ividual man against institutions, that a multitude of
common people heard it gladly, without consulting the critics as to whether
they should call it good poetry. Notwithstanding its faults, to which
Matthew Arnold has called sufficient attention, it has become one of our
best known poems, though we cannot help wishing that the monotony of its
couplets had been broken by some of the Irish folk songs and ballads that
charmed street audiences in Dublin, and that brought Goldsmith a welcome
from the French peasants wherever he stopped to sing. In the village parson
and the schoolmaster, Goldsmith has increased Chaucer's list by two lovable
characters that will endure as long as the English language. The criticism
that the picture of prosperous "Sweet Auburn" never applied to any village
in Ireland is just, no doubt, but it is outside the question. Goldsmith was
a hopeless dreamer, bound to see everything, as he saw his debts and his
gay clothes, in a purely idealistic way.

_The Good-Natured Man_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_ are Goldsmith's two
comedies. The former, a comedy of character, though it has some laughable
scenes and one laughable character, Croaker, met with failure on the stage,
and has never been revived with any success. The latter, a comedy of
intrigue, is one of the few plays that has never lost its popularity. Its
lively, bustling scenes, and its pleasantly absurd characters, Marlowe, the
Hardcastles, and Tony Lumpkin, still hold the attention of modern theater
goers; and nearly every amateur dramatic club sooner or later places _She
Stoops to Conquer_ on its list of attractions.

_The Vicar of Wakefield_ is Goldsmith's only novel, and the first in any
language that gives to home life an enduring romantic interest. However
much we admire the beginnings of the English novel, to which we shall
presently refer, we are nevertheless shocked by its frequent brutalities
and indecencies. Goldsmith like Steele, had the Irish reverence for pure
womanhood, and this reverence made him shun as a pest the vulgarity and
coarseness in which contemporary novelists, like Smollett and Sterne,
seemed to delight. So he did for the novel what Addison and Steele had done
for the satire and the essay; he refined and elevated it, making it worthy
of the old Anglo-Saxon ideals which are our best literary heritage.

Briefly, _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is the story of a simple English
clergyman, Dr. Primrose, and his family, who pass f