ss. It involves a point of
honour, of which no one--neither the maker of the book nor anyone he
made--is aware. What is better worth considering is the fact that
Goldsmith was completely aware of the unredeemed vulgarity of the ladies
of the Idyll, and cheerfully took it for granted as the thing to be
expected from the mother-in-law of a country gentleman and the daughters
of a scholar. The education of women had sunk into a degradation never
reached before, inasmuch as it was degraded in relation to that of men.
It would matter little indeed that Mrs. Primrose "could read any English
book without much spelling" if her husband and son were as definitely
limited to journeyman's field-labour as she was to the pickling and the
gooseberry wine. Any of those industries is a better and more liberal
business than unselect reading, for instance, or than unselect writing.
Therefore let me not be misunderstood to complain too indiscriminately of
that century or of an unlettered state. What is really unhandsome is the
new, slovenly, and corrupt inequality whereinto the century had fallen.

That the mother of daughters and sons should be fatuous, a village
worldling, suspicious, ambitious, ill-bred, ignorant, gross, insolent,
foul-mouthed, pushing, importunate, and a fool, seems natural, almost
innocently natural, in Goldsmith's story; the squalid Mrs. Primrose is
all this. He is still able, through his Vicar, in the most charmingly
humorous passage in the book, to praise her for her "prudence, economy,
and obedience." Her other, more disgusting, characteristics give her
husband an occasion for rebuking her as "Woman!" This is done, for
example, when, despite her obedience, she refuses to receive that unlucky
schemer, her own daughter, returned in ruins, without insulting her by
the sallies of a kitchen sarcasm.

She plots with her daughters the most disastrous fortune hunt. She has
given them a teaching so effectual that the Vicar has no fear lest the
paltry Sophia should lose her heart to the good, the sensible Burchell,
who had saved her life; for he has no fortune. Mrs. Primrose begins
grotesquely, with her tedious histories of the dishes at dinner, and she
ends upon the last page, anxious, amid the general happiness, in regard
to securing the head of the table. Upon these feminine humours the
author sheds his Vicar's indulgent smile. What a smile for a
self-respecting husband to be pricked to smile! A householder