window, and saying, "There is
room enough in the world for thee and me." It is a high proof of his
cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in
his readers even from such trivial occasions. He was a minute
philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art
of making much out of little. Less coarse than Fielding, he is far
more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly to the point; Sterne lingers among
the temptations and suspends the expectation to tease and excite it.
Forbidden fruit had a relish for him, and his pages {211} seduce. He
is full of good sayings, both tender and witty. It was Sterne, for
example, who wrote, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb."

A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose _Vicar of
Wakefield_, 1766, was the earliest, and is still one of the best,
novels of domestic and rural life. The book, like its author, was
thoroughly Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies. Very improbable
things happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic. But its
characters are true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweetness and
purity, and with touches of a most loving humor. Its hero, Dr.
Primrose, was painted after Goldsmith's father, a poor clergyman of the
English Church in Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country
parson in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_, 1770, who was "passing rich
on forty pounds a year." This poem, though written in the fashionable
couplet of Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr.
Johnson--so that it was not at all in line with the work of the
romanticists--did, perhaps, as much as any thing of Gray or of Collins
to recall English poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country
life.

Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and, perhaps, a few
other plays, the stage had now utterly declined. The novel, which is
dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to take its place, and
to represent life, though less intensely, yet more minutely, than the
theater could do. In the novelists of the 18th century, the life {212}
of the people, as distinguished from "society" or the upper classes,
began to invade literature.

Richardson was distinctly a bourgeois writer, and his
contemporaries--Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith--ranged over
a wide variety of ranks and conditions. This is one thing which
distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century
from that