The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith

by Oliver Goldsmith

After The Deserted Village had appeared, Goldsmith made a short trip to Paris, in company with Mrs. and the two Miss Hornecks, the elder of whom, christened by the poet with the pretty pet-name of ‘The Jessamy Bride,’ is supposed to have inspired him with more than friendly feelings. Upon his return he had to fall again to the old ‘book-building’ in order to recruit his exhausted finances. Since his last poem he had published a short Life of Parnell; and Davies now engaged him on a Life of Bolingbroke, and an abridgement of the Roman History. Thus, with visits to friends, among others to Lord Clare, for whom he wrote the delightful occasional verses called The Haunch of Venison, the months wore on until, in December, 1770, the print-shops began to be full of the well-known mezzotint which Marchi had engraved from his portrait by Sir Joshua.

His chief publications in the next two years were the above-mentioned History of England, 1771; Threnodia Augustalis, a poetical lament-to-order on the death of the Princess Dowager of Wales, 1772; and the abridgement of the Roman History, 1772. But in the former year he had completed a new comedy, She Stoops to Conquer; or, The Mistakes of a Night, which, after the usual vexatious negotiations, was brought out by Colman at Covent Garden on Monday, the 15th of March, 1773. The manager seems to have acted Goldsmith’s own creation of ‘Croaker’ with regard to this piece, and even to the last moment predicted its failure. But it was a brilliant success. More skilful in construction than The Good Natur’d Man, more various in its contrasts of character, richer and stronger in humour and vis comica, She Stoops to Conquer has continued to provide an inexhaustible fund of laughter to more than three generations of playgoers, and still bids fair to retain the character generally given to it, of being one of the three most popular comedies upon the English stage. When published, it was gratefully inscribed, in one of those admirable dedications of which its author above all men possessed the secret, to Johnson, who had befriended it from the first. ‘I do not mean,’ wrote Goldsmith, ‘so much to compliment you as myself. It may do me some honour to inform the public, that I have lived many years in intimacy with you. It may serve the interests of mankind also to inform them, that the greatest wit may be found in a character, without impairing the most unaffected piety.’

His gains from She Stoops to Conquer were considerable; but by this time his affairs had reached a stage of complication which nothing short of a miracle could disentangle; and there is reason for supposing that his involved circumstances preyed upon his mind. During the few months of life that remained to him he published nothing, being doubtless sufficiently occupied by the undertakings to which he was already committed. The last of his poetical efforts was the poem entitled Retaliation, a group of epitaph-epigrams prompted by some similar jeux d’esprit directed against himself by Garrick and other friends, and left incomplete at his death. In March, 1774, the combined effects of work and worry, added to a local disorder, brought on a nervous fever, which he unhappily aggravated by the use of a patent medicine called ‘James’s Powder.’ He had often relied upon this before, but in the present instance it was unsuited to his complaint. On Monday, the 4th of April, 1774, he died, in his forty-sixth year, and was buried on the 9th in the burying-ground of the Temple Church. Two years later a monument, with a medallion portrait by Nollekens, and a Latin inscription by Johnson, was erected to him in Westminster Abbey, at the expense of the Literary Club. But although the inscription contains more than one phrase of felicitous discrimination, notably the oft-quoted affectuum potens, at lenis dominator, it may be doubted whether the simpler words used by his rugged old friend in a letter to Langton are not a fitter farewell to Oliver Goldsmith,—‘Let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man.’

In person Goldsmith was short and strongly built. His complexion was rather fair, but he was deeply scarred with small-pox; and—if we may believe his own account—the vicissitudes and privations of his early life had not tended to diminish his initial disadvantages. ‘You scarcely can conceive,’ he writes to his brother in 1759, ‘how much eight years of disappointment, anguish, and study, have worn me down. . . . Imagine to yourself a pale melancholy visage, with two great wrinkles between the eye-brows, with an eye disgustingly severe, and a big wig; and you may have a perfect picture of my present appearance,’ i.e. at thirty years of age. ‘I can neither laugh nor drink,’ he goes on; ‘have contracted an hesitating, disagreeable manner of speaking, and a visage that looks ill-nature itself; in short, I have thought myself into a settled melancholy, and an utter disgust of all that life brings with it.’ It is obvious that this description is largely coloured by passing depression. ‘His features,’ says one contemporary, ‘were plain, but not repulsive,—certainly not so when lighted up by conversation.’ Another witness—the ‘Jessamy Bride’—declares that ‘his benevolence was unquestionable, and his countenance bore every trace of it.’ His true likeness would seem to lie midway between the grotesquely truthful sketch by Bunbury prefixed in 1776 to the Haunch of Venison, and the portrait idealized by personal regard, which Reynolds painted in 1770. In this latter he is shown wearing, in place of his customary wig, his own scant brown hair, and, on this occasion, masquerades in a furred robe, and falling collar. But even through the disguise of a studio ‘costume,’ the finely-perceptive genius of Reynolds has managed to suggest much that is most appealing in his sitter’s nature. Past suffering, present endurance, the craving to be understood, the mute deprecation of contempt, are all written legibly in this pathetic picture. It has been frequently copied, often very ineffectively, for so subtle is the art that the slightest deviation hopelessly distorts and vulgarizes what Reynolds has done supremely, once and for ever.

