es in one of his most delightful
essays, "in whatever company it is to be found, and wit, though dressed
in rags, is ever pleasing to me." There was plenty of wit dressed in
rags drifting about the London of that day. Men of genius slept on
bulkheads and beneath arches, and starved for want of a guinea, or
haunted low taverns, or paced St. James's Square all night in
impecunious couples for sheer need of a lodging, cheering each other's
supperless mood with political conversations and declarations that, let
come what might come, they would never desert the Ministry. But
Goldsmith unearthed men of genius whose names nobody ever heard of, and
studied them and made merry with them, and transferred them to his
pages for us to make merry with more than a century after Goldsmith
{170} fell asleep. We may suspect that Goldsmith never really found
those wonderful beggars he chronicles. He did not discover them as
Cabot discovered America; he is their inventor, as the fancy of poets
invented the Fortunate Islands.

Goldsmith's strolling player is as real as Richard Savage, with whom he
is contemporary, and it must be admitted that he is a more presentable
personage. What a jolly philosophy is his about the delights of
beggary! It has all the humor of Rabelais with no touch of the
Touraine grossness. It has something of the wisdom of Aurelius, only
clad in homespun instead of the purple. The philosophy of contentment
was never more merrily nor more whimsically expressed. A synod of
sages could not formulate a scheme in praise of poverty more impressive
than the contagious humor of his light-hearted merriment. The
strolling player has the best of the argument, but he has it because he
is speaking with the persuasive magic of the tongue of Oliver Goldsmith.

The same pervading cheerfulness, the same sunny philosophy, which is,
however, by no means the philosophy of Pangloss, informs all his work.
Beau Tibbs boasting in his garret; Dr. Primrose in Newgate; the
good-natured man, seated between two bailiffs, and trying to converse
with his heart's idol as if nothing had happened; Mr. Hardcastle,
foiled for the five-hundredth time in the tale of Old Grouse in the Gun
Room; each is an example of Goldsmith's method and of Goldsmith's
manner. If Goldsmith did not enjoy while he lived all the admiration,
all the rewards that belonged of right to his genius, the generations
that have succeeded have made amends for the errors of