[Illustration: ]KILKENNY WEST CHURCH(R. H. Newell)The hawthorn bush.The Rev. Annesley Strean, Henry Goldsmith’s successor at Kilkenny West, well remembered the hawthorn bush in front of the village ale-house. It had originally three trunks; but when he wrote in 1807 only one remained, ‘the other two having been cut, from time to time, by persons carrying pieces of it away to be made into toys, etc., in honour of the bard, and of the celebrity of his poem.’ (Essay on Light Reading, by the Rev. Edward Mangin, M.A., 1808, 142–3.) Its remains were enclosed by a Captain Hogan previously to 1819; but nevertheless when Prior visited the place in 1830, nothing was apparent but ‘a very tender shoot [which] had again forced its way to the surface.’ (Prior,Life, 1837, ii. 264.) An engraving of the tree by S. Alken, from a sketch made in 1806–9, is to be found at p. 41 of Goldsmith’sPoetical Works, R. H. Newell’s edition, 1811, and is reproduced in the present volume.[Illustration: ]HAWTHORN TREE(R. H. Newell)How often have I bless’d the coming day.Prior,Life, 1837, ii. 261, finds in this an allusion ‘to the Sundays or numerous holidays, usually kept in Roman Catholic countries.’Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen.Strean’s explanation (Mangin,ut supra, pp. 140–1) of this is as follows:—‘The poem ofThe Deserted Village, took its origin from the circumstance of general Robert Napper [Napier or Naper], (the grandfather of the gentleman who now [1807] lives in the house, within half a mile of Lissoy, and built by the general) having purchased an extensive tract of the country surrounding Lissoy, orAuburn; in consequence of which many families, here calledcottiers, were removed, to make room for the intended improvements of what was now to become the wide domain of a rich man, warm with the idea of changing the face of his new acquisition; and were forced, “with fainting steps,” to go in search of “torrid tracts” and “distant climes.”’Prior (Life, 1837, i. 40–3) points out that Goldsmith was not the first to give poetical expression to the wrongs of the dispossessed Irish peasantry; and he quotes a long extract from theWorks(1741) of a Westmeath poet, Lawrence Whyte, which contains such passages as these:—Their native soil were forced to quit,So Irish landlords thought it fit;Who without ceremony or rout,For their improvements turn’d them out ...How many villages they razed,How many parishes laid waste ...Whole colonies, to shun the fateOf being oppress’d at such a rate,By tyrants who still raise their rent,Sail’d to the Western Continent.The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest. ‘Of all those sounds,’ says Goldsmith, speaking of the cries of waterfowl, ‘there is none so dismally hollow as the booming of the bittern.’ . . . ‘I remember in the place where I was a boy with what terror this bird’s note affected the whole village; they considered it as the presage of some sad event; and generally found or made one to succeed it.’ (Animated Nature, 1774, vi. 1–2, 4.)Bewick, who may be trusted to speak of a bird which he has drawn with such exquisite fidelity, refers (Water Birds, 1847, p. 49) to ‘the hollow booming noise which the bittern makes during the night, in the breeding season, from its swampy retreats.’ Cf. also that close observer Crabbe (The Borough, Letter xxii, ll. 197–8):—And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home,Gave from the salt-ditch side the bellowing boom.Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;A breath can make them, as a breath has made.Mitford comparesConfessio Amantis, fol. 152:—A kynge may make a lorde a knave,And of a knave a lord also;and Professor Hales recalls Burns’s later line in theCotter’s Saturday Night, 1785:—Princes and lords are but the breath of kings.But Prior finds the exact equivalent of the second line in the verses of an old French poet, De. Caux, upon an hour-glass:—C’est un verre qui luit,Qu’un souffle peut détruire, et qu’un souffle a produit.A time there was, ere England’s griefs began.Here wherever the locality of Auburn, the author had clearly England in mind. A caustic commentator has observed that the ‘time’ indicated must have been a long while ago.opulence.In the first edition the word is ‘luxury.’And, many a year elapsed, return to view.