rm. Such a style is based upon a delicate "sensibility to the
graces of natural and moral beauty and decorum." Hence the ideographic
power, the directness, the sympathy, the lambent humor that characterize
the 'Essays,' the 'Vicar,' the 'Deserted Village,' and 'She Stoops to
Conquer.' This is the "plain language of ancient faith and sincerity"
that, pretending to no novelty, renovated the prose of the eighteenth
century, knocked the stilts from under Addison and Steele, tipped half
the Latinity out of Johnson, and readjusted his ballast. Goldsmith goes
without sprawling or tiptoeing; he sails without rolling. He borrows the
carelessness but not the ostentation of the Spectator; the dignity but
not the ponderosity of 'Rasselas'; and produces the prose of natural
ease, the sweetest English of the century. It in turn prefaced the way
for Charles Lamb, Hunt, and Sydney Smith. "It were to be wished that we
no longer found pleasure with the inflated style," writes Goldsmith in
his 'Polite Learning.' "We should dispense with loaded epithet and
dressing up trifles with dignity.... Let us, instead of writing finely,
try to write naturally; not hunt after lofty expressions to deliver mean
ideas, nor be forever gaping when we only mean to deliver a whisper."

Just this naturalness constitutes the charm of the essay on 'The Bee'
(1759), and of the essays collected in 1765. We do not read him for
information: whether he knows more or less of his subject, whether he
writes of Charles XII., or Dress, The Opera, Poetry, or Education, we
read him for simplicity and humor. Still, his critical estimates, while
they may not always square with ours, evince not only good sense and
aesthetic principle, but a range of reading not at all ordinary. When he
condemns Hamlet's great soliloquy we may smile, but in judicial respect
for the father of our drama he yields to none of his contemporaries. The
selections that he includes in his 'Beauties of English Poetry' would
argue a conventional taste; but in his 'Essay on Poetry Distinguished
from the Other Arts,' he not only defines poetry in terms that might
content the Wordsworthians, he also to a certain extent anticipates
Wordsworth's estimate of poetic figures.

While he makes no violent breach with the classical school, he
prophesies the critical doctrine of the nineteenth century. He calls for
the "energetic language of simple nature, which is now grown into
disrepute." "If the production does