moderate a term to apply to a quality which rendered a man unjust to many that he might gain the applause of a few.

  The 4th of April, 1874, was the centennial anniversary of Goldsmith’s death; and the recurrence of the date has been made the occasion, in England, of rearing a public monument to him who, after the lapse of a hundred years, is still the best-known and best-beloved writer of his age…. Whatever affection we may have for the generous and great-hearted nature of the man, and whatever the admiration his literary masterpieces may command, the world is, after all, chiefly interested in Goldsmith’s career as representing the condition of literature and literary men in the middle of the eighteenth century.

  It is amusing to find the harebrained character of the family repeated in the generation which succeeded Oliver Goldsmith. His nephew, Lieutenant Goldsmith, R.N., in 1824 resolved to try whether an ancient Cornish prophecy was true, that the famous Logan Stone would never be overturned by human strength: and, aided by a party of his seamen, he succeeded in rolling over this load of about seventy tons. The practical joke proved no joke to its perpetrator. He was ordered by the Admiralty to reinstate the Logan Stone in its proper site, and hence incurred debts which he only paid off shortly before his decease.

  His name has been used to glorify a sham Bohemianism—a Bohemianism that finds it easy to live in taverns, but does not find it easy, so far as one sees, to write poems like the “Deserted Village.” His experiences as an author have been brought forward to swell the cry about neglected genius—that is, by writers who assume their genius in order to prove the neglect. The misery that occasionally befell him during his wayward career has been made the basis of an accusation against society, the English constitution, Christianity—Heaven knows what. It is time to have done with all this nonsense. Goldsmith resorted to the hack-work of literature when everything else had failed him; and he was fairly paid for it. When he did better work, when he “struck for honest fame,” the nation gave him all the honor that he could have desired. With an assured reputation, and with ample means of subsistence, he obtained entrance into the most distinguished society then in England—he was made the friend of England’s greatest in the arts and literature—and could have confined himself to that society exclusively if he had chosen. His temperament, no doubt, exposed him to suffering; and the exquisite sensitiveness of a man of genius may demand our sympathy; but in far greater measure is our sympathy demanded for the thousands upon thousands of people who, from illness or nervous excitability, suffer from quite as keen a sensitiveness without the consolation of the fame that genius brings.

	As fabled beasts before the lyre
	Fell prone, so want and hunger fled;
	The way was free to his desire,
	And he like one with manna fed.
	The world, the world, for him was meant;
	Cathedral towers, and Alpine torrents!
	He trod a measure as he went,
	And piped and sang his way to Florence!
	Great wit and scholar though he be,
	I love, of all his famous days,
	This time of simple vagrancy
	Ere youth and bliss had parted ways.
	With what a careless heart he strayed,
	Light as the down upon a thistle,
	Made other hearts his own, and paid
	His way through Europe with a whistle!

  Near the Temple Church, in a green spot among the buildings, a plain stone laid flat on the turf bears these words: “Here lies Oliver Goldsmith.” I believe doubt has been thrown upon the statement that Goldsmith was buried in that place, but, as some poet ought to have written,

	Where doubt is disenchantment
	’Tis wisdom to believe.

We do not “drop a tear” so often as our Della Cruscan predecessors, but the memory of the author of the “Vicar of Wakefield” stirred my feelings more than a whole army of crusaders would have done.

  That Boswell had some prejudice against Goldsmith, partly due to jealousy of his intimacy with Johnson, talks of him with an absurd affectation of superiority, and dwells too much on his foibles, is no doubt true. The portrait may be slightly caricatured; but the substantial likeness is not doubtful. It would be as ill-judged to dispute Goldsmith’s foibles as to assert that Uncle Toby was above a weakness for his hobby. Goldsmith, no doubt, often blundered in conversation; went on without knowing how he should come off, and displayed ignorance when trying to “get in and shine.” Reynolds admitted the fact by explaining it as intended to diminish the awe which isolates an author. On such a question there can be no appeal from the unanimous judgment of contemporaries. But all this is perfectly compatible with his having frequently made the excellent hits reported by Boswell. The statements that he was jealous of the admiration excited by pretty women or puppet-shows, are probably exaggerations or misunderstandings of humorous remarks. But he was clearly vain, acutely sensitive to neglect, and hostile to criticism; fond of splendid garments, as appears from the testimony of his tailors’ bills, printed by Prior; and occasionally jealous, so far as jealousy can coexist with absolute guilelessness and freedom from the slightest tinge of malice. His charity seems to have been pushed beyond the limits of prudence, and all who knew him testify to the singular kindliness of his nature. According to Cradock he indulged in gambling. He was certainly not retentive of money; but his extravagance went naturally with an expansive and sympathetic character open to all social impulses.

  A stolid physician, called in consultation in those last days, and seeing his disordered state, asked, “If his mind was at ease?” Mind at ease! Surely a rasping question to put to a man whose pulse is thumping toward the hundreds, whose purse is empty, plans broken up, credit gone, debts crowding him at every point, pains racking him, and the grimy Fleet Prison close by, throwing its shadow straight across his path. No, his mind is not at ease; and the pulse does gallop faster and faster, and harder and harder to the end; when, let us hope—ease did come, and—God willing—“Rest for the weary.”

  Let him who wishes preach a sermon on this story. But there you have it. “A brother in Ireland who needs help.” The brother in London, the brother in America, the brother in Ireland who needs help. All men were his brothers, and those who needed help were first in his mind.

  As those who knew Charles Lamb intimately, loved him and delighted in his friendship in spite of his weaknesses, his irregular life and his bad puns, so the personal friends of Oliver Goldsmith were always willing to pass by his many faults and admire and love the great and lovable qualities of the man…. Because among the virtues were also strewn some not inconsiderable vices, and because a bad name is less easy to be rid of than a good one, the character of “poor Goldy” has been more or less twisted and turned and warped out of shape during the years, and he is perhaps better known as the “inspired idiot” than as a man of many high and noble qualities.

Polite Learning, 1759

  It is the first publication of Goldsmith’s in which one need now look for anything of his real mind, and is still well worth reading.

  Clouds of adversity were about Goldsmith in April, 1759, when the “Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe” was published by Dodsley, in 12mo., without its author’s name upon the title-page. The little book is interesting, as it represents the beginning of Goldsmith’s true life as a writer. It was suggested by the fact that in his year of travel he had seen something of Europe. He blunders boldly, speaks of Celtic as the language of the Eddas, and finds in Dante, who “addressed a barbarous people in a method suited to their apprehensions,” a strange mixture of good sense and absurdity. “The truth is, he owes most of his reputation to the obscurity of the times in which he lived. As in the land of Benin a man may pass for a prodigy of parts who can read, so in an age of barbarity a small degree of excellence ensures success.” Of this first essay of Goldsmith’s it may more certainly be said that there is a strange mixture in it of good sense and absurdity. He is right in the main: his sympathies are with the men of independent thought, and he sees clearly the fact that it is a poor time in Literature when criticism leads the way.

  Even when wrong, Goldsmith is generally half-way right; and this is especially true of the critical judgments contained in his first published book. The impudence of “The Enquiry” (1759) is delicious. What this young Irishman, fluting it through Europe some five years before, had not learned about the “Condition of Polite Learning,” in its principal countries, might fill a ponderous folio. What he did learn, eked out with harmless misstatement, flashes of inspiration, and a clever argument to prove that criticism has always been the foe of letters, managed to fill a respectable duodecimo, and brought him to the notice of publishers and scholars.