Goldsmith’s character presents but few real complexities. What seems most to have impressed his contemporaries is the difference, emphasized by the happily-antithetic epigram of Garrick, between his written style and his conversation; and collaterally, between his eminence as a literary man and his personal insignificance. Much of this is easily intelligible. He had started in life with few temporal or physical advantages, and with a native susceptibility that intensified his defects. Until he became a middle-aged man, he led a life of which we do not even now know all the degradations; and these had left their mark upon his manners. With the publication of The Traveller, he became at once the associate of some of the best talent and intellect in England,—of fine gentlemen such as Beauclerk and Langton, of artists such as Reynolds and Garrick, of talkers such as Johnson and Burke. Morbidly self-conscious, nervously anxious to succeed, he was at once forced into a competition for which neither his antecedents nor his qualifications had prepared him. To this, coupled with the old habit of poverty, must be attributed his oft-cited passion for fine clothes, which surely arose less from vanity than from a mistaken attempt to extenuate what he felt to be his most obvious shortcomings. As a talker especially he was ill-fitted to shine. He was easily disconcerted by retort, and often discomfited in argument. To the end of his days he never lost his native brogue; and (as he himself tells us) he had that most fatal of defects to a narrator, a slow and hesitating manner. The perspicuity which makes the charm of his writings deserted him in conversation; and his best things were momentary flashes. But some of these were undoubtedly very happy. His telling Johnson that he would make the little fishes talk like whales; his affirmation of Burke that he wound into a subject like a serpent; and half-a-dozen other well-remembered examples—afford ample proof of this. Something of the uneasy jealousy he is said to have exhibited with regard to certain of his contemporaries may also be connected with the long probation of obscurity during which he had been a spectator of the good fortune of others, to whom he must have known himself superior. His improvidence seems to have been congenital, since it is to be traced ‘even from his boyish days.’ But though it cannot justly be ascribed to any reaction from want to sufficiency, it can still less be supposed to have been diminished by that change. If he was careless of money, it must also be remembered that he gave much of it away; and fortune lingers little with those whose ears are always open to a plausible tale of distress. Of his sensibility and genuine kindheartedness there is no doubt. And it is well to remember that most of the tales to his disadvantage come, not from his more distinguished companions, but from such admitted detractors as Hawkins and Boswell. It could be no mean individuality that acquired the esteem, and deserved the regret, of Johnson and Reynolds.

In an edition of Goldsmith’s poems, any extended examination of his remaining productions would be out of place. Moreover, the bulk of these is considerably reduced when all that may properly be classed as hack-work has been withdrawn. The histories of Greece, of Rome, and of England; the Animated Nature; the lives of Nash, Voltaire, Parnell, and Bolingbroke, are merely compilations, only raised to the highest level in that line because they proceeded from a man whose gift of clear and easy exposition lent a charm to everything he touched. With the work which he did for himself, the case is different. Into The Citizen of the World, The Vicar of Wakefield, and his two comedies, he put all the best of his knowledge of human nature, his keen sympathy with his kind, his fine common-sense and his genial humour. The same qualities, tempered by a certain grace and tenderness, also enter into the best of his poems. Avoiding the epigram of Pope and the austere couplet of Johnson, he yet borrowed something from each, which he combined with a delicacy and an amenity that he had learned from neither. He himself, in all probability, would have rested his fame on his three chief metrical efforts, The Traveller, The Hermit, and The Deserted Village. But, as is often the case, he is remembered even more favourably by some of those delightful familiar verses, unprinted during his lifetime, which he threw off with no other ambition than the desire to amuse his friends. Retaliation, The Haunch of Venison, the Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury, all afford noteworthy exemplification of that playful touch and wayward fancy which constitute the chief attraction of this species of poetry. In his imitations of Swift and Prior, and his variations upon French suggestions, his personal note is scarcely so apparent; but the two Elegies and some of the minor pieces retain a deserved reputation. His ingenious prologues and epilogues also serve to illustrate the range and versatility of his talent. As a rule, the arrangement in the present edition is chronological; but it has not been thought necessary to depart from the practice which gives a time-honoured precedence to The Traveller and The Deserted Village. The true sequence of the poems, in their order of publication, is, however, exactly indicated in the table which follows this Introduction.

