gs
breathe compassion for frailty and failure with something of a
schoolboy sense of brotherhood which softens even his satire. The
flames of London's fiery furnace had blazed and raged about him, but he
passed through them unconsumed. The age in which he lived was not an
age of exalted purity, the city wherein he dwelt was scarcely saintly.
He lived in some of the most evil days of the eighteenth century, but
his writings and his life escaped pollution. He was not a saint,
indeed; he was a spendthrift and he loved his glass, but he was never
tainted with the servile sins of cities. Through all the weltering
horror of Hogarth's London we seem to see him walk with something of
the freshness of his boyhood still shining on his face. The reflection
of the Irish skies was too bright upon his eyes to let them be dimmed
by the squalor and the shame of a squalid and shameful city.

[Sidenote: 1774--The friends of Goldsmith]

With the true instinct of his fine nature he made his friends and
companions among the wisest and highest of his time. His intimates and
companions were Edmund {169} Burke, and Dr. Johnson, and Sir Joshua
Reynolds. He had women friends too, as wisely chosen as the men--women
who were kind to him and admired him, women whose kindness and
admiration were worth the winning, women whose friendship brightened
and soothed a life that was darkened and vexed enough. Mary Horneck
and her sister were the stars of his life, his heroines, his idols, his
ideals. He has made Mary Horneck immortal as the "Jessamy Bride." In
his hours of poverty he was cheered by the thought of her; while he
lived he worshipped her, and when he died a lock of his hair was taken
from his coffin and given to her. Thackeray tells a touching little
story of the Jessamy Bride. She lived long after the death of the man
of genius who adored her, lived well into the nineteenth century, and
"Hazlitt saw her, an old lady, but beautiful still, in Northcote's
painting-room, who told the eager critic how proud she was always that
Goldsmith had admired her."

Goldsmith was a companionable being and loved all company that was not
vicious and depraved. He could be happy at the club in the society of
the great thinkers and teachers and wits of the time. He could be more
than happy at Barton, in the society of Mary and her sister. But he
could be happy too, in far humbler, far less romantic fellowship. "I
am fond of amusement," he declar