  An extraordinary compound of good writing, bad taste, ignorance, mother-wit, and literary originality.

Citizen of the World, 1762

  Goldsmith’s “Citizen of the World,” like all his works, bears the stamp of the author’s mind. It does not “go about to cozen reputation without the stamp of merit.” He is more observing, more original, more natural and picturesque than Johnson. His work is written on the model of the “Persian Letters,” and contrives to give an abstracted and somewhat perplexing view of things, by proposing foreign prepossessions to our own, and thus stripping objects of their customary disguises. Whether truth is elicited in his collision of contrary absurdities, I do not know; but I confess the process is too ambiguous and full of intricacy to be very amusing to my plain understanding. For light summer reading it is like walking through a garden full of traps and pitfalls…. Beau Tibbs, a prominent character in this little work, is the best comic sketch since the time of Addison; unrivalled in his finery, his vanity, and his poverty.

  If in any of his writings Goldsmith could be truly said to have echoed the measured tone of Johnson, it was probably in his most varied and agreeable “Citizen of the World,” a work written at a period when his genius was scarcely yet independent enough to allow of abjuring allegiance to the reigning powers in literature. Yet even here an imitation is but sometimes perceptible, and whenever it occurred was, perhaps, only the involuntary work of the ear taking up the rich and elaborate harmony which it was most accustomed to hear, and which, in those days, was seldom heard unaccompanied by unqualified manifestations of almost rapturous approval…. Of that gay and sparkling facetiousness which he himself was wont to admire so highly in other writers, the instances in this collection are innumerable.

  One of the most exquisitely written books in any tongue.

  If Goldsmith had to struggle socially against the disadvantages of poverty, intellectually it cannot be doubted that poverty very amply compensated him. His circumstances forced him to be an unwilling spectator of scenes, and the companion of men of whom affluence or his laziness would have kept him ignorant. His “Citizen of the World,” indeed, is an epitome of London life as it was exhibited to the observer of that age.

  As a satirist he was more like Juvenal than Horace, and we may well doubt whether he would have been able to set off the lucubrations of his Indian with the felicitous sportiveness that still makes the letters, now better known by the name under which they were subsequently published in a collected form, of “The Citizen of the World,” the most popular work of their class.

The Traveller, 1765

  Goldsmith being mentioned, Johnson observed, that it was long before his merit came to be acknowledged. That he once complained to him, in ludicrous terms of distress, “Whenever I write anything, the publick make a point to know nothing about it:” but that his “Traveller” brought him into high reputation. LANGTON. “There is not one bad line in that poem; not one of Dryden’s careless verses.” SIR JOSHUA. “I was glad to hear Charles Fox say, it was one of the finest poems in the English language.” LANGTON. “Why was you glad? You surely had no doubt of this before.” JOHNSON. “No, the merit of ‘The Traveller’ is so well established, that Mr. Fox’s praise cannot augment it, nor his censure diminish it.”

  The partiality of his friends was always against him. It was with difficulty we could give him a hearing. Goldsmith had no settled notions upon any subject, so he talked always at random. It seemed to be his intention to blurt out whatever was in his mind, and see what would become of it. He was angry, too, when catched in an absurdity; but it did not prevent him from falling into another the next minute. I remember Chamier, after talking with him for some time, said, “Well, I do believe he wrote this poem himself: and, let me tell you, that is believing a great deal.” Chamier once asked him, what he meant by slow, the last word in the first line of “The Traveller,”

Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.

Did he mean tardiness of locomotion? Goldsmith, who would say something without consideration, answered, “Yes.” I was sitting by, and said, “No, Sir; you do not mean tardiness of locomotion; you mean, that sluggishness of mind which comes upon a man in solitude.” Chamier believed then that I had written the line as much as if he had seen me write it. Goldsmith, however, was a man, who, whatever he wrote, did it better than any other man could do. He deserved a place in Westminster Abbey, and every year he lived, would have deserved it better. He had, indeed, been at no pains to fill his mind with knowledge. He transplanted it from one place to another; and it did not settle in his mind; so he could not tell what was in his own books.

  Neither the ideas nor the imagery are very new or striking, but it is exquisitely versified (in the rhymed couplet); and its ease, elegance, and tenderness have made many passages pass into the memory and language of society. It is peculiarly admirable for the natural succession and connection of the thoughts and images, one seeming to rise unforcedly, and to be evolved, from the other. It is also coloured with a tender haze, so to say, of soft sentiment and pathos, as grateful to the mind as is to the eye the blue dimness that softens the tints of a distant mountain-range. It is a relief to the reader after Pope, in whom the objects stand out with too much sharpness, and in whom we see too much intense activity of the mere intellect at work. Pope is daylight; Goldsmith is moonlight.

  To point out the beauties of this poem, would be to comment upon every passage; and, indeed, it may be safely left to the admiration of its myriad readers. Though praised by Johnson and successful at the start, passing in a few months through four editions, it grew, by degrees, like all works of genius, in popular estimation. The best test of its merit is that now, after the extraordinary production of a new race of poets of the highest powers in the nineteenth century, it is as secure of admiration as ever.

  The very first line of the poem strikes a key-note—there is in it a pathetic thrill of distance, and regret, and longing; and it has the soft musical sound that pervades the whole composition.

  When Johnson prunes or interpolates lines in the “Traveller,” we feel as though a woodman’s axe was hacking at a most delicate piece of carving.

  Leaves us cold, although there are good lines here and there…. We seem to be remote from the new spirit of poetry as we read this rhymed thesis with which the simple-hearted child-like, merry young Irishman made his appearance as a poet. In order to be esteemed he suppressed all naturalness and simplicity, and posed for a philosopher, with a full command of rhetorical devices.

Vicar of Wakefield, 1766

  The | Vicar of Wakefield. | A Tale. | Supposed to be written by himself. | Sperate miseri, cavete felices. | Salisbury: | Printed by B. Collins, | for F. Newbery, in Pater-Noster-Row, London. | mdcclxvi.

  I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was drest, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.

  There are a hundred faults in this thing, and a hundred things might be said to prove them beauties. But it is needless. A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be dull without a single absurdity. The hero of this piece unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth: he is a priest, a husbandman, and the father of a family. He is drawn as ready to teach, and ready to obey; as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity. In this age of opulence and refinement, whom can such a character please? Such as are fond of high life, will turn with disdain from the simplicity of his country fireside. Such as mistake ribaldry for humour, will find no wit in his harmless conversation; and such as have been taught to deride religion, will laugh at one whose chief stores of comfort are drawn from futurity.

  I have this very moment finish’d reading a novel call’d the “Vicar of Wakefield.” It was wrote by Dr. Goldsmith. His style is rational and sensible, and I knew it again immediately. This book is of a very singular kind—I own I began it with distaste and disrelish, having just read the elegant Letters of Henry,—the beginning of it, even disgusted me,—he mentions his wife with such indifference—such contempt—the contrast of Henry’s treatment of Frances struck me—the more so, as it is real—while this tale is fictitious—and then the style of the latter is so elegantly natural, so tenderly manly, so unassumingly rational,—I own I was tempted to thro’ the book aside—but there was something in the situation of his family, which if it did not interest me, at least drew me on—and as I proceeded, I was better pleased.—The description of his rural felicity, his simple, unaffected contentment—and family domestic happiness, gave me much pleasure—but still, I was not satisfied, a something was wanted to make the book satisfy me—to make me feel for the Vicar in ever line he writes, nevertheless, before I was half thro’ the first volume, I was, as I may truly express myself, surprised into tears, and in the second volume I really sobb’d. It appears to me, to be impossible any person could read this book thro’ with a dry eye, at the same time the best part of it is that which turns one’s griefs out of doors, to open them to laughter.

