His naturally strong constitution was soon impaired by his hardships. At the age of thirty-one he wrote thus to his brother: "Though I never had a day's sickness since I saw you, yet I am not that strong active man you once knew me. You scarcely can conceive how much eight years of disappointment, anguish, and study, have worn me down." The climate of London was trying to him, and he frequently had to recruit by taking lodgings in the country.

The strong points of Goldsmith's intellect centred in his power of easy and graceful literary composition. He was not a profound scholar, and his mind was neither very comprehensive nor very productive. His fame rests upon the charms of his style: he tried nearly every kind of composition-poetry, comedy, fiction, history, essay-writing, natural science-and, as Johnson said in his wellknown epitaph, "whatever he touched he adorned." He criticised, as he wrote, with exquisite taste. The fragments that Mr Forster has reprinted from the Monthly Review,' Goldsmith's earliest performances, are models of just criticism. His delicately-sympathetic nature was a peculiar qualification for appreciating the works of others. This also gave him his singular power of reading character. His drawing of the members of the Literary Club, in the poem "Retaliation," is a supreme work of art. On the strength of Garrick's well-known epigram—

"Here lies poet Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll,
Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll

it has sometimes been said that he was very dull in conversation, and that in the Literary Club he was often made a butt. As Boswell admits, his conversational dulness has been much exaggerated. Undoubtedly he was quicker with his pen than with his tongue. A man of fine taste needs time to mature his thoughts; and Goldsmith, careless of his reputation, often opened his mouth without the least premeditation. As to his being made a butt, it was part of his peculiar humour to sacrifice himself for the amusement of the company by affecting ridiculous vanity and stupidity. Many of the anecdotes of his vanity bear evidence of the stolidity of the narrators-their incapability of understanding a joke or entering into the fun of humorous affectation.

In the matter of emotion, he was one of those beings that are often found in extremes. When fortune went well with him, he was as happy as the day was long. So mobile were his sympathies that he could not be sad in merry company, and was easily beguiled out of his sorrows. Yet he was also easily dispirited, and often took dark views of the future. Self-respect kept him from making many confidants of his heartless anticipations. He often assumed an appearance of gaiety when there was no small anxiety

within; but we find him, in an affectionate letter to his brother in Ireland, complaining of a "settled melancholy" and "gloomy habits of thinking;" and he sometimes laid his cares before his sturdy friend Johnson. After a happy deliverance from gloomy apprehensions, he would entertain his friends with ludicrous pictures of his previous distress. He was a warm friend and a generous enemy; quick to take offence, and easily pacified. His heart overflowed with tenderness: he loved the happy faces of children, and could not bear to see misery. With his rare skill in divining the thoughts of others, and detecting what they prided. themselves upon, he might have been a stinging satirist; but his tenderness, though it could not restrain, always induced him to soften the dart.

The imprudence of his conduct has often been dilated upon. As a young man he was flighty, and more bent upon seeing the world than willing to subside into a staid professional career. His life was one long battle with imprudence. He was thirty-one when he finally settled down to authorship; and then he never thought of laying up money for an evil day, but spent faster than he earned, and died two thousand pounds in debt. "His purse replenished," says Judge Day, "the season of relaxation and pleasure took its turn, in attending the theatres, Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and other scenes of gaiety and amusement. When his funds were dissipated-and they fled more rapidly from his being the dupe of many artful persons, male and female, who practised upon his benevolence-he returned to his literary labours, and shut himself up from society to provide fresh matter for his bookseller, and fresh supplies for himself." There are several well-known anecdotes of his imprudent generosity. On one occasion about the beginning of his career as an author, he pawned a suit of clothes that he had on loan to save his landlady from an execution for debt. Throughout all his struggles he continued to send money to his poor mother in Ireland; and when he died, "on the stairs of his apartment there was the lamentation of the old and infirm, and the sobbing of women, poor objects of his charity, to whom he had never turned a deaf ear.'

