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Thirty years of taking-in; fifteen years of giving-out;--that, in brief, is Oliver Goldsmith's story. When, in 1758, his failure to pass at Surgeons' Hall finally threw him on letters for a living, the thirty years were finished, and the fifteen years had been begun. What was to come he knew not; but, from his bare-walled lodging in Green-Arbour-Court, he could at least look back upon a sufficiently diversified past. He had been an idle, orchard-robbing schoolboy; a tuneful but intractable sizar of Trinity; a lounging, loitering, fair-haunting, flute-playing Irish 'buckeen.' He had knocked at the doors of both Law and Divinity, and crossed the threshold of neither. He had set out for London and stopped at Dublin; he had started for America and arrived at Cork. He had been many things: a medical student, a strolling musician, an apothecary, a corrector of the press, an usher at a Peckham 'academy.' Judged by ordinary standards, he had wantonly wasted his time. And yet, as things fell out, it is doubtful whether his parti-coloured experiences were not of more service to him than any he could have obtained if his progress had been less erratic. Had he fulfilled the modest expectations of his family, he would probably have remained a simple curate in Westmeath, eking out his 'forty pounds a year' by farming a field or two, migrating contentedly at the fitting season from the 'blue bed to the brown,' and (it may be) subsisting vaguely as a local poet upon the tradition of some youthful couplets to a pretty cousin, who had married a richer man. As it was, if he could not be said to have 'seen life steadily, and seen it whole,' he had, at all events, inspected it pretty closely in parts; and, at a time when he was most impressible, had preserved the impress of many things, which, in his turn, he was to re-impress upon his writings. 'No man'--says one of his biographers^[8]--'ever put so much of himself into his books as Goldsmith.' To his last hour he was drawing upon the thoughts and reviving the memories of that 'unhallowed time' when, to all appearance, he was hopelessly squandering his opportunities. To do as Goldsmith did would scarcely enable a man to write a 'Vicar of Wakefield' or a 'Deserted Village,'--certainly his practice cannot be preached with safety 'to those that eddy round and round.' But viewing his entire career, it is difficult not to see how one part seems to have been an indispensable preparation for the other, and to marvel once more (with the philosopher Square) at 'the eternal Fitness of Things.'

The events of Goldsmith's life have been too often narrated to need repetition, and we shall not resort to the well-worn device of repeating them in order to say so. But the progress of time, advancing some things and effacing others, lends a fresh aspect even to masterpieces; for which reason it is always possible to speak of a writer's work. In this instance we shall restrict ourselves to Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. And, with regard to both, what strikes one first is the extreme tardiness of that late blossoming upon which Johnson commented. When a man succeeds as Goldsmith succeeded, friends and critics speedily discover that he had shown signs of excellence even from his boyish years. But setting aside those half-mythical ballads for the Dublin street-singers, and some doubtful verses for Jane Contarine, there is no definite evidence that, from a doggerel couplet in his childhood to an epigram not much better than doggerel composed when he was five and twenty, he had written a line of verse of the slightest importance; and even five years later, although he refers to himself in a private letter as a 'poet,' it must have been solely upon the strength of the unpublished fragment of 'The Traveller,' which, in the interval, he had sent to his brother Henry from abroad. It is even more remarkable that--although so skilful a correspondent should have been fully sensible of his gifts--until, under the pressure of circumstances, he drifted into literature, the craft of letters seems never to have been his ambition. He thinks of turning lawyer, physician, clergyman--anything but author; and when at last he engages in that profession, it is to free himself from a scholastic slavery which he seems to have always regarded with peculiar bitterness, yet to which, after a first unsatisfactory trial of what was to be his true vocation, he unhesitatingly returned. If he went back anew to the pen, however, it was only to enable him to escape from it more effectually, and he was prepared to go as far as Coromandel. But Literature, 'toute entière à sa proie attachée,' refused to relinquish him; and, although he continued to make spasmodic efforts to extricate himself from the toils, detained him relentlessly to the day of his death.

