speech passed quietly, and somewhat
unhappily, away from a world he had done so much to make happy. With
Oliver Goldsmith an epoch of literature came to an end, as the year
that saw his death ended an epoch in the history of the world. The
characteristic literature of the eighteenth century, the literature
that began with Swift and Addison, and Steele and Pope; that boasted
among its greatest the names of Sterne and Richardson, Smollett and
Fielding, came to its close with the genius of Goldsmith. With the new
conditions which were coming over the world a new literature was to be
created. Wordsworth was a child of four, at Cockermouth; Coleridge was
a child of four, at Bristol; over in Germany a young poet, whose name
was unknown in England, had been much influenced by Goldsmith's
immortal story, and was in his turn and time to have a very profound
influence over the literature of Goldsmith's adopted country. The year
of Goldsmith's death was the year in which the young Goethe published
those "Sorrows of Werther" which marked the birth of a new form of
expression in art.

Goldsmith was born in Ireland, at Pallas, in the county of Longford, in
the early November of 1728. He lived for over forty-five years a life
of poverty, of vagrancy, of squalor, of foolish dissipation, of
grotesque vanity, of an {168} industry as amazing as his improvidence,
of a native idleness that was successfully combated by a tireless
industry, of an amazing simplicity that was only rivalled by his
amazing genius. There were a great many contrasting and seemingly
incompatible elements in Goldsmith's queer composition, but his faults
were not of a kind to prevent men from finding him lovable, and,
whatever his faults were, they left no stain upon his writings.

The writings of Goldsmith are distinguished in English literature, and,
indeed, in the literature of the world, by their sweet pure humor,
fresh and clear and sparkling as a fountain whose edges the satyr's
hoof has never trampled. They charm by their humanity, by their tender
charity, by the nobility of their lesson, a nobility only heightened by
the intense sympathy with the struggles, and sorrows, and errors of
mankind. A new St. Martin of letters, he was ever ready to share his
mantle of pity with the sad and sinning. He had himself suffered so
much, and been so tempted and tested, and had retained throughout his
trials so much of the serenity of a child, that all his writin