And varied life steal unperceiv’d away.
[While Resignation,] etc. In 1771 Sir Joshua exhibited a picture of ‘An Old Man,’ studied from the beggar who was his model for Ugolino. When it was engraved by Thomas Watson in 1772, he called it ‘Resignation,’ and inscribed the print to Goldsmith in the following words:—‘This attempt to express a Character in The Deserted Village, is dedicated to Dr. Goldsmith, by his sincere Friend and admirer, JOSHUA REYNOLDS.’
[Up yonder hill.] It has been suggested that Goldsmith was here thinking of the little hill of Knockaruadh (Red Hill) in front of Lissoy parsonage, of which there is a sketch in Newell’s Poetical Works, 1811. When Newell wrote, it was already known as ‘Goldsmith’s mount’; and the poet himself refers to it in a letter to his brother-in-law Hodson, dated Dec. 27, 1757:—‘I had rather be placed on the little mount before Lishoy gate, and there take in, to me, the most pleasing horizon in nature.’ (Percy Memoir, 1801, p. 43.)
[And fill’d each pause the nightingale had made.] In Animated Nature, 1774, v. 328, Goldsmith says:—‘The nightingale’s pausing song would be the proper epithet for this bird’s music.’ [Mitford.]
[No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale.] (Cf. Goldsmith’s Essay on Metaphors (British Magazine):—‘Armstrong has used the word ‘fluctuate’ with admirable efficacy, in his philosophical poem entitled The Art of Preserving Health.
Oh! when the growling winds contend, and all
The sounding forest ‘fluctuates’ in the storm,
To sink in warm repose, and hear the din
Howl o’er the steady battlements.
[The sad historian of the pensive plain.] Strean (see note to l. 13) identified the old watercress gatherer as a certain Catherine Giraghty (or Geraghty). Her children (he said) were still living in the neighbourhood of Lissoy in 1807. (Mangin’s Essay on Light Reading, 1808, p. 142.)
[The village preacher’s modest mansion rose.] ‘The Rev. Charles Goldsmith is allowed by all that knew him, to have been faithfully represented by his son in the character of the Village Preacher.’ So writes his daughter, Catharine Hodson (Percy Memoir, 1801, p. 3). Others, relying perhaps upon the ‘forty pounds a year’ of the Dedication to The Traveller, make the poet’s brother Henry the original; others, again, incline to kindly Uncle Contarine (vide Introduction). But as Prior justly says (Life, 1837, ii. 249), ‘the fact perhaps is that he fixed upon no one individual, but borrowing like all good poets and painters a little from each, drew the character by their combination.’
[with forty pounds a year.] Cf. Dedication to The Traveller, p. 3, l. 14.
[ Unpractis’d.] ‘Unskilful’ in the first edition.