If there is no evidence that he had written much when he entered upon what has been called his second period, he had not the less formed his opinions on many literary questions. Much of the matter of the 'Polite Learning' is plainly manufactured ad hoc; but in its references to authorship and criticism, there is an individual note which is absent elsewhere; and when he speaks of the tyranny of publishers, the petty standards of criticism, and the forlorn and precarious existence of the hapless writer for bread, he is evidently reproducing a condition of things with which he had become familiar during his brief bondage on the 'Monthly Review.' As to his personal views on poetry in particular, it is easy to collect them from this and later utterances. Against blank verse he objects from the first, as suited only to the sublimest themes--which is a polite way of shelving it altogether; while in favour of rhyme he alleges--perhaps borrowing his illustration from Montaigne--that the very restriction stimulates the fancy, as a fountain plays highest when the aperture is diminished. Blank verse, too (he asserts), imports into poetry a 'disgusting solemnity of manner' which is fatal to 'agreeable trifling,'--an objection intimately connected with the feeling which afterwards made him the champion on the stage of character and humour. Among the poets who were his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, his likes and dislikes were strong. He fretted at the fashion which Gray's 'Elegy' set in poetry; he considered it a fine poem, but 'overloaded with epithet;' and he deplored the remoteness and want of emotion which distinguished the Pindaric Odes. Yet from many indications in his own writings he seems to have genuinely appreciated the work of Collins. Churchill, and Churchill's satire, he detested. With Young he had some personal acquaintance, and had evidently read his 'Night Thoughts' with attention. Of the poets of the last age, he admired Dryden, Pope, and Gay, but more than any of these, if imitation is to be regarded as the surest proof of sympathy, Prior, Addison, and Swift. By his inclinations and his training, indeed, he belonged to this school. But he was in advance of it in thinking that poetry, however didactic after the fashion of his own day, should be simple in its utterance and directed at the many rather than at the few. This is what he meant when, from the critical elevation of Griffiths' back parlour, he recommended Gray to take the advice of Isocrates, and 'study the people.' If, with these ideas, he had been able to divest himself of the 'warbling groves' and 'finny deeps' of the Popesque vocabulary (of much of the more 'mechanic art' of that supreme artificer he did successfully divest himself), it would have needed but little to make him a prominent pioneer of the new school which was coming with Cowper. As it is, his poetical attitude is a little that intermediate one of Longfellow's maiden,--

'Standing, with reluctant feet,

Where the brook and river meet.'

Most of his minor and earlier pieces are imitative. In 'A New Simile,' and 'The Logicians Refuted' (if that be his), Swift is his acknowledged model; in 'The Double Transformation' it is Prior, modified by certain theories personal to himself. He was evidently well acquainted with collections such as the 'Ménagiana,' and with the French minor poets of the eighteenth century, many of which latter were among his books at his death. These he had carefully studied, probably during his continental wanderings, and from them he derives, like Prior, something of his grace and metrical buoyancy. The 'Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,' and 'Madam Blaize,' are both more or less constructed on the old French popular song of the hero of Pavia, Jacques de Chabannes, Seigneur de la Palice (sometimes Galisse), with, in the case of the former, a tag from an epigram by Voltaire, the original of which is in the Greek Anthology, though Voltaire simply 'conveyed' his version from an anonymous French predecessor. Similarly the lively stanzas 'To Iris in Bow Street,' the lines to Myra, the quatrain called 'A South American Ode,' and that 'On a Beautiful Youth struck blind with Lightning,' are all confessed or unconfessed translations. If Goldsmith had lived to collect his own works, it is possible that he would have announced the source of his inspiration in these instances as well as in one or two other cases,--the epitaph on Ned Purdon, for example,--where it has been reserved to his editors to discover his obligations. On the other hand, he might have contended, with perfect justice, that whatever the source of his ideas, he had made them his own when he got them; and certainly in lilt and lightness, the lines 'To Iris' are infinitely superior to those of La Monnoye on which they are based. But even a fervent admirer may admit that, dwelling as he did in this very vitreous palace of Gallic adaptation, one does not expect to find him throwing stones at Prior for borrowing from the French, or commenting solemnly in the Life of Parnell upon the heinousness of plagiarism. 'It was the fashion,' he says, 'with the wits of the last age, to conceal the places from whence they took their hints or their subjects. A trifling acknowledgment would have made that lawful prize which may now be considered as plunder.' He might appropriately have added to this latter sentence the quotation which he struck out of the second issue of the 'Polite Learning,'--'Haud inexpertus loquor.'

