Of his other poems "The Haunch of Venison," imitated from Horace, and the witty and kind raillery of "Retaliation," in which his pen supplies the wit that often failed his tongue in the wit-combats of "the Club," are both in "anapests" and are the most important. The "Lament for Madame Blaise" is a lively adaptation from the French, and the "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog" is a most vivacious piece. As a ballad "Edwin and Angelina," though popular, is too unballad-like.
The works on which Goldsmith's fame depends are not his essays, histories, or view of "Animated Nature," genially unscientific, but his "Vicar of Wakefield" (written earlier, but sold by Johnson for while Goldsmith was in a sponging house in 1764), and his two plays "The Good Natured Man," and "She Stoops to Conquer" (1768, 1773).
"The Vicar of Wakefield" drew the highest possible praise from Goethe, and the most furious of attacks from the critical pen of Mark Twain. Nobody says that it shines in construction, but its humour and sweetness, the goodness, the simplicity, the true wisdom, and the learned foibles of the Vicar, with the humours of his wife, daughters, and wandering scholar son, an usher, a dweller in Grub Street, make "The Vicar of Wakefield" a book to be read once a year. "Finding that the best things had not been said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new... the learned world said nothing to my paradoxes, nothing at all, sir." In the son's narrative Goldsmith has his usual flout at art and amateurs of art, and Pietro Perugino.
The plays are too well known for comment, with Croaker and Lofty, the Bailiffs, Tony Lumpkin, Mrs. Hardcastle, the revellers at the Three Pigeons, and young Marlow, they are at least as familiar on the amateur as on the professional boards. They brought to Goldsmith fame, some money and more credit, but he was still a drudge, still working for booksellers, and deep in debt, when his death on 4 April, 1774, made Reynolds for once lay down his brush, saddened the Club, and filled the stairs of his chambers in Brick Court with poor weeping women to whom he had been kind,—their only friend. "Nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit," wrote Johnson in his epitaph, adding a new phrase to Latin proverbial philosophy.[1]
Edmund Burke.
"It seems probable," says Burke's biographer, Lord Morley, "that Burke will be more frequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty years" (from 1899) "than he has been within the whole of the last eighty." Yet we do not find many references to Burke, who, living, speaking, and writing through some thirty years of discontents and revolutions (the American and the French) and bringing to problems like our own a masculine judgment, and a lucid and energetic style, might seem worthy of general study.
In a sketch of the history of literature space for the works of Burke, saturated with politics as they are, and only to be understood in the light of ample historical knowledge, cannot be provided. The speeches of most successful orators are brilliant, and persuasive for the hour, with crowds who wish to be persuaded. The speeches of Burke are sometimes, when his pity and indignation are stirred (as by the fate of Marie Antoinette, or the alleged infamies of Warren Hastings), rich in floral components, in impassioned rhetoric. But, as a rule, his best orations required to be read if they were to be appreciated; they are too full of thought and knowledge and too logically built to be generally effective at the moment.
Whatever our political opinions may be, we cannot but find Burke's "Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies" (22 March, 1775) a very great and noble literary work. For its purpose it was futile; fierce peoples are not to be guided by all the eloquence and all the wisdom of the wise. "We are called upon, as it were by a superior warning Voice, again to attend to America; to attend to the whole of it together; and to review the subject with an unusual degree of care and calmness. Surely it is an awful subject; or there is none so on this side of the grave."
It was an awful subject; but it was also a party question. Knowledge, care, and calmness were, therefore, put out of action. On an infamous proposal to "reduce the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the southern colonies" by proclaiming the freedom of the black slaves and raising a servile war, Burke said: "Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which has sold them to their present masters? from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic?"—the Slave Trade. The idea of sending, in the same ship, samples of fresh "black ivory" and a proclamation of freedom for all blacks, not unreasonably seemed absurd, to Burke.
This speech, so moving to the reader, is said to have driven members out of the House; the gestures of the orator being clumsy, his tones harsh, and his delivery hasty. Johnson said that his wit was "blunt"; Goldsmith, on the other hand, that he "cut blocks with a razor". He "to party gave up what was meant for mankind," but, save through party, mankind is not to be helped by the politicians.