[To see those joys.] Up to the third edition the words were each joy.
[There the black gibbet glooms beside the way.] The gallows, under the savage penal laws of the eighteenth century, by which horse-stealing, forgery, shop-lifting, and even the cutting of a hop-bind in a plantation were punishable with death, was a common object in the landscape. Cf. Vicar of Wakefield, 1706, ii. 122:—‘Our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets to scare every invader’; and Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 63–7. Johnson, who wrote eloquently on capital punishment in The Rambler for April 20, 1751, No. 114, also refers to the ceaseless executions in his London, 1738, ll. 238–43:—
Scarce can our fields, such crowds at Tyburn die,
With hemp the gallows and the fleet supply.
Propose your schemes, ye senatorian band,
Whose ways and means support the sinking land:
Lest ropes be wanting in the tempting spring,
To rig another convoy for the king.
[Where the poor houseless shivering female lies.] Mitford compares Letter cxiv of The Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 211:—‘These poor shivering females have once seen happier days, and been flattered into beauty. They have been prostituted to the gay luxurious villain, and are now turned out to meet the severity of winter. Perhaps now lying at the doors of their betrayers, they sue to wretches whose hearts are insensible, or debauchees who may curse, but will not relieve them.’ The same passage occurs in The Bee, 1759, p. 126 (A City Night-Piece).
[Near her betrayer’s door,] etc. Cf. the foregoing quotation.
[wild Altama,] i.e. the Alatamaha, a river in Georgia, North America. Goldsmith may have been familiar with this name in connexion with his friend Oglethorpe’s expedition of 1733.
[crouching tigers,] a poetical licence, as there are no tigers in the locality named. But Mr. J. H. Lobban calls attention to a passage from Animated Nature [1774, iii. 244], in which Goldsmith seems to defend himself:—‘There is an animal of America, which is usually called the Red Tiger, but Mr. Buffon calls it the Cougar, which, no doubt, is very different from the tiger of the east. Some, however, have thought proper to rank both together, and I will take leave to follow their example.’
[The good old sire.] Cf. Threnodia Augustalis, ll. 16–17:—
The good old sire, unconscious of decay,
The modest matron, clad in homespun gray