As a dramatist, he was more than equalled by Sheridan; but his two plays, The Good-Natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer, are still favorites upon the stage.
The irregularities of Goldsmith's private life seem to have been rather defects in his character than intentional wrong-doings. Generous to a fault, squandering without thought what was due to his creditors, losing at play, he lived in continual pecuniary embarrassment, and died unhappy, with a debt of £1000, the existence of which led Johnson to ejaculate, "Was ever poet so trusted before?" He lived a bachelor; and the conclusion seems forced upon us that had he married a woman who could have controlled him, he, would have been a happier and more respectable man, but perhaps have done less for literature than he did.
While Goldsmith was a type and presenter of his age, and while he took no high flights in the intellectual realms, he so handled what the age presented that he must be allowed the claim of originality, both in his poems and in the Vicar; and he has had, even to the present day, hosts of imitators. Poems on college gala-days were for a long time faint reflections of his Traveller, and simple, causal stories of quiet life are the teeming progeny of the Vicar, in spite of the Whistonian controversy, and the epitaph of his living wife.
A few of his ballads and songs display great lyric power, but the most of his poetry is not lyric; it is rather a blending of the pastoral and epic with rare success. His minor poems are few, but favorites. Among these is the beautiful ballad entitled Edwin and Angelina, or The Hermit, which first appeared in The Vicar of Wakefield, but which has since been printed separately among his poems. Of its kind and class it has no superior. Retaliation is a humorous epitaph upon his friends and co-literati, hitting off their characteristics with truth and point; and The Haunch of Venison—upon which he did not dine—is an amusing incident which might have happened to any Londoner like himself, but which no one could have related so well as he.
He died in 1774, at the age of forty-five; but his fame—his better life—is more vigorous than ever. Washington Irving, whose writings are similar in style to those of Goldsmith, has extended and perpetuated his reputation in America by writing his Biography; a charming work, many touches of which seem almost autobiographical, as displaying the resemblance between the writer and his subject.
Mackenzie.—From Sterne and Goldsmith we pass to Mackenzie, who, if not a conscious imitator of the former, is, at least, unconsciously formed upon the model of Sterne, without his genius, but also without his coarseness: in the management of his narrative, he is a medium between Sterne and Walter Scott; indeed, from his long life, he saw the period of both these authors, and his writings partake of the characteristics of both.
Henry Mackenzie was born at Edinburgh, in August, 1745, and lived until 1831, to the ripe age of eighty-six. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, and afterwards studied law. He wrote some strong political pamphlets in favor of the Pitt government, for which he was rewarded with the office of comptroller of the taxes, which he held to the day of his death.
The Man of Feeling.—In 1771 the world was equally astonished and delighted by the appearance of his first novel, The Man of Feeling. In this there are manifest tokens of his debt to Sterne's Sentimental Journey, in the journey of Harley, in the story of the beggar and his dog, and in somewhat of the same forced sensibility in the account of Harley's death.
In 1773 appeared his Man of the World which was in some sort a sequel to the Man of Feeling, but which wearies by the monotony of the plot.
In 1777 he published Julia de Roubigné, which, in the opinion of many, shares the palm with his first novel: the plot is more varied than that of the second, and the language is exceedingly harmonious—elegiac prose. The story is plaintive and painful: virtue is extolled, but made to suffer, in a domestic tragedy, which all readers would be glad to see ending differently.