in publishers'
advertisements. Goldsmith's story does not exceed such limits.

Therefore, although we may like it all the more because it is a
romantic sketch rather than a novel proper, we must grant that
its share in the eighteenth century shaping of the form is but
ancillary. The fact that the book upon its appearance awakened
no such interest as waited upon the fiction of Richardson or
Fielding a few years before, may be taken to mean that the taste
was still towards the more photographic portrayals of average
contemporary humanity. Several editions, to be sure, were issued
the year of its publication, but without much financial success,
and contemporary criticism found little remarkable in this
permanent contribution to English literature. Later, it was
beloved both of the elect and the general. Goethe's testimony to
the strong and wholesome effect of the book upon him in his
formative period, is remembered. Dear old Dr. Johnson too
believed in the story, for, summoned to Goldsmith's lodging by
his friend's piteous appeal for help, he sends a guinea in
advance and on arrival there, finds his colleague in high choler
because, forsooth, his landlady has arrested him for his rent:
whereupon Goldsmith (who had already expended part of the guinea
in a bottle of Madeira) displays a manuscript,--"a novel ready
for the press," as we read in Boswell; and Johnson--"I looked
into it and saw its merit," says he--goes out and sells it for
sixty pounds, whereupon Goldsmith paid off his obligation, and
with his mercurial Irish nature had a happy evening, no doubt,
with his chosen cronies! It is a sordid, humorous-tragic Grub
Street beginning for one of the little immortals of letters--so
many of which, alack! have a similar birth.

Certain other authors less distinguished than these, produced
fiction of various kinds which also had some influence in the
development, and further illustrate the tendency of the Novel to
become a pliable medium for literary expression; a sort of net
wherein divers fish might be caught. Dr. Johnson, essayist,
critic, coffee-house dictator, published the same year that
Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" began to appear, his "Rasselas,
Prince of Abyssinia"; a stately elegiac on the vanity of human
pleasures, in which the Prince leaves his idyllic home and goes
into the world to test its shams, only to return to his kingdom
with the sad knowledge that it is the better part of wisdom in
this vale of tears to