the professional
critic's airs of superiority, along with a few tricks of the trade, no
doubt taught him by Griffiths. Several of these reviews, for example,
are merely epitomes of the contents of the books reviewed, with some
vague suggestion that the writer might, if he had been less careful,
have done worse, and, if he had been more careful, might have done
better. Who does not remember how the philosophic vagabond was taught
to become a cognoscento? "The whole secret consisted in a strict
adherence to two rules: the one always to observe that the picture
might have been better if the painter had taken more pains; and the
other to praise the works of Pietro Perugino." It is amusing to
observe the different estimates formed of the function of criticism by
Goldsmith the critic, and by Goldsmith the author. Goldsmith, sitting
at Griffiths' desk, naturally magnifies his office, and announces his
opinion that "to direct our taste, and conduct the poet up to
perfection, has ever been the true critic's province." But Goldsmith
the author, when he comes to inquire into the existing state of Polite
Learning in Europe, finds in criticism not a help but a danger. It is
"the natural destroyer of polite learning." And again, in the _Citizen
of the World_, he exclaims against the pretensions of the critic. "If
any choose to be critics, it is but saying they are critics; and from
that time forward they become invested with full power and authority
over every caitiff who aims at their instruction or entertainment."

This at least may be said, that in these early essays contributed to
the _Monthly Review_ there is much more of Goldsmith the critic than
of Goldsmith the author. They are somewhat laboured performances. They
are almost devoid of the sly and delicate humour that afterwards
marked Goldsmith's best prose work. We find throughout his trick of
antithesis; but here it is forced and formal, whereas afterwards he
lent to this habit of writing the subtle surprise of epigram. They
have the true manner of authority, nevertheless. He says of Home's
_Douglas_--"Those parts of nature, and that rural simplicity with
which the author was, perhaps, best acquainted, are not unhappily
described; and hence we are led to conjecture, that a more universal
knowledge of nature will probably increase his powers of description."
If the author had written otherwise, he would have written
differently; had he known more, he would not have been so i