e's famous _Essay on Man_; it owes its
popularity to the sympathetic memories which it awakens, rather than to its
poetic excellence. It is as a prose writer that Goldsmith excels. He is an
essayist, with Addison's fine polish but with more sympathy for human life;
he is a dramatist, one of the very few who have ever written a comedy that
can keep its popularity unchanged while a century rolls over its head; but
greater, perhaps, than the poet and essayist and dramatist is Goldsmith the
novelist, who set himself to the important work of purifying the early
novel of its brutal and indecent tendencies, and who has given us, in _The
Vicar of Wakefield_, one of the most enduring characters in English
fiction. In his manner, especially in his poetry, Goldsmith was too much
influenced by his friend Johnson and the classicists; but in his matter, in
his sympathy for nature and human life, he belongs unmistakably to the new
romantic school. Altogether he is the most versatile, the most charming,
the most inconsistent, and the most lovable genius of all the literary men
who made famous the age of Johnson.

LIFE. Goldsmith's career is that of an irresponsible, unbalanced genius,
which would make one despair if the man himself did not remain so lovable
in all his inconsistencies. He was born in the village of Pallas, Ireland,
the son of a poor Irish curate whose noble character is portrayed in Dr.
Primrose, of _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and in the country parson of _The
Deserted Village_. After an unsatisfactory course in various schools, where
he was regarded as hopelessly stupid, Goldsmith entered Trinity College,
Dublin, as a sizar, i.e. a student who pays with labor for his tuition. By
his escapades he was brought into disfavor with the authorities, but that
troubled him little. He was also wretchedly poor, which troubled him less;
for when he earned a few shillings by writing ballads for street singers,
his money went oftener to idle beggars than to the paying of his honest
debts. After three years of university life he ran away, in dime-novel
fashion, and nearly starved to death before he was found and brought back
in disgrace. Then he worked a little, and obtained his degree in 1749.

Strange that such an idle and irresponsible youth should have been urged by
his family to take holy orders; but such was the fact. For two years more
Goldsmith labored with theology, only to be rejected when he presented
himself as a candidate f