them except bring them into the world. "A word in due season, how good is it!" though a true proverb, might be capped with one far more striking – viz., a few words well chosen, and chanted in the right key, how they stir men's minds and compel their sympathies!
The music, pictures, and large charity of "The Deserted Village" were touches on the springs of feeling by a master-hand; yet one may fairly doubt whether the master was wholly conscious of the power that was in him. On that and on 'The Vicar of Wakefield' I suppose that his fame principally rests. But if we are to measure the public's appreciation by the tendency of writers and speakers to quote passages and bring them into familiar use, then the witty piece called "Retaliation" is his most successful effort. Its lines are handed about with great freedom – often used in Parliament and in the lecture-room – much resorted to by critics and essayists, and passed as currency by many a talker who knows not at what mint they were coined. The characters sketched in the poem were those of individuals; the application of the sketches is of unlimited extent.
My earliest acquaintance with Goldsmith (and it came very early in my career) was through his ballad "The Hermit," which I, with some difficulty, got by heart. I was so young and so unpractised in poetical methods as not to be able to comprehend the situation in the opening without assistance; but I remember well how powerfully affected I was by the romance when once I received it. The verses took firm hold, have withstood "the whips and scorns of time," –
"In all my wanderings round this world of care,
In all my griefs and God has given my share,"
have presented themselves, and still do present themselves, though I have been face to face with time long enough to have forgotten many a thing which seemed more important than my childish task. Thus I am hardly an impartial judge; but it seems to me that, besides the sweet and kindly thoughts, and the affecting subject, the art shown in construction has much to do with the merit of the idyl. Simple as it reads, I should say there is very superior workmanship in it.
Now that peasant-proprietorships are so much in favour, Goldsmith's line –
"When every rood of ground maintained its man" –
suggests itself as if it were just written for the occasion. The poet, singularly happy in expression, has supplied a text on the sentiment of which men of a complexion far different from his may wrangle, after he has been asleep for an age. But we must look to him for nothing more than the text: he was not the man to take hard questions in his teeth and shake the truth out of them. No, happily he was not; for had he been given to demonstration, we should have wanted the inimitable pictures of the preacher, the pedagogue, the ale-house, the village-green, and the emigrants. I doubt if there be much wisdom in this delightful poem, and whether it may not have instilled into many minds grave mischievous error hidden in its surpassing sweets. But into its tendencies I will not now inquire; it is genuine poetry, brought pure from Helicon.
When one reflects on the many departments of the belles lettres in which Goldsmith's success has stood the test of a century – certainly tale, drama, satire, eclogue,