  We had lately a poet of the same name with the person just mentioned, perhaps of the same family, but by no means of the same character. His writings, in general, are much esteemed; but his poetry is greatly admired. Few tragedies have been read with stronger emotions of pity than the distressful scenes in the “Vicar of Wakefield;” yet we cannot but regret that the author of the “Traveller” should have undervalued his genius so far as to write a romance.

  In the meantime I will hope the best, and endeavour to pursue Oliver Cromwell, through all his crooked paths. I have gone but a short way, my attention having been completely engrossed by a book that has bewitched me for the time; it is the “Vicar of Wakefield,” which you must certainly read. Goldsmith puts one in mind of Shakspeare; his narrative is improbable and absurd in many instances, yet all his characters do and say so exactly what might be supposed of them, if so circumstanced, that you willingly resign your mind to the sway of this pleasing enchanter; laugh heartily at improbable incidents, and weep bitterly for impossible distresses. But his personages have all so much nature about them! Keep your gravity if you can, when Moses is going to market with the colt, in his waistcoat of gosling-green; when the Vicar’s family make the notable procession on Blackberry and his companion; or, when the fine ladies dazzle the Flamboroughs with taste, Shakspeare, and the musical glasses; not to mention the polemical triumphs of that redoubted monogamist the Vicar. ’Tis a thousand pities Goldsmith had not patience, or art, to conclude suitably a story so happily conducted; but the closing events which rush on so precipitately, are managed with so little skill, and wound up in such a hurried and really bungling manner, that you seem hastily awaked from an affecting dream.

  Now Herder came [in 1770?] and together with his great knowledge brought many other aids, and the later publications besides. Among these he announced to us the “Vicar of Wakefield” as an excellent work, with the German translation of which he would make us acquainted by reading it aloud to us himself…. The delineation of this character [that of the “excellent Wakefield”] on his course of life through joys and sorrows, the ever-increasing interest of the story, by the combination of the entirely natural with the strange and the singular, make this novel one of the best which has ever been written…. I may suppose that my readers know this work, and have it in memory; whoever hears it named for the first time here, as well as he who is induced to read it again, will thank me.

  His “Vicar of Wakefield” has charmed all Europe. What reader is there in the civilized world who is not the better for the story of the washes which the worthy Dr. Primrose demolished so deliberately with the poker—for the knowledge of the guinea which the Miss Primroses kept unchanged in their pockets,—the adventure of the picture of the Vicar’s family, which could not be got into the house,—and that of the Flamborough family, all painted with oranges in their hands—or for the story of the case of shagreen spectacles and the cosmogony?

  But whatever defects occur in the tenor of the story, the admirable ease and grace of the narrative, as well as the pleasing truth with which the principal characters are designed, make the “Vicar of Wakefield” one of the most delicious morsels of fictitious composition on which the human mind was ever employed…. We read the “Vicar of Wakefield” in youth and in age—we return to it again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature…. The wreath of Goldsmith is unsullied; he wrote to exalt virtue and expose vice; and he accomplished his task in a manner which raises him to the highest rank among British authors.

  Our only English poet of the period was Goldsmith; a pure, clear, genuine spirit, had he been of depth or strength sufficient: his “Vicar of Wakefield” remains the best of all modern Idyls, but it is and was nothing more.

  I lately chanced to fall in with “The Vicar of Wakefield,” and felt compelled to read the little book over again, from beginning to end, being not a little affected by the vivid recollection of all that I have owed to the author, for the last seventy years. The influence Goldsmith and Sterne exercised upon me, just at the chief point of my development, cannot be estimated. This high, benevolent irony, this just and comprehensive way of viewing things, this gentleness to all opposition, this equanimity under every change, and whatever else all the kindred virtues may be termed,—such things were a most admirable training for me, and surely these are the sentiments, which in the end lead us back from all the mistaken paths of life. By the way, it is strange that Yorick should incline rather to that which has no Form, and that Goldsmith should be all Form, as I myself aspired to be when the worthy Germans had convinced themselves, that the peculiarity of true humour is to have no Form.

  The sphere in which Goldsmith’s powers moved, was never very extensive, but, within it, he discovered all that was good, and shed on it the tenderest lights of his sympathizing genius. No one ever excelled so much as he in depicting amiable follies and endearing weaknesses. His satire makes us at once smile at, and love all that he so tenderly ridicules. The good Vicar’s trust in monogamy, his son’s purchase of the spectacles, his own sale of his horse, to his solemn admirer at the fair; the blameless vanities of his daughters, and his resignation under his accumulated sorrows, are among the best treasures of memory. The pastoral scenes in this exquisite tale are the sweetest in the world. The scents of the hay-field, and of the blossoming hedge-rows, seem to come freshly to our senses. The whole romance is a tenderly-coloured picture, in little, of human nature’s most genial qualities.

  The fable is indeed one of the worst that ever was constructed. It wants, not merely that probability which ought to be found in a tale of common English life, but that consistency which ought to be found even in the wildest fiction about witches, giants, and fairies.

  Look ye now, for one moment, at the deep and delicate humour of Goldsmith. How simple at his touch the venial infirmities and vanity of this good Vicar of Wakefield live lovingly before the mind’s eye! How we sympathize with poor Moses in that deep trade of his for the green spectacles! How all our good wishes for aspiring rusticity thrill for the showman who would let his bear dance only to the genteelest tunes!

  It had been published little more than four years, when two Germans whose names became afterwards world-famous, one a student at that time in his twentieth, the other a graduate in his twenty-fifth year, met in the city of Strasburg. The younger, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, a law-scholar of the university, with a passion for literature, sought knowledge from the older, Johann Gottfried Herder, for the course on which he was moved to enter. Herder, a severe and masterly, though somewhat cynical critic, laughed at the likings of the young aspirant, and roused him to other aspirations. Producing a German translation of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” he read it out aloud to Goethe in a manner which was peculiar to him; and, as the incidents of the little story came forth in his serious, simple voice,… a new ideal of letters and of life arose in the mind of the listener. Years passed on; and while that younger student raised up and re-established the literature of his country, and came at last, in his prime and in his age, to be acknowledged for the wisest of modern men, he never ceased throughout to confess what he owed to those old evenings at Strasburg. The strength which can conquer circumstances; the happy wisdom of irony which elevates itself above every object, above fortune and misfortune, good and evil, life and death, and attains to the possession of a poetical world, first visited Goethe in the tone with which Goldsmith’s tale is told. The fiction became to him life’s first reality…. He remembered it, when, at the height of his worldly honour and success, he made his written Life (Wahrheit und Dichtung) record what a blessing it had been to him; he had not forgotten it, when, some twenty years ago, standing at the age of eighty-one on the very brink of the grave, he told a friend that in the decisive moment of mental development, “The Vicar of Wakefield” had formed his education, and that he had recently, with unabated delight, “read the charming book again from beginning to end, not a little affected by the lively recollection” of how much he had been indebted to the author seventy [sixty] years before.