Of his longer pieces, 'The Traveller' was apparently suggested to him by Addison's 'Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax,' a poem to which, in his preliminary notes to the 'Beauties of English Poesy,' he gives significant praise. 'There is in it,' he says, 'a strain of political thinking that was, at that time, new in our country.' He obviously intended that 'The Traveller' should be admired for the same reason; and both in that poem and its successor, 'The Deserted Village,' he lays stress upon the political import of his work. The one, we are told, is to illustrate the position that the happiness of the subject is independent of the goodness of the sovereign; the other, to deplore the increase of luxury, and the miseries of depopulation. But, as a crowd of commentators have pointed out, it is hazardous for a poet to meddle with 'political thinking,' however much, under George the Second, it may have been needful to proclaim a serious purpose. If Goldsmith had depended solely upon the professedly didactic part of his attempt, his work would be as dead as 'Freedom,' or 'Sympathy,' or any other of Dodsley's forgotten quartos. Fortunately he did more than this. Sensibly or insensibly, he suffused his work with that philanthropy which is 'not learned by the royal road of tracts and platform speeches and monthly magazines,' but by personal commerce with poverty and sorrow; and he made his appeal to that clinging love of country, of old association, of 'home-bred happiness,' of innocent pleasure, which, with Englishmen, is never made in vain. Employing the couplet of Pope and Johnson, he has added to his measure a suavity that belonged to neither; but the beauty of his humanity and the tender melancholy of his wistful retrospect hold us more strongly and securely than the studious finish of his style.

'Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage,' said the arch-critic whose name, according to Keats, the school of Pope displayed upon their 'decrepit standard.' Even in 'The Traveller' and 'The Deserted Village,' there are indications of over-labour; but in a poem which comes between them--the once famous 'Edwin and Angelina'--Goldsmith certainly carried out Boileau's maxim to the full. The first privately printed version differs considerably from that in the first edition of the 'Vicar;' this again is altered in the fourth; and there are other variations in the piece as printed in the 'Poems for Young Ladies.' 'As to my "Hermit,"' said the poet complacently, 'that poem, Cradock, cannot be amended,'--and undoubtedly it has been skilfully wrought. But it is impossible to look upon it now with the unpurged eyes of those upon whom the 'Reliques of Ancient Poetry' had but recently dawned, still less to endorse the verdict of Sir John Hawkins that 'it is one of the finest poems of the lyric kind that our language has to boast of.' Its over-soft prettiness is too much that of the chromo-lithograph, or the Parian bust (the porcelain, not the marble), and its 'beautiful simplicity' is in parts perilously close upon that inanity which Johnson, whose sturdy good sense not even friendship could silence, declared to be the characteristic of much of Percy's collection. It is instructive as a study of poetical progress to contrast it with a ballad of our own day in the same measure,--the 'Talking Oak' of Tennyson.

The remaining poems of Goldsmith, excluding the 'Captivity,' and the admittedly occasional 'Threnodia Augustalis,' are not open to the charge of fictitious simplicity, or of that hyper-elaboration which, in the words of the poet just mentioned, makes for the 'ripe and rotten.' The gallery of kit-cats in 'Retaliation,' and the delightful bonhomie of 'The Haunch of Venison,' need no commendation. In kindly humour and not unkindly satire Goldsmith was at his best, and the imperishable portraits of Burke and Garrick and Reynolds, and the inimitable dinner at which Lord Clare's pasty was not, are as well known as any of the stock passages of 'The Deserted Village' or 'The Traveller,' though they have never been babbled 'in extremis vicis' by successive generations of schoolboys. It is usually said, probably with truth, that in these poems and the delightful 'Letter to Mrs. Bunbury,' Goldsmith's metre was suggested by the cantering anapests of the 'New Bath Guide,' and it is to be observed that 'Little Comedy's' invitation is to the same favourite tune. But it is also the fact that a line of the once popular lyric of 'Ally Croaker,'--

'Too dull for a wit, too grave for a joker,'--

has a kind of echo in the--

'Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit'--

of Burke's portrait in 'Retaliation.' What is still more remarkable is that Gray's 'Sketch of his own Character,' the resemblance of which to Goldsmith has been pointed out by his editors, begins,--

'Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune.'

