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low whose father kept a school in Peckham, Goldsmith became an usher, and a miserable time he had of it. Griffiths, the bookseller, dined one day at the school where Goldsmith was usher. The conversation turned upon the Monthly Review, owned and conducted by Griffiths. Something said by Goldsmith led to further consideration, and the usher left the school to board and lodge with the bookseller, to have a small regular salary, and to devote himself to the Monthly Review.

The history of literature at this time in England gives necessarily to the bookseller. In the transition much space period of authorship, this middleman occupied a position of power and authority not since accorded to him; it was a singular relation which the drudging author held to his employer, and Goldsmith from this time forward was scarcely ever free from a dependence upon the autocrats of He entered the profession of literature as the book trade. upon something which was a little more profitable and certainly more agreeable than the occupation of an usher in a boarding-school, or the profession of a doctor without payA profession which now dignifies its members ing clients. was then without respect socially, and attended by all the meanness which springs from a false position. The rich and powerful in government looked upon it as appointed only to serve the ends of the ambitious, and the poor author had to struggle to maintain his independence of nature. The men who could sell their talents and their self-respect for gold and place jostled roughly their nobler comrades who served literature faithfully in poverty, and it was only So crowding was now and then that the fickle breath of popular favor wafted some author's book into warmer waters. this Grub Street life that Goldsmith sought release from it in a vain attempt after a government appointment as He was driven back into medical officer at Coromandel. striving to escape, yet out

the galleys from which he was
of this life there began to issue the true products of his

genius. He brooded over his own and his fellows' condition. Something within him made protest against the ignoble state of literature, and he wrote the first book which gave him a name, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe. The subject was wrung from his fortunes, but the style was the music which he had never failed to hear from boyhood. Style, bred of no special study at Trinity College, nor too closely allied with learning, but a gift of nature, guarded well and cherished by the varying fortune which was moulding his mind in the secret fashion that makes a genuine surprise when discovered this was seen in his book, and justified his place in the great profession of authorship. There is in Goldsmith's life, as in Andersen's, and in that of many a man of genius, the sad, sweet story of the Ugly Duckling. Pecked at and scorned by meaner associates, conscious of disadvantages and of inferiority in inferior things, a divine ray of hope and longing never left him; and when at last he gave outward expression to the genius in him, he found himself amongst

true fellows, recognized by men of genius as their associate. From this time forward Goldsmith knew his place and took it. He was thirty-one years of age, and in the remainder of his life he wrote his essays in The Bee and The Citizen of the World; The Vicar of Wakefield, The Traveller, The Deserted Village, his shorter poems, and the two comedies, A Good-Natured Man, and She Stoops to Conquer. In quantity not a large showing, but glistening with that pure fancy and happy temper which are among the choicest gifts of literature to a tired world. These are his works which give him his place in literature, but during the time when they were composed he was constantly at work upon tasks. He wrote his histories of England and Rome, and his Animated Nature, which, despite its unscientific cast, is a storehouse of delightful reading; and he wrote reviews, essays, prefaces, translations, and the like, quite beyond record.

Yet all this time he was in debt. He did not want because his work was ill paid or he was not industrious, but because his money slipped through his fingers, too volatile to hold it fast. Some of it went upon his back in the odd finery which has stuck to his reputation, but a large share went to the poor and miserable. Look at the poor man lying dead in his solitary chamber. "The staircase of Birch Court is said to have been filled with mourners, the reverse of domestic: women without a home, without domesticity of any kind, with no friend but him they had come to weep for, outcasts of that great, solitary, wicked city, to whom he had never forgotten to be kind and charitable.'

"1

1 Forster's The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, ii. 467.

THE DESERTED VILLAGE.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

The Deserted Village was not Goldsmith's first considerable poem; that was The Traveller, published five or six years earlier; but it is the production which has endeared him most to readers, and it is in form and content one of the most melodious and at the same time thoughtful poems in the English language. Its foundations are laid deep in human nature, for it is at once the reflection of a man upon the beginning of his life, and the return in thought of one who has seen much of the world to those simple delights which are most elemental, least dependent upon the conventions of complex society. The poem is, besides, the contribution of an earnest thinker toward the solution of great national and social problems. Goldsmith had already shown in The Traveller not only that he was a clear-sighted observer of scenes in various lands and an interpreter of national characteristics, but that his mind had been at work on the great question of what constitutes the real prosperity of nations. In this poem he returns to the subject and makes his thought still more luminous by drawing a contrast between two separate conditions in the same nation, rather than instituting a comparison among several nations.

Never was the truth of literary art, that the greatest success is attained when form and content are inseparably joined, better exemplified than in The Deserted Village. Here is serious thought, but it is presented in such exquisite language, it is illustrated by such a series of charming pictures, that one scarcely perceives at first the solidity of

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the structure of the poem. A great contemporary of Goldsmith's, Dr. Samuel Johnson, wrote a sonorous and thoughtful poem called The Vanity of Human Wishes, but though it was greatly and justly praised at the time, it has failed to fasten itself on the affection of readers for lack of that translucent beauty of form which has preserved The Deserted Village and The Traveller.

This

For Goldsmith was preeminently a poet; in his travels he saw into the soul of things; in his reflection he penetrated beneath the surface; and in his expression, both as regards words, phrases, and construction, he had the intuitive sense which chose the right word, gave music to his phrase, and made the whole poem a work of art. poem, therefore, like any great imaginative piece, must not be examined too closely for an identity with prosaic fact. There is a likeness, unquestionably, between Sweet Auburn and Lissoy, the village where Goldsmith passed his childhood; the portrait of the village preacher might readily be taken for a sketch either of Goldsmith's father or his brother Henry; enthusiastic investigators even give the actual name of the

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wretched matron, forced in age, for bread,

To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread ;

but one must never forget, if he would enter most completely into the poet's way of looking at life, that all these facts of experience are transmuted into vivid images, creations of the poet's mind out of material afforded him by memory and observation.

The reader of the poem, as well as of Goldsmith's verse in general, if he is unfamiliar with any other than nineSome of these uses are teenth-century poetry, will very likely be puzzled by the use of words in senses unfamiliar. pointed out in the notes, but many more will be learned by recourse to a good dictionary. Next to a reading of the poem for delight comes the scrutiny of the language, and the reader is advised to look closely at the words, since in