  How contradictory it seems that this, one of the most delightful pictures of home and home-felt happiness should be drawn by a homeless man; that the most amiable picture of domestic virtue and all the endearments of the married state should be drawn by a bachelor, who had been severed from domestic life almost from boyhood; that one of the most tender, touching, and affecting appeals on behalf of female loveliness should have been made by a man whose deficiency in all the graces of person and manner seemed to mark him out for a cynical disparager of the sex.

  With that sweet story of the “Vicar of Wakefield,” he has found entry into every castle and every hamlet in Europe. Not one of us, however busy or hard, but once or twice in our lives, has passed an evening with him, and undergone the charm of his delightful music.

  His “Vicar of Wakefield” is “a prose idyl,” somewhat spoilt by phrases too well written, but at bottom as homely as a Flemish picture.

  Goldsmith alone amongst our later poets has left us a portrait that deserves to compare with one by Chaucer. It is that ever-charming portrait of the Village Preacher, a not unworthy pendant of the “Parson,” by which, indeed, it was indirectly inspired. He has given us duplicates of it in prose in the persons of the Vicar of Wakefield and of the Man in Black. There is a tradition that he who sat to Chaucer for the Parson was no other than Wicliffe. It seems fairly certain that Goldsmith’s original was his own father. That was the one figure he could draw with the utmost skill, the deepest feeling.

  Dante exhibits great fertility in situations and conjunctions; but, besides that many of them were ready to his hand, this kind of inventiveness denotes of itself no fine creative faculty. It is the necessary equipment of the voluminous novelist. In this facility and abundance Goldsmith could not have coped with James and Bulwer; and yet the “Vicar of Wakefield” (not to go so high as “Tristram Shandy” and “Don Quixote”) is worth all their hundred volumes of tales put together.

  And the wonder is that Goldsmith of all men should have produced such a perfect picture of domestic life. What had his own life been but a moving about between garret and tavern, between bachelor’s lodgings and clubs? Where had he seen—unless, indeed, he looked back through the mist of years to the scenes of his childhood—all this gentle government, and wise blindness; all this affection, and consideration, and respect? There is as much human nature in the character of the Vicar alone as would have furnished any fifty of the novels of that day, or of this.

  But to return to our sketch of English fiction, it is now delightful to find a snowdrop springing from this muck of the classics. In the year 1766 appeared Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield.”

  No novelist has more deeply imbued his work with his own genius and spirit, and none have had a more beneficent genius, nor a more beautiful spirit to impart than the author of “The Deserted Village.” The exquisite style, the delicate choice of words, the amiability of sentiment, so peculiarly his own, and so well suited to express the simple beauty of his thoughts, gave a charm to the work which familiarity can only endear.

  Dr. Primrose and his wife, Olivia and Sophia, Moses with his white stockings and black ribbon, Mr. Burchell and his immortal “Fudge,” My Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs—have all become household words. The family picture that could not be got into the house when it was painted; the colt that was sold for a gross of green spectacles; the patter about Sanchoniathon, Manetho, Berosus, and Ocellus Lucanus, with the other humours of Mr. Ephraim Jenkinson—these are part of our stock speech and current illustration. Whether the book is still much read it would be hard to say, for when a work has, so to speak, entered into the blood of a literature, it is often more recollected and transmitted by oral tradition than actually studied. But in spite of the inconsistencies of the plot, and the incoherencies of the story, it remains, and will continue to be, one of the first of our English classics. Its sweet humanity, its simplicity, its wisdom and its common-sense, its happy mingling of character and Christianity, will keep it sweet long after more ambitious, and in many respects abler, works have found their level with the great democracy of the forgotten.

  “The Vicar of Wakefield” is remarkable for its single characters, remarkable for its incidents of pathos and humour, but has no substantial development of plot. The tangential property of Goldsmith’s mind, the happy Irish inconsequence, that led him in his “Animated Nature” to include among the varieties of the human race dwarfs and giants, mummies and waxworks, because he had seen some of these in a show at Chelsea, made him averse to all rigid or reasoned structure in his novel. He is the gayest and wisest of companions on the road, all the more because he is unaccustomed to a destination.

  When his landlady had Goldsmith arrested for debt, the only possible asset through which his friend Johnson could hope to extricate him was the manuscript of a tale which Goldsmith had written, but had never attempted to publish. This Johnson took to a publisher and advised him to buy it for sixty pounds. What would have been poor Goldsmith’s emotion could he have looked into the future and witnessed a recent event which took place in Germany: the editor of a widely circulated journal there took the votes of his subscribers as to their favourite book, and this same tale of Goldsmith’s—“The Vicar of Wakefield”—came in at the top of the poll.

  When I first read the “Vicar of Wakefield” (for I have since read it several times, and hope yet to read it many times), I found its persons and incidents familiar, and so I suppose I must have heard it read. It is still for me, one of the most modern novels: that is to say, one of the best. It is unmistakably good up to a certain point, and then unmistakably bad, but with always good enough in it to be forever imperishable. Kindness and gentleness are never out of fashion; it is these in Goldsmith which make him our contemporary, and it is worth the while of any young person presently intending deathless renown to take a little thought of them. They are the source of all refinement, and I do not believe that the best art in any kind exists without them. The style is the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb of words so that we shall not know somehow what manner of man he is within it; his speech betrayeth him, not only as to his country and his race, but more subtly yet as to his heart, and the loves and hates of his heart. As to Goldsmith, I do not think that a man of harsh and arrogant nature, of worldly and selfish soul, could ever have written his style, and I do think that, in far greater measure that criticism has recognized, his spiritual quality, his essential friendliness, expressed itself in the literary beauty that wins the heart as well as takes the fancy in his work.

  It made its way, not because Goldsmith had written it, but by reason of its domesticity and the simple idyllic charm which attracts in any age. The story of good prevailing over evil as he told it was new-old, and the tale of sure reward for patient submission in adversity is as ancient as the Book of Job. Its motive is to enforce the truth that heroism of soul may rise triumphant over the vanities and trials of daily life.

  The first edition of Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield,” 1766, a quarter of a century ago could have been purchased for £5; eight or nine years ago almost twice that sum would not have been considered excessive; in 1891 a copy sold at Sotheby’s for £90, and in May 1892 another at the same place went to £94.

  Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield,” 1766, first edition. Mansfield-Mackenzie (1889), £67. T. B. T. Hildyard (1895), £56 (original calf). Alfred Crampton (1896), £65 (morocco extra by Bedford). Rare Books and MSS. (Sotheby, March 1897), £60 (original calf).

  Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Walpole, had started English fiction upon many lines, dealing with life under the most varied aspects and from widely different points of view. But it was reserved for Goldsmith to initiate the idyllic novel—to portray with mingled humour and pathos the lives and doings of simple country folk, to touch the actualities of their existence with the transfiguring power of the poet, and to fill his descriptions with deep and genuine feeling, born of closest sympathy with the things of which he wrote. Thus, instead of following the course which others had marked out, he established a fresh point of departure. To recognize this is to appreciate something of his originality, and to understand why his work occupies a place by itself among the great novels of the time.

  As a humorist, Goldsmith set himself squarely against his contemporaries, and, with what little gall there was in him, expressly against Sterne. He never twitches at our nerves with the sentimental scene, but relieves his deepest pathos with a kindly irony. To him there is no humor in the dash, the asterisk, the wink, and the riddle; his sentences always have their logic and their rhythm. He despises ribaldry, and implies, with a grain of truth, that Sterne is only a second Tom D’Urfey, one of the most profane of Restoration wits.