Whether Goldsmith was thinking of Anstey or 'Ally Croaker,' it is at least worthy of passing notice that an Irish song of no particular literary merit should have succeeded in haunting the two foremost poets of their day.^[9]

Poetry brought Goldsmith fame, but money only indirectly. Those Saturnian days of the subscription-edition, when Pope and Gay and Prior counted their gains by thousands, were over and gone. He had arrived, it has been truly said, too late for the Patron, and too early for the Public. Of his lighter pieces, the best were posthumous; the rest were either paid for at hack prices or not at all. For 'The Deserted Village' Griffin gave him a hundred guineas, a sum so unexampled as to have prompted the pleasant legend that he returned it. For 'The Traveller' the only payment that can be definitely traced is £21. 'I cannot afford to court the draggle-tail muses,' he said laughingly to Lord Lisburn; 'they would let me starve; but by my other labours I can make shift to eat, and drink, and have good clothes.' It was in his 'other labours' that his poems helped him. The booksellers, who would not or could not remunerate him adequately for delayed production and minute revision, were willing enough to secure the sanction of his name for humbler journey-work. If he was ill-paid for 'The Traveller,' he was not ill-paid for the 'Beauties of English Poesy' or the 'History of Animated Nature.'

Yet notwithstanding his ready pen, and his skill as a compiler, his life was a treadmill. 'While you are nibbling about elegant phrases, I am obliged to write half a volume,' he told his friend Cradock; and it was but natural that he should desire to escape into walks where he might accomplish something 'for his own hand,' by which, at the same time, he might exist. Fiction he had already essayed. Nearly two years before 'The Traveller' appeared, he had written a story about the length of 'Joseph Andrews,' for which he had received little more than a third of the sum paid by Andrew Millar to Fielding for his burlesque of Richardson's 'Pamela.' But obscure circumstances delayed the publication of the 'Vicar of Wakefield' for four years, and when at last it was issued, its first burst of success--a success, as far as can be ascertained, productive of no further profit to its author--was followed by a long period during which the sales were languid and uncertain. There remained the stage, with its two-fold allurement of fame and fortune, both payable at sight, added to which it was always possible that a popular play, in those days when plays were bought to read, might find a brisk market in pamphlet form. The prospect was a tempting one, and it is scarcely surprising that Goldsmith, weary of the 'dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood,' and conscious of better things within him, should engage in that most tantalizing of all enterprises, the pursuit of dramatic success.

For acting and actors he had always shown a decided partiality.^[10] Vague stories, based, in all probability, upon the references to strolling players in his writings, hinted that he himself had once worn the comic sock as 'Scrub' in 'The Beaux' Stratagem;' and it is clear that soon after he arrived in England, he had completed a tragedy, for he read it in manuscript to a friend. That he had been besides an acute and observant play-goer is plain from his excellent account in 'The Bee' of Mademoiselle Clairon, whom he had seen at Paris, and from his sensible notes in the same periodical on 'gestic lore' as exhibited on the English stage. In his 'Polite Learning in Europe,' he had followed up Ralph's 'Case of Authors by Profession,' by protesting against the despotism of managers, and the unenlightened but economical policy of producing only the works of deceased playwrights; and he was equally opposed to the growing tendency on the part of the public--a tendency dating from Richardson and the French comédie larmoyante--to substitute sham sensibility and superficial refinement for that humourous delineation of manners which, with all their errors of morality and taste, had been the chief aim of Congreve and his contemporaries. To the fact that what was now known as 'genteel comedy' had almost wholly supplanted this elder and better manner, must be attributed his deferred entry upon a field so obviously adapted to his gifts. But when, in 1766, the 'Clandestine Marriage' of Garrick and Colman, with its evergreen 'Lord Ogleby,' seemed to herald a return to the side of laughter as opposed to that of tears, he took heart of grace, and, calling to mind something of the old inconsiderate benevolence which had been the Goldsmith family-failing, set about his first comedy, 'The Good-Natur'd Man.'

