were the gems and confetti of many an occasion. Garrick went for Goldy and Goldy went for Garrick, with Boswell industriously and surreptitiously taking notes; and so we had such appetising dishes of personfalities and fun as were served up in 'Retaliation.' But it was a little hard on Oliver that the descriptions and exaggerations of his oddities and quaint incapacities should have persisted as they have done. Let not his frailties be remembered,' wrote Dr Johnson, when the news of Goldsmith's death was brought to him; 'he was a very great man.' Even in those catastrophic moments, however, the frailties were not forgotten ;

✓ but the tribute coming from those lips and that heart was worth the years and paragraphs of misunderstanding and belittlement. In the long run the verdict of Johnson has strengt sened and been confirmed by posterity. The greatness of Goldsmith is finally established.

1

He is to be honoured both as a man and a writer; yet, in his case as in many others, without the sort of man that he was there could have been no enduring writer. He was pre-eminently the child of his circumstances, from the first to the last; and could not have written Lis best and truest work without the haphazard, topsy-turvy, farcical-tragical, down-at-heels experiences which harassed and amused him during his pilgrimage of life. The main appeal of 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'She Stoops to Conquer,' 'The Good-Natured Man,' and the two great poems, 'The Deserted Village' and 'The Traveller,' come from his own hard experiences philosophically met. Le style, c'est l'homme même'! Those works are essentially autobiographical; they possess an enduring life and happiness. Practically all else that he did was hack-work; and surely he was the prince and emperor of literary hacks; often giving gold for dross and merging with the necessarily poor value of the work so turned out, under threat of writ and want, much of the charm of his genial and noble spirit. The Citizen of the World,' even with its glimpses of the Man in Black and the delightful Beau Tibbs and his wife, as a whole, is hardly worth re-reading; yet had Goldsmith been able to write those descriptive letters entirely as a labour of enjoyment and love, with restraint and economy, blotting' a thousand lines, and working up the pseudo-Chinese

6

and the English characters, 'The Citizen' might have become a remarkable work and immortal. Such a passage of delicious nonsense as this, from Lien Chi Altangi to Fum Hoam, in China, is pretty well at the crown of comic absurdity.

'Where shall I meet a soul of such purity as that which resides in thy breast! Sure thou hast been nurtured by the bill of the Shin Shin, or sucked the breasts of the provident Gin Hiung. The melody of thy voice could rob the Chong Fou of her whelps, or inveigle the Boh that lives in the midst of the waters.'

Who, with any imagination or blood in his veins can resist nonsense so sublime? It is of the cream and ecstasy of burlesque; and such delightful spirit of mockbombast and playfulness as that frequently popped up its head when Goldy's quill was scratching away; though not nearly often enough; for the bondage of the thousand words held him in thrall, and when Griffiths or Newbery was clamouring for the next belated instalment of 'copy,' it was inevitable that the offering made was generally of mere prose written with a tired and protesting pen.

In his Essays and the special contributions to 'The Bee'; in the unconvincing and unhelpful 'Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning'; in the poor life of Bolingbroke, the inadequate Memoirs of M. de Voltaire, the more amusing biography of Beau Nash; in the histories of Greece and elsewhere, in the Natural History, as in the other manifold writings wrought by him with drudgery, misery, and, doubtless, some measure of shame, Goldsmith often was compelled to let his fancy and sense of poetry have play; and so it is that out of the barrenness of many uninspired pages we encounter Mistress Quickly still at the Boar's Head Tavern-' in this room I have lived, child, woman and ghost, more than three hundred years'; and are enabled to enjoy a foretaste of such details of the strolling player's life as were described by George Primrose in 'The Vicar of Wakefield.'

No more characteristic work of fiction has been written than 'The Vicar.' It is Oliver himself-l'homme même. He is Dr Primrose, Moses, and George; Burchell also, and possibly the better side of Jenkinson too;