  Little enough was Goldsmith like his own hero, the Vicar of Wakefield, save only that both were lovable; and in no sense is “The Vicar of Wakefield” an autobiography. It is an imperishable tale of the misfortunes of that compound of wisdom and simplicity, of vanity and unselfishness, of shrewdness and benevolence—the Vicar of Wakefield.

The Hermit, 1766

  The best things in it are some neat turns of moral and pathetic sentiment, given with a simple conciseness that fits them for being retained in the memory. As to the story, it has little fancy or contrivance to recommend it.

  Any reader of the ballad who pleases may make a wry face, along with Kenrick of Grub street, at the insipidity of Dr. Goldsmith’s negus, and may seek elsewhere some livelier liquor. We feel differently, for we have heard this ballad in the open air from Mr. Burchell’s manly throat, while Sophia in her new ribbons languished in the hay. To us, the love-lorn stranger is an eighteenth-century cousin—and so perhaps a little modish—of Rosalind and Viola. Those earlier disguisers bore themselves no doubt more gallantly, with more of saucy archness; but none was more sweetly discovered than Goldsmith’s pretty pilgrim by her mantling blush, and bashful glance, and rising breast.

  At most we can allow it accomplishment and ease. But its sweetness has grown a little insipid, and its simplicity, to eyes unannointed with eighteenth-century sympathy, borders perilously upon the ludicrous.

The Deserted Village, 1770

  What true and pretty pastoral images has Goldsmith in his “Deserted Village!” They beat all: Pope, and Phillips, and Spenser too, in my opinion;—That is, in the pastoral, for I go no farther.

  “The Deserted Village” is a poem far inferior to “The Traveller,” though it contains many beautiful passages. I do not enter into its pretensions to skill in poetical economy, though, in that respect, it contains a strange mixture of important truths. My business is with the poetry. Its inferiority to its predecessor [“The Traveller”] arises from its comparative want of compression, as well as of force and novelty of imagery. Its tone of melancholy is more sickly, and some of the descriptions which have been most praised are marked by all the poverty and flatness, and indeed are peopled with the sort of comic and grotesque figures, of a Flemish landscape.

  A little poem, which we passionately received into our circle, allowed us from henceforward to think of nothing else. Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village” necessarily delighted every one at that grade of cultivation, in that sphere of thought. Not as living and active, but as a departed, vanished existence was described, all that one so readily looked upon, that one loved, prized, sought passionately in the present, to take part in it with the cheerfulness of youth. Highdays and holidays in the country, church consecrations and fairs, the solemn assemblage of the elders under the village linden-tree, supplanted in its turn by the lively delight of youth in dancing, while the more educated classes show their sympathy. How seemly did these pleasures appear, moderated as they were by an excellent country pastor, who understood how to smooth down and remove all that went too far,—that gave occasion to quarrel and dispute. Here again we found an honest Wakefield, in his well-known circle, yet no longer in his living bodily form, but as a shadow recalled by the soft mournful tones of the elegiac poet. The very thought of this picture is one of the happiest possible, when once the design is formed to evoke once more an innocent past with a graceful melancholy. And in this kindly endeavour, how well has the Englishman succeeded in every sense of the word! I shared the enthusiasm for this charming poem with Gotter, who was more felicitous than myself with the translation undertaken by us both; for I had too painfully tried to imitate in our language the delicate significance of the original, and thus had well agreed with single passages, but not with the whole.

  In Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” much entertainment is afforded, and compassion excited, by the inimitable skill and pathos of the author in displaying the characters, pastimes, wrongs, and sufferings of the natives of “Auburn:” but still the reader condescends to be pleased, or to pity; and the poet is rather their advocate than their neighbour, or one of themselves: there is little of fellow-feeling in the case.

  The “Deserted Village” is, of all Goldsmith’s productions, unquestionably the favorite. It carries back the mind to the early seasons of life, and re-asserts the power of unsophisticated tastes. Hence, while other poems grow stale, this preserves its charm…. So thoroughly did the author revise the “Deserted Village,” that not a single original line remained. The clearness and warmth of his style is, to my mind, as indicative of Goldsmith’s truth, as the candor of his character or the sincerity of his sentiments. It has been said of Pitt’s elocution, that it had the effect of impressing one with the idea that the man was greater than the orator. A similar influence it seems to me is produced by the harmonious versification and elegant diction of Goldsmith.

  The sweet and tender seriousness of the “Deserted Village” is relieved by touches of humor, as well as heightened by touches of pathos; if sorrow disturb the heart, it is more than half consoled by the thought, that gentle or happy natures will find or make for themselves such simple and unexacting pleasures, wherever their lot may be cast. And then the personality which we cannot help attaching to this poem, the reflex of Goldsmith’s own character, private history, cherished opinions and tastes, and secret sorrow—what interest do they impart to every line of it! Spite of all the controversy about the identity of Auburn and Lissoy, we shall always feel that the former is the scene of the poet’s early life, and the haven towards which, amid the storms of his struggling existence, his eyes were ever turned.

  It is in “The Deserted Village,” his best known poem, that he has most fully shown the grace and truthfulness with which he could touch natural scenes. Lissoy, an Irish village where the poet’s brother had a living, is said to have been the original from which he drew. In the poem, the church which crowns the neighboring hill, the mill, the brook, the hawthorn-tree, are all taken straight from the outer world. The features of Nature and the works of man, the parsonage, the school-house, the ale-house, all harmonize in one picture, and though the feeling of desolation must needs be a melancholy one, yet it is wonderfully varied and relieved by the uncolored faithfulness of the pictures from Nature and the kindly humor of those of man. It is needless to quote from a poem which every one knows so well. The verse of Pope is not the best vehicle for rural description, but it never was employed with greater grace and transparency than in “The Deserted Village.” In that poem there is fine feeling for Nature, in her homely forms, and truthful descriptions of these, but beyond this Goldsmith does not venture. The pathos of the outward world in its connection with man is there, but no reference to the meaning of Nature in itself, much less any question of its relation to the Divine Being and a supersensible world.

  In English literature there is nothing more thoroughly English than these writings produced by an Irishman.

  The matter is of more importance to him than the manner; and at the same time his ear for music, and familiar acquaintance with good models have enabled him to go on without jarring the reader’s ear with crude or false lines. Figures of speech are introduced in sufficient variety, but always from well-understood sources, and never expressed in such a way as to cause any effort in following them or their application. We are not challenged to stop and admire new and glittering constructions, nor ingeniously improvised words. Common speech affords the most of his material; and thus his lines pass again into common speech, and enrich the thought of thousands who are unaffected by the more ambitious masters of verse. He is strikingly free from foreign airs, uses no metrical variations caught from the Continent, and yet, by skilfully varying his pauses, avoids monotony throughout. He has a poet’s mastery of epithet…. “The Deserted Village” deserves our careful attention from the deep feeling in its thought, the music in its lines, and its entire freedom from affectation. It stands for itself, a graceful example of true English literature.

  We do not read “The Deserted Village” for its Political Economy: we read it for its idyllic sweetness; for its portraits of the village preacher, of the village schoolmaster, of the country inn; for its pathetic description of the poor emigrants; for the tender and noble feeling with which Goldsmith closes the poem in his Farewell to Poetry.

History of England, 1771

  I have published, or Davies has published for me, an “Abridgment of the History of England,” for which I have been a good deal abused in the newspapers, for betraying the liberties of the people. God knows I had no thought for or against liberty in my head; my whole aim being to make up a book of a decent size, that, as Squire Richard says, would do no harm to nobody. However, they set me down as an arrant Tory, and consequently an honest man. When you come to look at any part of it, you’ll say that I am a sore Whig.