Even without experiment, no one could have known better than Goldsmith upon what a sea of troubles he had embarked. Those obstacles which, more than thirty years before, had been so graphically described in Fielding's 'Pasquin,'--which Goldsmith himself had indicated with equal accuracy in his earliest book,--still lay in the way of all dramatic purpose, and he was to avoid none of them. When he submitted his completed work to Garrick, the all-powerful actor, who liked neither piece nor author, blew hot and cold so long that Goldsmith at last, in despair, transferred it to Colman. But, as if fate was inexorable, Colman, after accepting it effusively, also grew dilatory, and ultimately entered into a tacit league with Garrick not to produce it at Covent Garden until his former rival had brought out at Drury Lane a comedy by Goldsmith's countryman, Hugh Kelly, a sentimentalist of the first water. Upon the heels of the enthusiastic reception which Garrick's administrative tact secured for the superfine entanglements of 'False Delicacy,' came limping 'The Good-Natur'd Man' of Goldsmith, wet-blanketed beforehand by a sombre prologue from Johnson. No first appearance could have been less favourable. Until it was finally saved in the fourth act by the excellent art of Shuter as 'Croaker,' its fate hung trembling in the balance, and even then one of its scenes--not afterwards reckoned the worst--had to be withdrawn in deference to the delicate scruples of an audience which could not suffer such inferior beings as bailiffs to come between the wind and its gentility. Yet, in spite of all these disadvantages, 'The Good-Natur'd Man' obtained a hearing, besides bringing its author about five hundred pounds, a sum far larger than anything he had ever made by poetry or fiction.

That the superior success of 'False Delicacy,' with its mincing morality and jumble of inadequate motives, was wholly temporary and accidental is evident from the fact that, to use a felicitous phrase, it has now to be disinterred in order to be discussed. But, notwithstanding one's instinctive sympathy for Goldsmith in his struggles with the managers, it is not equally clear that, everything considered, 'The Good-Natur'd Man' was unfairly treated by the public. Because Kelly's play was praised too much, it by no means follows that Goldsmith's play was praised too little. With all the advantage of its author's reputation, it has never since passed into the répertoire, and, if it had something of the freshness of a first effort, it had also its inexperience. The chief character, Honeywood,--the weak and amiable 'good-natur'd man,'--never stands very firmly on his feet, and the first actor of the part, Garrick's promising young rival, Powell, failed, or disdained to make it a stage success. On the other hand, 'Croaker,' an admitted elaboration of Johnson's sketch of 'Suspirius' in 'The Rambler,' is a first-rate comic creation, and the charlatan 'Lofty,' a sort of 'Beau-Tibbs-above-Stairs,' is almost as good. But, as Garrick's keen eye saw, to have a second male figure of greater importance than the central personage was a serious error of judgment, added to which neither 'Miss Richland' nor 'Mrs. Croaker' ever establishes any hold upon the audience. Last of all, the plot, such as it is, cannot be described as either particularly ingenious or particularly novel. In another way the merit of the piece is, however, incontestable. It is written with all the perspicuous grace of Goldsmith's easy pen, and, in the absence of stagecraft, sparkles with neat and effective epigrams. One of these may be mentioned as illustrating the writer's curious (perhaps unconscious) habit of repeating ideas which had pleased him. He had quoted in his 'Polite Learning' the exquisitely rhythmical close of Sir William Temple's prose essay 'Of Poetry,' and in 'The Bee' it still seems to haunt him. In 'The Good-Natur'd Man' he has absorbed it altogether, for he places it, without inverted commas, in the lips of Croaker.^[11]

