n of minor personages, romantic or ridiculous, but
unique,--equally classic for these characters and for the satire of the
conception. These are Goldsmith's best sketches. Though the prose is not
always precise, it seems to be clear, and is simple. The writer cares
more for the judicious than the sublime; for the quaint, the comic, and
the agreeable than the pathetic. He chuckles with sly laughter--genial,
sympathetic; he looses his arrow phosphorescent with wit, but not
barbed, dipped in something subacid,--straight for the heart. Not Irving
alone, but Thackeray, stands in line of descent from the Goldsmith of
the 'Citizen.'

'The Traveller,' polished _ad unguem_, appeared in 1764, and placed
Goldsmith in the first rank of poets then living; but of that later.
There is good reason for believing that his masterpiece in prose, 'The
Vicar of Wakefield,' had been written as early as 1762, although it was
not published until 1766. It made Goldsmith's mark as a storyteller. One
can readily imagine how, after the grim humor of Smollett, the broad and
_risque_ realism of Fielding, the loitering of Sterne, and the
moralizing of Richardson, the public would seize with a sense of relief
upon this unpretentious chronicle of a country clergyman's life: his
peaceful home, its ruin, its restoration. Not because the narrative was
quieter and simpler, shorter and more direct than other narratives, but
because to its humor, realism, grace, and depth it added the charity of
First Corinthians Thirteenth. England soon discovered that the borders
of the humanities had been extended; that the Vicar and his "durable"
wife, Moses, Olivia with the prenatal tendency to romance, Sophia, the
graceless Jenkinson,--the habit and temper of the whole,--were a new
province. The prose idyl, with all its beauty and charity, does not
entitle Goldsmith to rank with the great novelists; but of its kind, in
spite of faults of inaccuracy, improbability, and impossibility, it is
first and best. Goethe read and re-read it with moral and aesthetic
benefit; and the spirit of Goldsmith is not far to seek in 'Hermann and
Dorothea.' 'The Vicar' is perhaps the most popular of English classics
in foreign lands.

In poetry, if Goldsmith did not write much, it was for lack of
opportunity. What he did write is good, nearly all of it. The philosophy
of 'The Traveller' (1764) and the political economy of 'The Deserted
Village' (1770) may be dubious, but the poetry is true