[tawdry] was added in the sixth edition of 1770.
[blank verse.] Cf. The Present State of Polite Learning, 1759, p. 150—‘From a desire in the critic of grafting the spirit of ancient languages upon the English, has proceeded of late several disagreeable instances of pedantry. Among the number, I think we may reckon blank verse. Nothing but the greatest sublimity of subject can render such a measure pleasing; however, we now see it used on the most trivial occasions’—by which last remark Goldsmith probably, as Cunningham thinks, intended to refer to the efforts of Akenside, Dyer, and Armstrong. His views upon blank verse were shared by Johnson and Gray. At the date of the present dedication, the latest offender in this way had been Goldsmith’s old colleague on The Monthly Review, Dr. James Grainger, author of The Sugar Cane, which was published in June, 1764. (Cf. also The Bee for 24th November, 1759, ‘An account of the Augustan Age of England.’)
[and that this principle, etc.] In the first edition this read—‘and that this principle in each state, and in our own in particular, may be carried to a mischievous excess.’
[Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.] Mitford (Aldine edition, 1831, p. 7) compares the following lines from Ovid:—
Solus, inops, exspes, leto poenaeque relictus.
Metamorphoses, xiv. 217.
Exsul, inops erres, alienaque limina lustres, etc.
Ibis. 113.
[slow.] A well-known passage from Boswell must here be reproduced:—‘Chamier once asked him [Goldsmith], what he meant by slow, the last word in the first line of The Traveller,
Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.
Did he mean tardiness of locomotion? Goldsmith, who would say something without consideration, answered “yes.” I [Johnson] was sitting by, and said, “No, Sir, you do not mean tardiness of locomotion; you mean, that sluggishness of mind which comes upon a man in solitude.” Chamier believed then that I had written the line as much as if he had seen me write it.’ [Birkbeck Hill’s Boswell, 1887, iii. 252–3.) It is quite possible, however, that Goldsmith meant no more than he said.
[the rude Carinthian boor.] ‘Carinthia,’ says Cunningham, ‘was visited by Goldsmith in 1755, and still (1853) retains its character for inhospitality.’
[Campania.] ‘Intended,’ says Bolton Corney, ‘to denote La campagna di Roma. The portion of it which extends from Rome to Terracina is scarcely habitable.’