while in Mrs Primrose, Olivia, Sophia, and the blowsed Misses Flamborough, not to speak of Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, we see something of his reactions to the infinite concourse of women. In Squire Thornhill we apprehend, what hitherto has not generally been discerned in Goldsmith, his essential detestation of the privileged debauchee, and the fact that in spite of his living more or less hand-to-mouth in a time of widespread moral lassitude and degradation, he kept a clean heart. It is worth while to look at this truth more particularly now, for it has not been sufficiently recognised. Goldsmith, without mawkishness or the faintest suspicion of cant, was a thoroughly good man, a Christian in heart and actions; yet fully alive to the sympathies of this world, and not disposed to tremble before the possible woes and threats of the next while still the jolly sun was capable of shining here. How completely and incredibly mean Thornhill is shown to be-indeed, in giving the Squire no redeeming qualities at all, the novelist rather over-painted his portrait and ✓ detracted from the full artistic effect. A vile seducer, mean to the last degree; a bully; a wastrel, insolent, merciless, selfish, revengeful; and served by creatures who would have been as worthless as himself had their responsibility been equal to his. He is of a type that often casually appears in Goldsmith's pages, as in Smollett, Richardson, and Fielding; for those were years of licence when a young man of wealth and position was allowed and expected to practise most worldly principles, and feminine flesh was generally supposed to be hopelessly frail. We see something of this odious concession to the worst in human nature in Young Marlow's attitude towards Miss Hardcastle during the passages wherein he mistakes her for a domestic servant at an inn. Happily, Goldsmith checked the base ardours of his hero in time; but the possibility so nearly approached was sufficient to illustrate his acceptance of the assumption that gilded youth in that ' age of opulence and refinement' might take its pleasures with impunity; and for no other reason than that the youth so selfindulgent and indulged happened to be 'gilded.'

All Goldsmith's writings, directly or indirectly-yet never obtrusively, as if they were parts of a seriously determined purpose to make life less comfortable to other people-have a powerful moral tone, exceptional to the time. Naturally, now and then, a point of view is expressed which a more-or a less-sophisticated age possibly would rather noisily hush; for they could then be frank over circumstances which we too elaborately ignore or else perhaps exploit in the louder fiction. With him and 'The Vicar,' anyhow, the moral tone was nobly good, with sincerity, and without affectation. But what is more important still, the story attracts, amuses, and entertains. Take the 'Advertisement' to 'The Vicar,' as expressive of Goldsmith's sound moral sense:

'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, an 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.'

The happiest quality in Goldy's personality is his rich humanity. He was true gentleman to the innermost heart-beat. As was to be expected of one who had often starved, and had slept with strange bedfellows; who had wandered penniless across Europe and lived by his humour rather than his wits; who had mixed fraternally with the squalid poor of Dublin and London and the peasantry of Germany, Italy, and France, he had none of the meanness of vanity, called snobbishness, which so easily tarnishes the shallower sort, and to which his period was unusually subject. Nothing better illustrates his fine humanity than the scenes in 'The Vicar,' which show Dr Primrose almost rejoicing in his wretchedness in gaol, because it gave him an opportunity, that otherwise would be impossible, of helping his fellow-prisoners to escape from the dissoluteness, degradation, and despair

which hitherto had bound and oppressed them. The whole incident, besides proving the greatness of his kindness and the height of his ideality, shows the ☑ practical sense of Goldsmith-in whom little practical ✓ sense, especially so far as concerned himself, has been + suspected. Yet more enlightened than his fellows, even than the reformers of his time, he saw that incarceration in a common prison, then so brutal and very far-reaching in its evil effects, could only be finally ruinous; and that if the sufferers-he had pity even for the villainous in their misfortune were to be redeemed, it must be through the re-establishment of their self-respect and through their learning the principles of self-help. Goldsmith in this was before his time, another aspect of him insufficiently discerned.

D

Without obtrusiveness, therefore, and with practice rather than with profession, he was a truly religious man; and it may be regarded as certain that this quality, as much as anything else, endeared him to Johnson, who, as the prayers he composed, as well as the written confessions of his weaknesses testify, was of a similar inward spirituality. The cause of Goldsmith's religious

✓ strength is shown in his two supreme poems, and especially in 'The Deserted Village.' He loved his father and his brother Henry, country parsons both, and 'passing rich with forty pounds a year'; and no perversities of misfortune could destroy that power of affection. His mother was not so fondly endeared to him. There is reason to think that she had an acid tongue with no extraordinary understanding of his irresponsible and trying young ways. He dedicated The Traveller' to his brother, and always hoped even amid ☑his worst adversities to be re-united with him some day.

'Unpractised he to fawn, or seek for power,

By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour;
Far other aims his heart had learned to prize,
More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.
His house was known to all the vagrant train;
He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain...
Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow,
And quite forgot their vices in their woe;

Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began.'