  The History on the whole, however, was well received; some of the critics declared that English history had never before been so usefully, so elegantly, and agreeably epitomized; “and, like his other historical writings, it has kept its ground” in English literature.

  As a historian, Goldsmith accomplishes all at which he aims. He does not promise much, but he does more than he promises. He takes, it is true, facts which had been already collected, but he shapes them with an art that is all his own.

  In Goldsmith’s “History of England” no mention is made of the great plague or the great fire of London.

Retaliation, 1774

  In fact the poem, for its graphic truth, its nice discrimination, its terse good sense, and its shrewd knowledge of the world, must have electrified the club almost as much as the first appearance of “The Traveller,” and let them still deeper into the character and talents of the man they had been accustomed to consider as their butt. “Retaliation,” in a word, closed his accounts with the club, and balanced all his previous deficiencies.

  Plutarch, as a character-painter, is a dauber to Oliver Goldsmith; nor has Reynolds himself, in those portraits of his in which, according to Burke, he has combined the invention of history and the amenity of landscape, “excelled these little sketches, where the artist not only draws the literal features, but gives at once the inner soul and the future history of his subjects.” The character of Garrick and Burke have never been surpassed, and have been approached only by Lowell, in his “Fable for Critics”—a poem formed upon the model (and the motive, too), of “Retaliation.”

  “Retaliation” is the most mischievous, and the most playful, the friendliest and the faithfulest of satires. How much better we know Garrick because Goldsmith has shown him to us in his acting off the stage! And do we as often think of Reynolds in any attitude as in that of smiling non-listener to the critical coxcombs.

	“When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios and staff,
	He shifted his trumpet and only took snuff.”

Would that portraits of Johnson and Boswell had been added!

Animated Nature, 1774

  Distress drove Goldsmith upon undertakings, neither congenial with his studies, nor worthy of his talents. I remember him, when in his chamber in the Temple, he shewed me the beginning of his “Animated Nature;” it was with a sigh, such as genius draws, when hard necessity diverts it from its bent to drudge for bread, and talk of birds and beasts and creeping things, which Pidcock’s showman would have done as well. Poor fellow, he hardly knew an ass from a mule, nor a turkey from a goose, but when he saw it on the table.

  The descriptions and definitions are often loose and inaccurate, and the chief defect of the work arises from its being a mere compilation from books. It has therefore none of the freshness of personal observation; nothing which awakens the curiosity and inspires the confidence of the reader, as in the delightful pages of White, Montague, or Rennie.

  Of all his hack labours for booksellers that which seems to have been written with the greatest good-will. The work contains many exquisite passages, and as it is not very probable that it will ever be reprinted in extenso, those passages in which the writer appears to the greatest advantage richly deserve to find a place in any edition of his writings.

Comedies

  Goldsmith in vain tried to stem the torrent by opposing a barrier of low humour, and dulness and absurdity, more dull and absurd than English sentimental Comedy itself.

  Goldsmith was, perhaps, in relation to Sheridan, what Vanburgh was to Congreve. His comedies turn on an extravagance of intrigue and disguise, and so far belong to the Spanish school. But the ease of his humorous dialogue, and the droll, yet true conception of the characters, made sufficient amends for an occasional stretch in point of probability. If all who draw on the spectators for indulgence, were equally prepared to compensate by a corresponding degree of pleasure, they would have little occasion to complain.

  His two admirable Comedies of “The Good Natured Man,” and “She Stoops to Conquer,” are the greenest spots in the Dramatic waste of the period of which we are speaking. They are worthy of the Author of “The Vicar of Wakefield;” and to praise them more highly is impossible. Wit without licentiousness; Humour with out extravagance; brilliant and elegant dialogue; and forcible but natural delineation of character, are the excellencies with which his pages are prodigally strewn.

  Goldsmith’s immediate predecessors were the playwrights of the sentimental school. His literary taste and keen sense of humour revolted against their general badness and their bathos, and he went back for models to the dramatists of the Restoration,—a term, be it observed, which has much more than a chronological significance,—and both Goldsmith and Sheridan may in a sense be taken to be the last representatives of the great Restoration School of Comedy.

The Good-Natured Man, 1768

  The town will not bear Goldsmith’s low humour, and justly. It degrades his Good natur’d Man, whom they were taught to pity and have a sort of respect for, into a low buffoon; and, what is worse, into a falsifier, a character unbecoming a gentleman.

  Is labored and vaguely portrayed.

  Honey-wood (the Good-Natured Man) is not a successful bit of painting; it is impossible to feel that there is reality or naturalness in the character. As the leading lover, also, Honey-wood should exact our sympathy in his misfortunes, instead of which he represses it. When he entertains the idea of giving up the woman he loves to such a creature as Lofty, we are offended with him, but later on, when he actually pleads for his rival to Miss Richland (she taking it for his own declaration), his conduct provokes disgust. Goldsmith seems to have felt that the character was not satisfactory, if we may judge by the attempts made to justify it, in the speeches at the end of the play given to Sir William Honey-wood. As it stands, Croaker (originally played by Shuter) is the best acting part in the piece. Collaboration would not have been easy with Goldsmith, but it might in many respects have improved “The Good-Natured Man.”

She Stoops to Conquer, 1773

  Dr. Goldsmith has written a Comedy—no, it is the lowest of all farces. It is not the subject I condemn, though very vulgar, but the execution. The drift tends to no moral, no edification of any kind. The situations, however, are well imagined, and make one laugh, in spite of the grossness of the dialogue, the forced witticisms, and total improbability of the whole plan and conduct. But what disgusts me most is, that though the characters are very low, and aim at a lower humour, not one of them says a sentence that is natural or marks any character at all. It is set up in opposition to sentimental comedy, and is as bad as the worst of them.

  The whole company pledged themselves to the support of the ingenious poet, and faithfully kept their promise to him. In fact he needed all that could be done for him, as Mr. Colman, then manager of Covent Garden theatre, protested against the comedy, when as yet he had not struck upon a name for it. Johnson at length stood forth in all his terrors as champion for the piece, and backed by us his clients and retainers demanded a fair trial. Colman again protested, but, with that salve for his own reputation, liberally lent his stage to one of the most eccentric productions that ever found its way to it, and “She Stoops to Conquer” was put into rehearsal. We were not over-sanguine of success, but perfectly determined to struggle hard for our author: we accordingly assembled our strength at the Shakespear Tavern in a considerable body for an early dinner, where Samuel Johnson took the chair at the head of a long table, and was the life and soul of the corps: the poet took post silently by his side with the Burkes, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fitzherbert, Caleb Whitefoord and a phalanx of North-British pre-determined applauders, under the banner of Major Mills, all good men and true. Our illustrious president was in inimitable glee, and poor Goldsmith that day took all his raillery as patiently and complacently as my friend Boswell would have done any day, or every day of his life. In the meantime we did not forget our duty, and though we had a better comedy going, in which Johnson was chief actor, we betook ourselves in good time to our separate and allotted posts, and waited the awful drawing up of the curtain. As our stations were pre-concerted, so were our signals for plaudits arranged and determined upon in a manner, that gave every one his cue where to look for them, and how to follow them up…. All eyes were upon Johnson, who sate in a front row of a side box, and when he laughed everybody thought themselves warranted to roar…. We carried our play through, and triumphed not only over Colman’s judgment, but our own.

