As a writer of plays, Goldsmith gained a great success with She Stoops to Conquer. Johnson, to whom it was dedicated, said:
"I know of no comedy for many years that has so much exhilarated an audience, that has answered so much the great end of comedy—making an audience merry."
Goldsmith wrote histories of England, Greece, and Rome—sometimes inaccurate, but always readable, and, with but a shallow knowledge of natural science, plunged into a work called A History of the Earth and Animated Nature. He had, as Boswell says, "a more than common share of that hurry of ideas which we often find in his countrymen."
"Goldsmith told us, that he was now busy in writing a natural history, and ... had taken lodgings, at a farmer's house, near to the six mile-stone, on the Edgeware road, and had carried down his books in two returned post-chaises.... I went to visit him at this place ... and found curious scraps of descriptions of animals, scrawled upon the wall with a black lead pencil."
When Johnson heard of the project, he said:
"Goldsmith, Sir, will give us a very fine book upon the subject; but if he can distinguish a cow from a horse, that, I believe, may be the extent of his knowledge of natural history."
Goldsmith was certainly not very sound on cows. This is what he says of their horns:
"At three years old the cow sheds its horns, and new ones arise in their place, which continue as long as it lives"!
But all that Goldsmith wrote had charm, and no one was more sensitive to it than Johnson.