But if its lack of constructive power and its errors of conception make it impossible to regard 'The Good-Natur'd Man' as a substantial gain to humourous drama, it was undoubtedly a formidable attack upon that 'mawkish drab of spurious breed,' Sentimental Comedy, and its success was amply sufficient to justify a second trial. That Goldsmith did not forthwith make this renewed effort must be attributed partly to the recollection of his difficulties in getting his first play produced, partly to the fact that, his dramatic gains exhausted, he was almost immediately involved in a sequence of laborious taskwork. Still, he had never abandoned his ambition to restore humour and character to the stage; and as time went on, the sense of his past discouragements grew fainter, while the success of 'The Deserted Village' increased his importance as an author. Sentimentalism, in the meantime, had still a majority. Kelly, it is true, was now no longer to be feared. His sudden good fortune had swept him into the ranks of the party-writers, with the result that the damning of his next play, 'A Word to the Wise,' had been exaggerated into a political necessity. But the school which he represented had been recruited by a much abler man, Richard Cumberland, and it was probably the favourable reception of Cumberland's 'West Indian' that stimulated Goldsmith into striking one more blow for legitimate comedy. At all events, in the autumn of the year in which 'The West Indian' was produced, he is hard at work in the lanes at Hendon and Edgware, 'studying jests with a most tragical countenance' for a successor to 'The Good-Natur'd Man.'

To the modern spectator of 'She Stoops to Conquer,' with its unflagging humour and bustling action, it must seem almost inconceivable that its stage qualities can ever have been questioned. Yet questioned they undoubtedly were, and Goldsmith was spared none of his former humiliations. Even from the outset all was against him. His difference with Garrick had long been adjusted, and the Drury Lane manager would now probably have accepted a new play from his pen, especially as that astute observer had already detected signs of a reaction in the public taste. But Goldsmith was morally bound to Colman and Covent Garden; and Colman, in whose hands he placed his manuscript, proved even more disheartening and unmanageable than Garrick had been in the past. Before he had come to his decision, the close of 1772 had arrived. Early in the following year, under the irritation of suspense and suggested amendments combined, Goldsmith hastily transferred his proposal to Garrick; but, by Johnson's advice, as hastily withdrew it. Only by the express interposition of Johnson was Colman at last induced to make a distinct promise to bring out the play at a specific date. To believe in it, he could not be persuaded, and his contagious anticipations of its failure passed insensibly to the actors, who, one after another shuffled out of their parts. Even over the epilogue there were vexatious disputes, and when at last, in March, 1773, 'She Stoops to Conquer' was performed, its leading actor had previously held no more exalted position than that of ground-harlequin, while one of its most prominent characters had simply been a post-boy in 'The Good-Natur'd Man.' But once fairly upon the boards neither lukewarm actors nor an adverse manager had any further influence over it, and the doubts of every one vanished in the uninterrupted applause of the audience. When, a few days later, it was printed with a brief and grateful dedication to its best friend, Johnson, the world already knew with certainty that a fresh masterpiece had been added to the roll of English Dramatic Literature, and that 'genteel comedy' had received a decisive blow.