  That delightful comedy, “She Stoops to Conquer,” would indeed deserve a volume, and is the best specimen of what an English comedy should be. It illustrates excellently what has been said as to the necessity of the plot depending on the characters, rather than the characters depending on the plot, as the fashion is at present…. What a play! We never tire of it. How rich in situations, each the substance of a whole play! At the very first sentence the stream of humour begins to flow.

  He at least lived long enough to witness the brilliant beginning of a dramatic triumph which has lasted till our day, and which only one other comedy written since, “The School for Scandal,” can be said to have rivaled. Macaulay calls it “an incomparable farce in five acts;” its rollicking drollery and sparkling wit are fitting to amuse all generations, and its dramatic skill is a victory of true inventive genius.

  Night fell, and [Goldsmith] found himself at Ardagh, half-way on his journey. Casting about for information as to “the best house,” that is to say, the best inn in the neighbourhood, he unluckily lit upon one Cornelius Kelly, who had been fencing-master to the Marquis of Granby, but, what is more to the purpose, was a confirmed wag and practical joker. Amused with Oliver’s schoolboy swagger, he gravely directed him to the mansion of the local magnate, Squire Featherston. To Squire Featherston’s the lad accordingly repaired, and called lustily for some one to take his horse. Being ushered into the presence of the supposed landlord and his family, he ordered a good supper, invited the rest to share it, treated them to a bottle or two of wine, and finally retired to rest, leaving careful injunctions that a hot cake should be prepared for his breakfast on the morrow. His host, who was a humourist, and moreover knew something of his visitor’s father, never undeceived him; and it was not until he quitted the supposed inn next day that he learned, to his confusion, that he had been entertained at a private house. Thus early in Oliver Goldsmith’s career was rehearsed the first sketch of the successful comedy of “She Stoops to Conquer.”

  Is the best society comedy in our language.

General

  We do not mean to insinuate that his lucubrations [“The Bee”] are so void of merit as not to deserve the public attention. On the contrary, we must confess ourselves to have found no inconsiderable entertainment in their perusal. His stile is not the worst, and his manner is agreeable enough, in our opinion, however it may have failed of exciting universal admiration. The truth is, most of his subjects are already sufficiently worn out.

	The trading wits endeavour to attain,
	Like booksellers, the world’s first idol—gain:
	For this they puff the heavy Goldsmith’s line,
	And hail his sentiment, though trite, divine.

  Goldsmith being mentioned: JOHNSON. “It is amazing how little Goldsmith knows. He seldom comes where he is not more ignorant than any one else.” SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. “Yet there is no man whose company is more liked.” JOHNSON. “To be sure, Sir. When people find a man of the most distinguished abilities as a writer, their inferiour while he is with them, it must be highly gratifying to them. What Goldsmith comically says of himself is very true,—he always gets the better when he argues alone; meaning, that he is master of a subject in his study, and can write well upon it; but when he comes into company, grows confused, and unable to talk. Take him as a poet, his ‘Traveller’ is a very fine performance; ay, and so is his ‘Deserted Village,’ were it not sometimes too much the echo of his ‘Traveller.’ Whether, indeed, we take him as a poet,—as a comick writer,—or as an historian, he stands in the first class.”

  No man had the art of displaying with more advantage as a writer, whatever literary acquisitions he made. “Nihil quod tetigit non ornavit.” His mind resembled a fertile, but thin soil. There was a quick, but not a strong vegetation, of whatever chanced to be thrown upon it. No deep root could be struck. The oak of the forest did not grow there; but the elegant shrubbery and the fragrant parterre appeared in gay succession.

  What can be more exquisite than the poetry of Goldsmith, whose versification is, without any exception, more sweet and harmonious than that of any other poet, and whose sentiments and imagery are equally beautiful and pathetic.

  Goldsmith was the most natural of cultivated poets. Though he retained the cadence, he softened and varied the style of his master, Pope. His ideas are often common-place and his language slovenly; but his simplicity and tenderness will always continue to render him one of the most delightful of our poets. Whatever excellence he possesses is genuine, neither the result of affectation nor even of effort; few writers have so much poetry with so little glare. His prose is of a pure school, but not of sufficient elegance to atone for the substantial defects of his writings, except indeed in one charming novel, in which if he had more abstained from common-place declamation, less indulged his national propensity to broad farce, and not at last hurried his personages out of their difficulties with improbable confusion, he would have reached nearly the highest rank in that species of composition.

  Goldsmith wrote with perfect elegance and beauty, in a style of mellow tenderness and elaborate simplicity. He had the harmony of Pope without his quaintness, and his selectness of diction without his coldness and eternal vivacity.

  His whole manner has a still depth of feeling and reflection, which gives back the image of nature unruffled and minutely. He has no redundant thoughts or false transports; but seems, on every occasion, to have weighed the impulse to which he surrendered himself. Whatever ardour or casual felicities he may have thus sacrificed, he gained a high degree of purity and self-possession. His chaste pathos makes him an insinuating moralist, and throws a charm of Claude-like softness over his descriptions of homely objects that would seem only fit to be the subjects of Dutch painting. But his quiet enthusiasm leads the affections to humble things without a vulgar association; and he inspires us with a fondness to trace the simplest reflections of Auburn, till we count the furniture of its ale-house and listen to

“The varnish’d clock, that tick’d behind the door.”

  He was a friend to virtue, and in his most playful pages never forgets what is due to it. A gentleness, delicacy, and purity of feeling, distinguishes whatever he wrote, and bears a correspondence to the generosity of a disposition which knew no bounds but his last guinea. It was an attribute almost essential to such a temper, that he wanted the proper guards of firmness and decision, and permitted, even when aware of their worthlessness, the intrusions of cunning and of effrontery.

  Goldsmith did everything happily.

  Goldsmith is, perhaps, the only English poet who can claim the exclusive merit of writing from the heart alone; not that he has not written pieces of wit and humour, but that his principal poems are the pure offspring of feeling and passion. It was, however, a subdued passion, for there is more pathos in Eloisa to Abelard, than in any of his productions, or in any other production of the English language…. Goldsmith possessed a considerable portion of patriot virtue, but it was not sufficiently ardent to be called patriotic fire. He was more a philanthropist than a patriot.

  Of Goldsmith, all praise were idle, and censure vain. For simplicity, sweetness, and tenderness, he has yet no rival: and he is always perspicuous and correct.

  We do ourselves wrong to compare him injuriously with others. We are losers by it. We cannot and ought not to be satisfied with his poetry, and seek nothing higher and different; yet if we forget it, and even think less of it, the change will not be owing to our worship of greater genius, but to a feverish love to idols. Indeed, the relish of such poetry is some evidence of an uncorrupted taste. It owes nothing to affectation, and is in nothing more original than its serenity or tempered feeling. While the glory of greater artists is in subduing their inspiration to their conception of perfect workmanship, his distinction is that he is willing not to stimulate his powers to false efforts. He effects one purpose of all real poetry, by refining the perception and multiplying the sources of truth.

