mith was not cast in a more heroic mould; we have to take
him as he is; and be grateful for what he has left us.

It is a grateful relief to turn from these booksellers' contracts and
forced labours to the sweet clear note of singing that one finds in
the _Deserted Village_. This poem, after having been repeatedly
announced and as often withdrawn for further revision, was at last
published on the 26th of May, 1770, when Goldsmith was in his
forty-second year. The leading idea of it he had already thrown out in
certain lines in the _Traveller_:--

"Have we not seen, round Britain's peopled shore,
Her useful sons exchanged for useless ore?
Seen all her triumphs but destruction haste,
Like flaring tapers brightening as they waste?
Seen opulence, her grandeur to maintain,
Lead stern depopulation in her train,
And over fields where scattered hamlets rose
In barren solitary pomp repose?
Have we not seen at pleasure's lordly call
The smiling long-frequented village fall?
Beheld the duteous son, the sire decayed,
The modest matron, and the blushing maid,
Forced from their homes, a melancholy train,
To traverse climes beyond the western main;
Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around,
And Niagara stuns with thundering sound?"

--and elsewhere, in recorded conversations of his, we find that he had
somehow got it into his head that the accumulation of wealth in a
country was the parent of all evils, including depopulation. We need
not stay here to discuss Goldsmith's position as a political
economist; even although Johnson seems to sanction his theory in the
four lines he contributed to the end of the poem. Nor is it worth
while returning to that objection of Lord Macaulay's which has already
been mentioned in these pages, further than to repeat that the poor
Irish village in which Goldsmith was brought up, no doubt looked to
him as charming as any Auburn, when he regarded it through the
softening and beautifying mist of years. It is enough that the
abandonment by a number of poor people of the homes in which they and
theirs have lived their lives, is one of the most pathetic facts in
our civilisation; and that out of the various circumstances
surrounding this forced migration Goldsmith has made one of the most
graceful and touching poems in the English language. It is clear
bird-singing; but there is a pathetic note in it. That imaginary
ramble through the