The effect of this blow, it must be admitted, had been aided not a little by the appearance, only a week or two earlier, of Foote's clever puppet-show of 'The Handsome Housemaid; or, Piety in Pattens,' which was openly directed at Kelly and his following. But ridicule by itself, without some sample of a worthier substitute, could not have sufficed to displace a persistent fashion. This timely corrective 'She Stoops to Conquer,' in the most unmistakable way, afforded. From end to end of the piece there is not a sickly or a maudlin word. Even Sheridan, writing 'The Rivals' two years later, thought it politic to insert 'Faulkland' and 'Julia' for the benefit of the sentimentalists. Goldsmith made no such concession, and his wholesome, hearty merriment put to flight the Comedy of Tears,--even as the Coquecigrues vanished before the large-lunged laugh of Pantagruel. If, as Johnson feared, the plot bordered slightly upon farce--and of what good comedy may this not be said?--at least it can be urged that its most farcical incident, the mistaking of a gentleman's house for an inn, had really happened, since it had happened to the writer himself. But the superfine objections of Walpole and his friends are now ancient history--history so ancient that it is scarcely credited, while Goldsmith's manly assertion (after Fielding) of the author's right 'to stoop among the low to copy nature,' has been ratified by successive generations of novelists and playwrights. What is beyond dispute is the healthy atmosphere, the skilful setting, the lasting freshness and fidelity to human nature of the persons of his drama. Not content with the finished portraits of the Hardcastles (a Vicar and Mrs. Primrose promoted to the squirearchy),--not content with the incomparable and unapproachable Tony, the author has managed to make attractive what is too often insipid, his heroines and their lovers. Miss Hardcastle and Miss Neville are not only charming young women, but charming characters, while Marlow and Hastings are much more than stage young men. And let it be remembered--it cannot be too often remembered--that in returning to those Farquhars and Vanbrughs 'of the last age,' who differed so widely from the Kellys and Cumberlands of his own, Goldsmith has brought back no taint of their baser part. Depending solely for its avowed intention to 'make an audience merry,' upon the simple development of its humourous incident, his play (wonderful to relate!) attains its end without resorting to dubious suggestion or equivocal intrigue. Indeed, there is but one married woman in the piece, and she traverses it without a stain upon her character.

'She Stoops to Conquer' is Goldsmith's last dramatic work, for the trifling sketch of 'The Grumbler' had never more than a grateful purpose. When, only a year later, the little funeral procession from 2, Brick Court laid him in his unknown grave in the Temple burying-ground, the new comedy of which he had written so hopefully to Garrick was still non-existent. Would it have been better than its last fortunate predecessor?--would those early reserves of memory and experience have still proved inexhaustible? The question cannot be answered. Through debt, and drudgery, and depression, the writer's genius had still advanced, and these might yet have proved powerless to check his progress. But at least it was given to him to end upon his best, and not to outlive it. For, in that critical sense which estimates the value of a work by its excellence at all points, it can scarcely be contested that 'She Stoops to Conquer' is his best production. In spite of their beauty and humanity, the lasting quality of 'The Traveller' and 'The Deserted Village' is seriously prejudiced by his half-way attitude between the poetry of convention and the poetry of nature--between the gradus epithet of Pope and the direct vocabulary of Wordsworth. With the 'Vicar of Wakefield' again, immortal though it be, it is less his art that holds us than his charm, his humour, and his tenderness, which tempt us to forget his inconsistency and his errors of haste. In 'She Stoops to Conquer,' neither defect of art nor defect of nature forbids us to give unqualified admiration to a work which lapse of time has shown to be still unrivalled in its kind.

[8]	Forster's 'Life,' Bk. ii. ch. vi.

[9]

This suggestive performance is mentioned in Act ii. of 'She Stoops to Conquer,' where Tony Lumpkin is made to say that he no more troubles his head about 'Ali Cawn' (the Subah of Bengal) than 'Ally Croaker;' and Miss Edgeworth quotes the first verse in her 'Belinda,' ch. v.:'There was a young man in Ballinacrasy,Who wanted a wife to make him unasy,And thus in gentle strains he spoke her,Arrah, vill you marry me, my dear Ally Croker?'The whole, which differs somewhat from this, is given in the 'Universal Magazine' for October, 1753, where it is styled 'A New Song.' The line 'Too dull for a wit, too grave for a joker' comes in the second stanza.

[10]

This is not inconsistent with the splenetic utterances in the letters to Daniel Hodson, first made public in the 'Great Writers' life of Goldsmith, where he speaks of the stage as 'an abominable resource which neither became a man of honour, nor a man of sense.' Those letters were written when the production of 'The Good-Natur'd Man' had supplied him with abundant practical evidence of the vexations and difficulties of theatrical ambition.

[11]

In the same way he annexes, both in 'The Hermit' and 'The Citizen of the World,' a quotation from Young. The passage from Temple is as follows: 'When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.' Lamb uses this to wind up his essay on Shaftesbury and Temple ('The Genteel Style in Writing'); and perhaps there is a memory of it in the'Pleas'd with this bauble still, as that before;Till tir'd he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er'--of Pope's 'Essay on Man,' ii. 281-2.