CHRONOLOGY OF GOLDSMITH’S LIFE AND POEMS.

1728	November 10. Born at Pallas, near Ballymahon, in the county of Longford, Ireland.
1730	Family remove to Lissoy, in the county of Westmeath.
1731	Under Elizabeth Delap.
1734	Under Mr. Thomas Byrne of the village school.
1736–44	At school at Elphin (Mr. Griffin’s), Athlone (Mr. Campbell’s), Edgeworthstown (Mr. Hughes’s).
1744	June 11. Admitted a sizar of Trinity College, Dublin, ‘annum agens 15.’
1747	Death of his father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith. May. Takes part in a college riot. June 15. Obtains a Smythe exhibition. Runs away from college.
1749	February 27. Takes his degree as Bachelor of Arts.
1751	Rejected for orders by the Bishop of Elphin. Tutor to Mr. Flinn. Sets out for America (via Cork), but returns. Letter to Mrs. Goldsmith (his mother).
1752	Starts as a law student, but loses his all at play. Goes to Edinburgh to become a medical student.
1753	January 13. Admitted a member of the ‘Medical Society’ of Edinburgh. May 8. Letter to his Uncle Contarine. September 26. Letter to Robert Bryanton. Letter to his Uncle Contarine.
1754	Goes to Leyden. Letter to his Uncle Contarine.
1755	February. Leaves Leyden. Takes degree of Bachelor of Medicine at Louvain (?). Travels on foot in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Sketches The Traveller.
1756	February 1. Returns to Dover. Low comedian; usher (?); apothecary’s journeyman; poor physician in Bankside, Southwark.
1757	Press corrector to Samuel Richardson, printer and novelist; assistant at Peckham Academy (Dr. Milner’s). April. Bound over to Griffiths the bookseller. Quarrels with Griffiths. December 27. Letter to his brother-in-law, Daniel Hodson.
1758	February. Publishes The Memoirs of a Protestant, condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion. Gives up literature and returns to Peckham. August. Leaves Peckham. Letters to Edward Mills, Bryanton, Mrs. Jane Lawder. Appointed surgeon and physician to a factory on the Coast of Coromandel. November (?). Letter to Hodson. Moves into 12 Green Arbour Court, Old Bailey. Coromandel appointment comes to nothing. December 21. Rejected at Surgeons’ Hall as ‘not qualified’ for a hospital mate.
1759	February (?). Letter to Henry Goldsmith. March. Visited by Percy at 12 Green Arbour Court. April 2. Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe published. ‘Prologue of Laberius’ (Enquiry). October 6.The Bee commenced. ‘On a Beautiful Youth struck blind with Lightning’ (Bee). October 13. ‘The Gift’ (Bee). October 18. ‘The Logicians Refuted’ (Busy Body). October 20. ‘A Sonnet’ (Bee). October 22. ‘Stanzas on the Taking of Quebec’ (Busy Body). October 27. ‘Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize’ (Bee). November 24. The Bee closed.
1760	January 1. The British Magazine commenced. January 12. The Public Ledger commenced. January 24. First Chinese Letter published (Citizen of the World). May 2. ‘Description of an Author’s Bedchamber’ (‘Chinese Letter’ in Public Ledger). October 21. ‘On seeing Mrs. . . . perform,’ etc. (‘Chinese Letter’ in Public Ledger). Editing Lady’s Magazine. Compiling Prefaces. Moves into 6 Wine Office Court, Fleet Street.
1761	March 4. ‘On the Death of the Right Hon. . . . (‘Chinese Letter’ in Public Ledger). April 4–14. ‘An Epigram’; to G. C. and R. L. (‘Chinese Letter in Public Ledger). May 13. ‘Translation of a South American Ode.’ (‘Chinese Letter’ in Public Ledger) August 14. Last Chinese Letter published (Citizen of the World). Memoirs of M. de Voltaire published in Lady’s Magazine.
1762	February 23. Pamphlet on Cock Lane Ghost published. February 26. History of Mecklenburgh published. May 1.Citizen of the World published. May 1 to Nov. 1.Plutarch’s Lives, vol. i to vii, published. At Bath and Tunbridge. October 14. Life of Richard Nash published. October 28. Sells third share of Vicar of Wakefield to B. Collins, printer, Salisbury. At Mrs. Fleming’s at Islington.
1763	March 31. Agrees with James Dodsley to write a Chronological History of the Lives of Eminent Persons of Great Britain and Ireland. (Never done.)
