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.