Our alter’d Parson now began
To be a perfect ladies’ man;
Made sonnets, lisp’d his sermons o’er,
And told the tales he told before,
Of bailiffs pump’d, and proctors bit,
At college how he shew’d his wit;
And, as the fair one still approv’d,
He fell in love—or thought he lov’d.
So with decorum, etc.
The fifth line was probably a reminiscence of the college riot in which Goldsmith was involved in May, 1747, and for his part in which he was publicly admonished. (See [Introduction,] p. xi, l. 3.)
[usage.] This word, perhaps by a printer’s error, is ‘visage’ in the first version.
[Skill’d in no other arts was she.] Cf. Prior:—
For in all Visits who but She,
To Argue, or to Repartee.
[Five greasy nightcaps wrapp’d her head.] Cf. Spectator, No. 494— ‘At length the Head of the Colledge came out to him, from an inner Room, with half a Dozen Night-Caps upon his Head.’ See also Goldsmith’s essay on the Coronation (Essays, 1766, p. 238), where Mr. Grogan speaks of his wife as habitually ‘mobbed up in flannel night caps, and trembling at a breath of air.’
[By day, ’twas gadding or coquetting.] The first version after ‘coquetting’ begins a fresh paragraph with—
Now tawdry madam kept, etc.
[A sigh in suffocating smoke.] Here in the first version follows:—
She, in her turn, became perplexing,
And found substantial bliss in vexing.
Thus every hour was pass’d, etc.