the immortal biographer and to the other memoirs of the period, the student must turn for an inimitably vivid record of the personality and ways, the speech, the tastes, the habits of those good comrades and great men, over whose converse everyone loves to linger,Sir Joshua Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Goldsmith. Here we can only chronicle the story, told by Johnson himself, how late in the year 1764 Goldsmith in great distress sent for Johnson, having been arrested for rent: how Johnson bore away a manuscript novel, called The Vicar of Wakefield, sold it for sixty pounds, three hundred dollars, and set his friend. free. The price was little for that delightful work: yet the fact that Johnson could secure such a sum proves that Goldsmith had already a certain reputation.

More prosperous days came later. Many of the ablest men in the eighteenth century were unhappy: several, including Gray, Collins, Cowper, and Johnson himself, were over-shadowed by mental disease. But Goldy, as the great Doctor called him, was apparently a fairly happy man, who enjoyed his friends, his trips into the country and to the Continent, and not least the innocent personal vanities which are mercilessly recorded for us in contemporary accounts. He achieved distinction in one line of letters after another. First known as a light essayist, his poem The Traveller, published in 1764, when he was thirty-six years old, gave him a leading position among writers of verse, a position confirmed by The Deserted Village six years later. His novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, published in 1766, found its way at once to people's

hearts and his two dramas, The Good-Natured Man (1767) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771), had a charm that still holds the stage. Goldsmith was a blunderer in social converse, and funny stories are told of his awkwardness and simplicity. Yet he had on occasion a pretty wit of his own, and if people laughed at him, they loved him. When news came of his death, Burke burst into tears and Reynolds painted no more that day. "Let not his frailties be remembered: he was a very great man,' said Dr. Johnson. "Frailties" he had in abundance, but his instincts were pure and gay, his spirit was sensitive to all fine things, his whole nature, in a worldly age, was unworldly, tender, and sincere. In that famous group there is no other man who appeals so warmly to the affections.

II.

We

Goldsmith is one of the most charming and versatile of English writers. Great writers usually do one thing supremely well. Shakespeare wrote dramas. Shelley lyrics, Thackeray novels. Goldsmith did many things: none supremely, all delightfully. need not speak of the hack work he conscientiously performed, the History of England, the compilations of scientific information: putting these aside, how much remains! Goldsmith's essays, especially those collected as The Citizen of the World, are the most graceful writing of that order between Addison and Lamb: his two dramas are, with the exception of the plays of Sheridan, the most living comedies in an undramatic age: The Vicar of Wakefield is an idyll

that has become a classic: and the two companion poems, The Deserted Village and The Traveller, give him an assured place among English poets.

Goldsmith wrote in the middle of the eighteenth century. The men who carried on the pseudo-classic traditions were his contemporaries; so too were the leaders of the romantic revolt, Gray, Collins, Dr. Percy of the Reliques, and Horace Walpole. The great novelists, Richardson, (for whom he was once proofreader) Fielding, and Smollett, had immediately preceded him. The stars of Gibbon, Hume, and Adam Smith were rising. For the Romantic school Goldsmith had no liking, and he adhered stoutly to old forms: but nevertheless the new spirit is in his work. True, it shows no trace of that awakening imaginative passion memorable in the poems of Gray and Collins. Goldsmith's imagination was weak his subjects were drawn from what he had observed or experienced in the flesh, and when, as in The Citizen of the World, he spins a thread of story out of pure fantasy, his work is laughable to a degree. But if deficient in imagination, it is redolent of feeling. Emotion of that purest type in which tears and laughter blend, makes The Vicar of Wakefield a limpid source of refreshment, whether to a Goethe or to a little school-girl. His comedies are provocative of hearty laughter, but the laughter is innocent and loving, not barbed with a sneer like the laughter of Swift or Pope.

:

It is humor indeed that saves his sentiment from sentimentality, and it is largely humor that enables us to claim Goldsmith as one of the pioneers of literary

realism. His realism is not sustained. Sweet Auburn may be a true village, but the inhabitants wend their way to a country of fantasy. The plot of The Vicar of Wakefield is full of harmless conventions; nor is the joyous world of the comedies quite the actual world. Yet there is evident in all Goldsmith's writings the instinctive quest of simplicity and truth. He really prefers the Vicar of Wakefield for a hero to any of the fine folk who move in stately minuet through the literature of the age of Queen Anne. He was in a sense a man of the world; his essays attest a keen if not profound gift of social criticism (as in the entertaining panegyric of the beauty of the ladies of China as compared with those of England); yet he was never worldly. His books evince a nature of rare delicacy, in which the keynote is a gentle sincerity that charms us still. Many eighteenth century writers seem successfully to hide themselves when they write: if it were not for Boswell, who would know Dr. Johnson? Goldsmith, on the contrary, revealed himself, and the man he reveals is one whom everyone must love.

III.

Warm sympathy mingles with keen powers of observation in The Traveller, a poem that records the impressions of different nations received by Goldsmith in his youthful travels. Perhaps the powers of observation are the more evident. The poem is full of general statements, aptly put, about great countries and various racial types. But The Deserted Village has always been the more popular of the two poems,

just because it is the one in which Goldsmith's heart speaks most clearly. It lingers fondly over the fate of one little village such as he loved when a boy. It may not possess the highest qualities of poetry: but it is written in English beautifully pure; it is full of feeling and of gentle humorous wisdom; it gives us delightful sketches of innocent country life and of two or three quaint village people; and with all its quiet tone, it is aflame with a noble passion for social justice and a fine, hot sympathy with the wrongs of the poor.

Let us first note the form of the poems. In the preface to The Traveller Goldsmith says: "What criticisms have we not heard of late, in favor of blank verse, Pindaric odes, choruses, anapests, and iambics, alliterative care, and happy negligence!" It happened that Gray had recently published his Pindaric Odes, and that discussion had indeed been rife regarding the advisability of enlarging the borders of poetic style. Goldsmith was a conservative so far as the metrical form of his poems is concerned. He adhered to the chief poetic tradition of his century in using the so-called heroic couplet which had been brought to perfection by Dryden and Pope and which had for more than one generation driven all free movement of poetic feeling out of the field in favor of “a wit all see-saw between That and This." We may question whether the couplet, with its demand for epigrammatic conciseness, was the best possible vehicle for the sympathetic picture of village life which Goldsmith desired to present in The Deserted Village. It was better adapted to the generalizations