When noble aims have suffer’d long controul,
They sink at last, or feebly man the soul.
[No product here, etc.] The Swiss mercenaries, here referred to, were long famous in European warfare.
They parted with a thousand kisses,
And fight e’er since for pay, like Swisses.
Gay’s Aye and No, a Fable.
[breasts] This fine use of ‘breasts’—as Cunningham points out—is given by Johnson as an example in his Dictionary.
[With patient angle, trolls the finny deep.] ‘Troll,’ i.e. as for pike. Goldsmith uses ‘finny prey’ in The Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 99:—‘The best manner to draw up the finny prey.’ Cf. also ‘warbling grove,’ Deserted Village, l. 361, as a parallel to ‘finny deep.’
[the struggling savage,] i.e. wolf or bear. Mitford compares the following:—‘He is a beast of prey, and the laws should make use of as many stratagems and as much force to drive the reluctant savage into the toils, as the Indians when they hunt the hyena or the rhinoceros.’ (Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 112.) See also Pope’s Iliad, Bk. xvii:—
But if the savage turns his glaring eye,
They howl aloof, and round the forest fly.
[lines 201–2] are not in the first edition.
[For every want,] etc. Mitford quotes a parallel passage in Animated Nature, 1774, ii. 123:—‘Every want thus becomes a means of pleasure, in the redressing.’
[Their morals, like their pleasures, are but low.] Probably Goldsmith only uses ‘low’ here in its primitive sense, and not in that which, in his own day, gave so much umbrage to so many eighteenth-century students of humanity in the rough. Cf. Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749, iii. 6:— ‘Some of the Author’s Friends cry’d—“Look’e, Gentlemen, the Man is a Villain; but it is Nature for all that.” And all the young Critics of the Age, the Clerks, Apprentices, etc., called it Low and fell a Groaning.’ See also Tom Jones, iv. 94, and 226–30. ‘There’s nothing comes out but the ‘most lowest’ stuff in nature’—says Lady Blarney in ch. xi of the Vicar, whose author is eloquent on this topic in The Present State of Polite Learning, 1759, pp. 154–6, and in She Stoops to Conquer, 1773 (Act i); while Graves (Spiritual Quixote, 1772, bk. i, ch. vi) gives the fashion the scientific appellation of tapino-phoby, which he defines as ‘a dread of everything that is low, either in writing or in conversation.’ To Goldsmith, if we may trust George Colman’s Prologue to Miss Lee’s Chapter of Accidents, 1780, belongs the credit of exorcising this particular form of depreciation:—