Here amidst sylvan bowers we’ll rove,
From lawn to woodland stray;
Blest as the songsters of the grove,
And innocent as they.
To all that want, and all that wail,
Our pity shall be given,
And when this life of love shall fail,
We’ll love again in heaven.
These couplets, with certain alterations in the first and last lines, are to be found in the version printed in Poems for Young Ladies, 1767, p. 98.
[AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF A MAD DOG.]
This poem was first published in The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, i. 175–6, where it is sung by one of the little boys. In common with the Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize (p. 47) it owes something of its origin to Goldsmith’s antipathy to fashionable elegiacs, something also to the story of M. de la Palisse. As regards mad dogs, its author seems to have been more reasonable than many of his contemporaries, since he ridiculed, with much common sense, their exaggerated fears on this subject (v. Chinese Letter in The Public Ledger for August 29, 1760, afterwards Letter lxvi of The Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 15). But it is ill jesting with hydrophobia. Like Madam Blaize, these verses have been illustrated by Randolph Caldecott.
[In Islington there was a man.] Goldsmith had lodgings at Mrs. Elizabeth Fleming’s in Islington (or ‘Isling town’ as the earlier editions have it) in 1763–4; and the choice of the locality may have been determined by this circumstance. But the date of the composition of the poem is involved in the general obscurity which hangs over the Vicar in its unprinted state. (See [Introduction,] pp. xviii-xix.)
[The dog, to gain some private ends.] The first edition reads ‘his private ends.’
[The dog it was that died.] This catastrophe suggests the couplet from the Greek Anthology, ed. Jacobs, 1813–7, ii. 387:—
Kappadoken pot exidna kake daken alla kai aute
katthane, geusamene aimatos iobolou.
Goldsmith, however, probably went no farther back than Voltaire on Fréron:—
L’autre jour, au fond d’un vallon,
Un serpent mordit Jean Fréron.
Devinez ce qu’il arriva?
Ce fut le serpent qui creva.