He was

Opinions.-Goldsmith is not known to have held strong opinions, as Johnson did, either in politics or in sectarian religion. more of an observer than of a doctrinaire. He had seen much of mankind, and interested himself more in noting characteristic expression and conduct than in gaining adherents to any favourite views. The point of view of the Chinese Letters is characteristic. Himself emancipated by temperament and education from nearly every mode of traditionary prejudice, he regarded as absurd and mischievous many of the English opinions, customs, and institu

tions. But he did not attack these directly, as Mr Matthew Arnold has lately done, in his own proper person. He assumed the person of a philosophic Chinaman, and showed, in the form of letters to friends in the East, how English ways appeared in the eyes of a "Citizen of the World." In these letters he not only expresses surprise at superficial absurdities in dress, in public ceremonies, and suchlike, and at such incongruities as charging admission-fees to tombs and other memorials of great men, but also strikes at graver subjects, at the law of divorce, at iniquities in the administration of justice, at the abuses of Church patronage, at the frivolous causes of great wars, and similar matters of more serious import.

ELEMENTS OF STYLE.

Vocabulary.-The best evidence of Goldsmith's wide command of language is his excellence in so many different kinds of composition. The remarkable thing is his combination of purity with copiousness. He is more copious than Addison; and, while no less simple than that master of simple language, he never is affectedly easy, never condescends to polite slang. One is safe to assert that no writer of English is at once so copious and so pure.

Sentences and Paragraphs.-The light and graceful structure of Goldsmith's sentences cannot be too much admired. It would be interesting to find out what preceding writer he is most indebted to. We may concede to Boswell and to Dr Nathan Drake that in some respects he belongs to the "Johnsonian school." Had Goldsmith written before Johnson, he would probably have constructed his sentences as loosely as Addison. He may have learnt from Johnson to observe grammar more strictly than was usual with the Queen Anne writers, to balance clauses, and to round off his sentences without leaving inelegant tags. Probably he caught these parts of his skill from Johnson, though none but the greater grammatical accuracy can be said to have been originated by "the great lexicographer." But in other respects his style is so unlike Johnson's that it needs some practice in criticism to discover any resemblance whatsoever. Not to speak of Goldsmith's simple diction and exquisite melody, which make a sufficient disguise for the general reader, his sentences are much shorter, less condensed, and less abrupt. When we remember Goldsmith's acquaintance with French literature, we can hardly help ascribing some of the merits of his style to the influence of the French.

In the following specimens of his style, taken from his earliest work, the Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning,' we catch an occasional echo of Johnson; but the general structure is much lighter and more graceful:

"If we examine the state of learning in Germany, we shall find that the

Germans early discovered a passion for polite literature; but unhappily, like conquerors who, invading the dominions of others, leave their own to desolation, instead of studying the German tongue, they continued to write in Latin. Thus, while they cultivated an obsolete language, and vainly laboured to apply it to modern manners, they neglected their own.

"At the same time, also, they began at the wrong end,-I mean by being commentators; and though they have given many instances of their industry, they have scarcely afforded any of genius. If criticism could have improved the taste of a people, the Germans would have been the most polite nation alive. We shall nowhere behold the learned wear a more important appearance than here; nowhere more dignified with professorships, or dressed out in the fopperies of scholastic finery. However, they seem to earn all the honour of this kind which they enjoy. Their assiduity is unparalleled; and did they employ half those hours on study which they bestow on reading, we might be induced to pity as well as praise their painful pre-eminence. But, guilty of a fault too common to great readers, they write through volumes while they do not think through a page. Never fatigued themselves, they think the reader can never be weary; so they drone on, saying all that can be said on the subject, not selecting what may be advanced to the purpose. Were angels to write books, they never would write folios."