1764	‘The Club,’ afterwards the Literary Club, founded. Moves into lodgings on the library staircase of the Temple. June 26.History of England, in a series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son published. October 31. Oratorio of The Captivity sold to James Dodsley. December 19. The Traveller published.
1765	June 4. Essays by Mr. Goldsmith published. ‘The Double Transformation,’ ‘A New Simile’ (Essays). Edwin and Angelina (The Hermit) printed privately for the amusement of the Countess of Northumberland. Resumes practice as a physician.
1766	March 27. Vicar of Wakefield published. ‘Elegy on a Mad Dog’; ‘Olivia’s Song’ (Vicar of Wakefield). May 31. Vicar of Wakefield, 2nd edition. June. Translation of Formey’s Concise History of Philosophy and Philosophers published. August 29. Vicar of Wakefield, 3rd edition. December 15. Poems for Young Ladies published.
1766	December 28. English Grammar written.
1767	April. Beauties of English Poesy published. July 19. Living in Garden Court, Temple. July 25. Letter to the St. James’s Chronicle. December 22. Death of John Newbery.
1768	February 5. Publishes The Good Natur’d Man, a Comedy, produced at Covent Garden, January 29. ‘Epilogue to The Good Natur’d Man.’ Moves to 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple. May. Death of Henry Goldsmith. Living at Edgware.
1769	February 18. ‘Epilogue to Mrs. Lenox’s Sister.’ February 29. Agreement for ‘a new Natural History of Animals’ (Animated Nature). May 18. Roman History published. June 13. Agreement for History of England. December. Appointed Professor of History to the Royal Academy.
1770	January. Letter to Maurice Goldsmith. April 24–May 26. Portrait by Reynolds exhibited. May 26. The Deserted Village published. July 13. Life of Thomas Parnell published. July. On the Continent with the Hornecks. Letters to Reynolds. September 15. Agreement for abridgement of Roman History. December 1. Marchi’s print from Reynold’s portrait published. December 19.Life of Bolingbroke published. Vicar of Wakefield, 4th edition.
1771	Haunch of Venison written. (?) August 6.History of England published. December 11. ‘Prologue to Cradock’s Zobeide.’
1772	February 20. Threnodia Augustalis published. Watson’s Engraving of Resignation published. December. Abridgement of Roman History published.
1773	March 26. Publishes She Stoops to Conquer; or, The Mistakes of a Night, a Comedy, produced at Covent Garden, March 15. ‘Song in She Stoops to Conquer,’ ‘Epilogue to She Stoops to Conquer.’
1773	March 24. Kenrick’s libel in the London Packet. March 31. Letter in the Daily Advertiser. May 8. The Grumbler produced. Projects a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.
1774	March 25. Illness. April 4. Death. April 9. ‘Buried 9th April, Oliver Goldsmith, MB, late of Brick-court, Middle Temple’ (Register of Burials, Temple Church). April 19.Retaliation published. April. Vicar of Wakefield, 5th edition (dated 1773). June. Song (‘Ah me, when shall I marry me?’) published. June 28. Letters of Administration granted. June. An History of the Earth and Animated Nature published. ‘Translation from Addison.’ (History, etc., 1774.)
1776	The Haunch of Venison published. ‘Epitaph on Thomas Parnell,’ and ‘Two Songs from The Captivity (Haunch of Venison). Monument with medallion by Nollekens erected in the south transept of Westminster Abbey.
1777	Poems and Plays published. ‘The Clown’s Reply,’ ‘Epitaph on Edward Purdon’ (Poems, etc., 1777).
1779	Vicar of Wakefield, 6th edition.
1780	Poetical and Dramatic Works, Evans’s edition, published. ‘Epilogue for Lee Lewes’ (Poetical, etc., Works, 1780).
1801	Miscellaneous Works, Percy’s edition, published. ‘Epilogues (unspoken) to She Stoops to Conquer’ (Misc. Works, 1801).
1820	Miscellaneous Works, ‘trade’ edition, published. An Oratorio’ (The Captivity). (Misc. Works, 1820.)
1837	Miscellaneous Works, Prior’s edition, published. ‘Verses in Reply to an Invitation to Dinner’; ‘Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury’ (Misc. Works, 1837). Tablet erected in the Temple Church.
1854	Goldsmith’s Works, Cunningham’s edition, published. ‘Translation of Vida’s Game of Chess’ (Works, 1854, vol. iv).
1864	January 5. J. H. Foley’s statue placed in front of Dublin University.

---