w what volumes men might write and not reveal. Pope crippled
meaning and weakened force to procure a rhyme--nay, since he actually
planned the rhymes to make his couplets before he penned his poetry,
to him not infrequently it was far more to rhyme than realise. In
Goldsmith's couplet,

"Till carried to excess in each domain,
This favourite good begets peculiar pain,"

we have a dissertation upon both individual and national ethics, and
the sole secret of the failures of men and States. There appear
passages where Goldsmith held Virgil much in view. To some extent this
poem, and also _The Deserted Village_, remind one of Volney. In this
light the style in places is more French than English. There is full
force in the phrase,

"And e'en in penance, planning sins anew."

While the poem is always graceful, readers are not at their happiest
when pleasing poets turn philosophers. Throughout the piece there is a
manly courage, a purity of motive, a magnanimous ideality, and an
unexpected and almost muscular robustness. What gaiety there is in
this phrase--

"Sport and flutter in a kinder sky."

We have, when he comes to France, upon which country he writes
delightfully, a couplet happily autobiographical:

"Yet would the village praise my wondrous power,
And dance forgetful of the noontide hour."

Radiant must have been the moments when later the little man in Fleet
Street could look back on scenes like these. We wish that his own
graceful pen had granted us a full and vivid record of his roamings.

It cannot be said that from the higher standpoint Goldsmith owed much
to Dublin, Edinburgh, Leyden, or Louvain. His class-rooms for the
study of life were provided in rustic inns, his studious chambers
village greens in the land where he was born, French riversides,
Swiss mountains, Italian lakes, the blue skies of many climes, and
later the crowded streets of the London he loved. His books were the
hearts of women, the smiles of children, and the lives of men.

CHAPTER IV

LONDON

Young Oliver Goldsmith, diffident and with no adroitness of address,
was not one of those authors who can take publishers by storm, and
fame with a wave of the hand. He was a nervous man. Although one of
the most collected of writers, he had to be fully at his ease before,
in conversation or the common intercourse of society, he could be
himself and reveal that force of mind and invincibility of personality
that mark