their ancestors.
"She Stoops to Conquer" is still the most successful of the stock
comedies. If "The Good-Natured Man" can scarcely be said to have kept
the stage, it is still the delight of the student in his closet. What
satires are better known than the letters of the "Citizen of the
World"? What spot on the map is more familiar than Sweet Auburn? As
for the "Vicar of Wakefield," what profitable words could now be added
to {171} its praise? It has conquered the world, it is dear to every
country and known in every language, it has taken its place by
unquestionable right with the masterpieces of all time.

[Sidenote: 1774--Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson]

"Dr. Goldsmith," said his most famous friend of the man who was then
lying in the Temple earth--"Dr. Goldsmith was wild, sir, but he is so
no more." This epitaph has been quoted a thousand times, but it must
in no sense be taken as a summing-up of the dead man's career. It was
a rebuke, justly administered, to the critic who at such a moment could
have the heart to say that Oliver Goldsmith had been wild. Dr.
Johnson, who uttered the rebuke, put the same thought even more
profoundly in a letter addressed to Bennet Langton shortly after
Goldsmith's death. In this letter he announces Goldsmith's death,
speaks of his "folly of expense," and concludes by saying, "But let not
his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man." These simple
words are infinitely more impressive than the magniloquence of the
epitaph which Johnson wrote on Goldsmith.

Goldsmith lived in London and he died in London, and he lies buried in
the precincts of the Temple. The noise, and rattle, and roar of London
rave daily about his grave. Around it rolls the awful music of a great
city that has grown and swollen and extended its limits and multiplied
its population out of all resemblance to that little London where
Goldsmith lived and starved and made merry, and was loved, and dunned,
and sorrowed for. The body that first drew breath among the pleasant
Longford meadows, which seem to stretch in all directions to touch the
sky, lies at rest within the humming, jostling, liberties of the
Temple. It is perhaps fitting that the grave of one who all his life
loved men and rejoiced so much in companionship should be laid in a
place where the foot of man is almost always busy, where silence, when
it comes at all, comes only with the night.

There is not a space in the scope of this hist