Again

"The French nobility have certainly a most pleasing way of satisfying the vanity of an author, without indulging his avarice. A man of literary merit is sure of being caressed by the great, though seldom enriched. His pension from the Crown just supplies half a competence, and the sale of his labours makes some small addition to his circumstances. Thus the author leads a life of splendid poverty, and seldom becomes wealthy or indolent enough to discontinue an exertion of those abilities by which he rose. With the English it is different. Our writers of rising merit are generally neglected, while the few of an established reputation are overpaid by luxurious affluThe young encounter every hardship which generally attends upon aspiring indigence; the old enjoy the vulgar and perhaps the more prudent satisfaction of putting riches in competition with fame. Those are often seen to spend their youth in want and obscurity; these are sometimes found to lead an old age of indolence and avarice. But such treatment must naturally be expected from Englishmen, whose national character is to be slow and cautious in making friends, but violent in friendships once contracted." Once more, in a criticism of Gray's Odes, he says

ence.

"We cannot without regret behold talents so capable of giving pleasure to all, exerted in efforts that at best can amuse only the few: we cannot behold this rising poet seeking fame among the learned, without hinting to him the advice that Isocrates used to give his scholars, Study the people. This study it is that has conducted the great masters of antiquity up to immortality. Pindar himself, of whom our modern lyrist is an imitator, appears entirely guided by it. He adapted his works exactly to the disposi tions of his countrymen. Irregular, enthusiastic, and quick in transition, he wrote for a people inconstant, of warm imagination, and exquisite sensibility. He chose the most popular subjects, and all his allusions are to customs well known in his days to the meanest person."

Figures of Speech.-Goldsmith resembles Johnson in the neglect of ornamental similitudes. To say so is, however, to use "similitudes" in the sense of similes, or formal similitudes. The remark

does not apply as regards metaphors. Goldsmith's style is too much elevated by metaphors to be called plain. He is not so plain a writer as Addison; his style has (to use Ben Jonson's expression) more "blood and juice." Thus

"The other countries of Europe may be considered as immersed in ignorance or making but feeble efforts to rise. Spain has long fallen from amazing Europe with her wit, to amusing them with the greatness of her catholic credulity."

Again

"Men like these, united by one bond, pursuing one design, spend their labour and their lives in making their fellow-creatures happy, and in repairing the breaches caused by ambition. In this light, the meanest philosopher, though all his possessions are his lamp or his cell, is more truly valuable than he whose name echoes to the shout of the million, and who stands in all the glare of admiration. In this light, though poverty and contemptuous neglect are all the wages of his good-will from mankind, yet the rectitude of his intention is an ample recompense; and self-applause for the present, and the alluring prospect of fame for futurity, reward his labours. The perspective of life brightens upon us, when terminated by an object so charming. Every intermediate image of want, banishment, or sorrow, receives a lustre from its distant influence. With this in view, the patriot, philosopher, and poet, have often looked with calmness on disgrace and famine, and rested on their straw with cheerful serenity. Even the last terrors of departing nature abate of their severity, and look kindly on him who considers his sufferings as a passport to immortality, and lays his sorrows on the bed of fame."

Contrast. As sufficiently appears in the preceding quotations, he was taken with the charm of rhetorical antithesis, and laboured to deliver his sayings in an antithetical form. In his 'Polite Learning' we can read but few sentences without encountering a formal "point;" and here and there we find the general sparkle condensed into the brilliancy of an epigram.

The following are examples of his epigrams:

"Cautious stupidity is always in the right.'

"We see more of the world by travel, more of human nature by remaining at home."

"We grow learned, not wise, by too long a continuance at college." "To imitate nature was found to be the surest way of imitating antiquity." "The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them." i

The peculiar artifice of ending off a sentence with an unexpected turn is of the nature of epigram. Of this artifice we might cull numerous examples from Goldsmith. It peculiarly suited his gay volatility. We take the three following from the narrative of the Man in Black.2

1 Epigrams similar to this occur in South, Butler, Young, and Voltaire.

2 The Man in Black is usually said to be modelled on the real character of Goldsmith's father. The father of the Man in Black is obviously drawn from Goldsmith's father; the Man in Black is no less obviously intended by Goldsmith for a portrait of himself.