  For accurate research or grave disquisition, he was not well qualified by nature or by education. He knew nothing accurately: his reading had been desultory; nor had he meditated deeply on what he had read. He had seen much of the world; but he had noticed and retained little more of what he had seen than some grotesque incidents and characters which happen to strike his fancy. But, though his mind was very scantily stored with materials, he used what materials he had in such a way as to produce a wonderful effect. There have been many greater writers; but perhaps no writer was ever more uniformly agreeable. His style was always pure and easy, and, on proper occasions, pointed and energetic. His narratives were always amusing, his descriptions always picturesque, his humour rich and joyous, yet not without an occasional tinge of amiable sadness. About everything that he wrote, serious or sportive, there was a certain natural grace and decorum, hardly to be expected from a man a great part of whose life had been passed among thieves and beggars, streetwalkers and merryandrews, in those squalid dens which are the reproach of great capitals.

  We are obliged to confess that the Vicar, artless and delightful as he is, is an inferior brother of Parson Adams; and that there are great improbabilities in the story. But the family manners, and the Flamboroughs, and Moses, are all delicious; and the style of writing perfect. Again, we are forced to admit, that the “Traveller” and “Deserted Village” are not of the highest or subtlest order of poetry; yet they are charming of their kind, and as perfect in style as his prose. They are cabinets of exquisite workmanship, which will outlast hundreds of oracular shrines of oak ill put together. Goldsmith’s most thoroughly original productions are his comedies and minor poems, particularly “She Stoops to Conquer.”

  It is in the narrowness of his range, and in the close identity of his characters with his own heart and experience, that we are to find the main cause of Goldsmith’s universal and unfading popularity. He had in himself an original to draw from, with precisely those qualities which win general affection. Lovable himself, in spite of all his grave faults, he makes lovable the various copies that he takes from the master portrait. His secret is this—the emotions he commands are pleasurable. He is precisely what Johnson calls him, “affectuum lenis dominator”—potens because lenis. He is never above the height of the humblest understanding; and, by touching the human heart, he raises himself to a level with the loftiest. He has to perfection what the Germans call Anmuth. His muse wears the zone of the Graces…. Whether you read “The Deserted Village,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” “The Goodnatured Man,” or “The Citizen of the World,” you find at the close that much the same emotions have been awakened—the heart has been touched much in the same place. But with what pliant aptitude the form and mode are changed and disguised! Poem, novel, essay, drama, how exquisite of its kind! The humour that draws tears, and the pathos that provokes smiles, will be popular to the end of the world.

  While the productions of writers of loftier pretension and more sounding names are suffered to moulder on our shelves, those of Goldsmith are cherished and laid in our bosoms. We do not quote them with ostentation, but they mingle with our minds, sweeten our tempers, and harmonize our thoughts; they put us in good-humor with ourselves and with the world, and in so doing they make us happier and better men.

	But gentler GOLDSMITH, whom no man could hate,
	Beloved of Heaven, pursued by wayward fate,
	Whose verse shall live in every British mind,
	Though sweet, yet strong; though nervous, yet refined;—
	A motley part he play’d in life’s gay scene,
	The dupe of vanity and wayward spleen;
	Aping the world, a strange fantastic elf;
	Great, generous, noble, when he was himself.

  His books, I think, must be always pleasant, as well as profitable, friends, provided we do not expect from them, as we ought not to expect from any friend, more than they profess to give.

  Goldsmith could not be termed a thinker; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month of dry weather, the shower brightens the dusty shrubbery of a suburban villa.

  It is a sensible relief to turn from the maudlin sentimentality of Richardson and the coarseness of Fielding and Smollett, to the purity of the pages of Goldsmith.

  Goldsmith, in his farm-house lodgings on the Edgeware road, used to sit writing in very loose apparel,—sometimes wandering into the kitchen, without noticing any one, where he would stand musing with his back to the fire, and then hurry off again to his room, to jot down whatever thought might have struck him. It was off at a tangent with him; but then whatever he touched (tetigit) he adorned. Rough jottings down are seldom so smooth as his.

  The elegant simplicity, the genial wisdom, the lambent humor, the melting tenderness, the perennial cheerfulness, and the fresh and uncloying sweetness, which charm us in every line of Goldsmith.

  The most thoughtful, the most gentle, the most truly humourous of all the writers of his age or of any age, he is, on the whole, the most attractive figure in our literary history. He has touched every kind of composition, history, poetry, drama, fiction, and criticism, and he has touched them all with a master’s hand.

  The simplicity of his pathos and the gentleness of his humour have never been equalled.

  In Goldsmith we have a respectable degree of variability in sentence-length, and therefore of one chief element of proportion—though other sense of paragraphic proportion Goldsmith had none. The general sentence-length is low, and 15 per cent. of the sentences fall below 15 words; on the other hand there are a few periods of more than 100 words. Goldsmith’s narrative sequence is perfect, little needing nor much using connectives. He has not such unity as some descriptive and narrative writers of the day, Fielding, for instance. He follows Fielding carelessly in the handling of dialogue.

  Much of its attraction is of that native and personal kind which resists the resolvents of analysis. That he may have learnt something of phrase-building from the “Rambler” is possible, but he clearly, and fortunately, did not learn too much. It is demonstrable that, for certain of the qualities of his verse, he was largely indebted to French models and it is not unreasonable to conclude that French models generally, and Voltaire in particular, had also influenced him in prose. But when one has catalogued his peculiarities and noted his differences, when one has duly scheduled his gifts of simplicity, ease, gaiety, pathos, and humour, something still remains undefined and evasive—the something that is Genius.

  Goldsmith, doubtless, felt that his proper study was Man. Hence the Greek reserve in the treatment of the accessory landscape. Why, then, have these fragmentary glimpses so permanent a hold on our memories and hearts? We may find this in their perfect propriety of choice, their “keeping,” as painters say, in their delightful simplicity of thought and expression,—perhaps above all, in the music, the equable balance of syllables, with which Goldsmith—and he only—by some mysterious gift of grace, has half-transformed the too monotonously accented decasyllabic couplet of Pope.

  The one great writer whom Johnson could not eclipse was Oliver Goldsmith, who, amidst the general contamination, stood out as the exponent of a pure and almost faultless prose style. It is questionable whether Goldsmith’s essays have generally received the attention they merit, for they are easily the best of their time.

  By the side of Johnson, like an antelope accompanying an elephant, we observe the beautiful figure of Oliver Goldsmith. In spite of Johnson’s ascendency, and in spite of a friendship that was touching in its nearness, scarcely a trace of the elder companion is to be discovered in the work of the younger…. There is no ponderosity about Goldsmith, whose limpid and elegant simplicity of style defies analysis. In that mechanical and dusty age he did not set up to be an innovator. We search in vain, in Goldsmith’s verse or prose, for any indication of a consciousness of the coming change. He was perfectly contented with the classical traditions, but his inborn grace and delicacy of temper made him select the sweeter and the more elegant among the elements of his time. As a writer, purely, he is far more enjoyable than Johnson; he was a poet of great flexibility and sensitiveness; his single novel is much fuller of humour and nature than the stiff “Rasselas;” as a dramatist he succeeded brilliantly in an age of failures; he is one of the most perfect of essayists. Nevertheless, with all his perennial charm, Goldsmith, in his innocent simplicity, does not attract the historic eye as the good giant Johnson does, seated for forty years in the undisputed throne of letters.

  In the “Deserted Village” and the “Vicar of Wakefield” we have his love of nature and man, shot through with the characteristic elements of his varied and eventful life. They are graceful and touching in their revelation of the pleasures and pains of mortal life, and yet there is not an element of bitterness. In each nature and man are revealed with distinctness and color, with warmth and naturalness, entirely new to English literature. No changes of literary fashion can ever lessen the estimation in which these works are held by all who love simplicity and truth.

  The slave of letters and the master of letters.