Yet, though to fortune lost, here still abide
Some splendid arts, the wrecks of former pride.
[The paste-board triumph and the cavalcade.] ‘Happy Country [he is speaking of Italy], where the pastoral age begins to revive! Where the wits even of Rome are united into a rural groupe of nymphs and swains, under the appellation of modern Arcadians [i.e. the Bolognese Academy of the Arcadi]. Where in the midst of porticos, processions, and cavalcades, abbes turn’d into shepherds, and shepherdesses without sheep, indulge their innocent divertimenti.’ (Present State of Polite Learning, 1759, pp. 50–1.) Some of the ‘paste-board triumphs’ may be studied in the plates of Jacques Callot.
[By sports like these, etc.] A pretty and well-known story is told with regard to this couplet. Calling once on Goldsmith, Reynolds, having vainly tried to attract attention, entered unannounced. ‘His friend was at his desk, but with hand uplifted, and a look directed to another part of the room; where a little dog sat with difficulty on his haunches, looking imploringly at his teacher, whose rebuke for toppling over he had evidently just received. Reynolds advanced, and looked past Goldsmith’s shoulder at the writing on his desk. It seemed to be some portions of a poem; and looking more closely, he was able to read a couplet which had been that instant written. The ink of the second line was wet:—
By sports like these are all their cares beguil’d;
The sports of children satisfy the child.
(Forster’s Life, 1871, i. pp. 347–8).
[The sports of children.] This line, in the first edition, was followed by:—
At sports like these, while foreign arms advance,
In passive ease they leave the world to chance.
[Each nobler aim, etc.] The first edition reads:—
When struggling Virtue sinks by long controul,
She leaves at last, or feebly mans the soul.
This was changed in the second, third, fourth, and fifth editions to:—