‘It is strongly contended at Lishoy, that “the Poet,” as he is usually called there, after his pedestrian tour upon the Continent of Europe, returned to and resided in the village some time. . . . It is moreover believed, that the havock which had been made in his absence among those favourite scenes of his youth, affected his mind so deeply, that he actually composed great part of the Deserted Village ‘at’ Lishoy.’ (Poetical Works, with Remarks, etc., by the Rev. R. H. Newell, 1811, p. 74.)Notwithstanding the above, there is no evidence that Goldsmith ever returned to his native island. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Daniel Hodson, written in 1758, he spoke of hoping to do so ‘in five or six years.’ (Percy Memoir, 1801, i. 49). But in another letter, written towards the close of his life, it is still a thing to come. ‘I am again,’ he says, ‘just setting out for Bath, and I honestly say I had much rather it had been for Ireland with my nephew, but that pleasure I hope to have before I die.’ (Letter to Daniel Hodson, no date, in possession of the late Frederick Locker Lampson.)Where once the cottage stood, the hawthorn grew.Here followed, in the first edition:—Here, as with doubtful, pensive steps I range,Trace every scene, and wonder at the change,Remembrance, etc.In all my griefs—and God has given my share.Prior notes a slight similarity here to a line of Collins:—Ye mute companions of my toils, that bear,In all my griefs, a more than equal share!Hassan; or, The Camel Driver.InThe Present State of Polite Learning, 1759, p. 143, Goldsmith refers feelingly to ‘the neglected author of the Persian eclogues, which, however inaccurate, excel any in our language.’ He included four of them inThe Beauties of English Poesy, 1767, i. pp. 239–53.To husband out,etc. In the first edition this ran:—My anxious day to husband near the close,And keep life’s flame from wasting by repose.Here to return—and die at home at last.Forster compares a passage inThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 153:—‘There is something so seducing in that spot in which we first had existence, that nothing but it can please; whatever vicissitudes we experience in life, however we toil, or wheresoever we wander, our fatigued wishes still recur to home for tranquillity, we long to die in that spot which gave us birth, and in that pleasing expectation opiate every calamity.’ The poet Waller too—he adds—wished to die ‘like the stag where he was roused.’ (Life, 1871, ii. 202.)[Illustration: ]South View from Goldsmith’s Mount(R.H. Newell)How happy he.‘How blest is he’ in the first edition.And, since ’tis hard to combat, learns to fly.Mitford comparesThe Beefor October 13, 1759, p. 56:—‘By struggling with misfortunes, we are sure to receive some wounds in the conflict. The only method to come off victorious, is by running away.’surly porter.Mr. J. M. Lobban compares theCitizen of the World, 1762, i. 123:—‘I never see a nobleman’s door half opened that some surly porter or footman does not stand full in the breach.’ (Select Poems of Goldsmith, 1900, p. 98.)Bends.‘Sinks’ in the first edition.unperceived decay. Cf. Johnson,Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, l. 292:—An age that melts with unperceiv’d decay,And glides in modest innocence away;andIrene, Act ii, Sc. 7:—And varied life steal unperceiv’d away.While Resignation,etc. In 1771 Sir Joshua exhibited a picture of ‘An Old Man,’ studied from the beggar who was his model for Ugolino. When it was engraved by Thomas Watson in 1772, he called it ‘Resignation,’ and inscribed the print to Goldsmith in the following words:—‘This attempt to express a Character inThe Deserted Village, is dedicated to Dr. Goldsmith, by his sincere Friend and admirer, JOSHUAREYNOLDS.’Up yonder hill.It has been suggested that Goldsmith was here thinking of the little hill of Knockaruadh (Red Hill) in front of Lissoy parsonage, of which there is a sketch in Newell’sPoetical Works, 1811. When Newell wrote, it was already known as ‘Goldsmith’s mount’; and the poet himself refers to it in a letter to his brother-in-law Hodson, dated Dec. 27, 1757:—‘I had rather be placed on the little mount before Lishoy gate, and there take in, to me, the most pleasing horizon in nature.’ (Percy Memoir, 1801, p. 43.)And fill’d each pause the nightingale had made.InAnimated Nature, 1774, v. 328, Goldsmith says:—‘The nightingale’s pausing song would be the proper epithet for this bird’s music.’ [Mitford.]No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale.(Cf. Goldsmith’s Essay onMetaphors(British Magazine):—‘Armstrong has used the word ‘fluctuate’ with admirable efficacy, in his philosophical poem entitledThe Art of Preserving Health.Oh! when the growling winds contend, and allThe sounding forest ‘fluctuates’ in the storm,To sink in warm repose, and hear the dinHowl o’er the steady battlements.The sad historian of the pensive plain.Strean (see note to l. 13) identified the old watercress gatherer as a certain Catherine Giraghty (or Geraghty). Her children (he said) were still living in the neighbourhood of Lissoy in 1807. (Mangin’sEssay on Light Reading, 1808, p. 142.)The village preacher’s modest mansion rose.‘The Rev. Charles Goldsmith is allowed by all that knew him, to have been faithfully represented by his son in the character of the Village Preacher.’ So writes his daughter, Catharine Hodson (Percy Memoir, 1801, p. 3). Others, relying perhaps upon the ‘forty pounds a year’ of the Dedication toThe Traveller, make the poet’s brother Henry the original; others, again, incline to kindly Uncle Contarine (vide Introduction). But as Prior justly says (Life, 1837, ii. 249), ‘the fact perhaps is that he fixed upon no one individual, but borrowing like all good poets and painters a little from each, drew the character by their combination.’with forty pounds a year.Cf. Dedication toThe Traveller, p. 3, l. 14.Unpractis’d.‘Unskilful’ in the first edition.More skilled.‘More bent’ in the first edition.The long remember’d beggar.‘The same persons,’ says Prior, commenting upon this passage, ‘are seen for a series of years to traverse the same tract of country at certain intervals, intrude into every house which is not defended by the usual outworks of wealth, a gate and a porter’s lodge, exact their portion of the food of the family, and even find an occasional resting-place for the night, or from severe weather, in the chimney-corner of respectable farmers.’ (Life, 1837, ii. 269.) Cf. Scott on the Scottish mendicants in the ‘Advertisement’ toThe Antiquary, 1816, and Leland’sHist. of Ireland, 1773, i. 35.The broken soldier.The disbanded soldier let loose upon the country at the conclusion of the ‘Seven Years’ War’ was a familiar figure at this period. Bewick, in hisMemoir(‘Memorial Edition’), 1887, pp. 44–5, describes some of these ancient campaigners with their battered old uniforms and their endless stories of Minden and Quebec; and a picture of two of them by T. S. Good of Berwick belonged to the late Mr. Locker Lampson. Edie Ochiltree (Antiquary)—it may be remembered—had fought at Fontenoy.Allur’d to brighter worlds.Cf. Tickell on Addison—‘Saints who taught and led the way to Heaven.’And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray.Prior compares the opening lines of Dryden’sBritannia Rediviva:—Our vows are heard betimes, and heaven takes careTo grant, before we can conclude the prayer;Preventing angels met it half the way,And sent us back to praise, who came to pray.As some tall cliff,etc. Lucan, Statius, and Claudian have been supposed to have helped Goldsmith to this fine and deservedly popular simile. But, considering his obvious familiarity with French literature, and the rarity of his ‘obligations to the ancients,’ it is not unlikely that, as suggested by a writer in theAcademyfor Oct. 30, 1886, his source of suggestion is to be found in the following passage of an Ode addressed by Chapelain (1595–1674) to Richelieu:—Dans un paisible mouvementTu t’élèves au firmament,Et laisses contre toi murmurer cette terre;Ainsi le haut Olympe, à son pied sablonneux,Laisse fumer la foudre et gronder le tonnerre,Et garde son sommet tranquille et lumineux.Or another French model—indicated by Mr. Forster (Life, 1871, ii. 115–16) by the late Lord Lytton—may have been these lines from a poem by the Abbé de Chaulieu (1639–1720):—Au milieu cependant de ces peines cruellesDe notre triste hiver, compagnes trop fidèles,Je suis tranquille et gai. Quel bien plus précieuxPuis-je espérer jamais de la bonté des dieux!Tel qu’un rocher dont la tête,Égalant le Mont Athos,Voit à ses pieds la tempêteTroubler le calme des flots,La mer autour bruit et gronde;Malgré ses emotions,Sur son front élevé règne une paix profonde,Que tant d’agitationsEt que ses fureurs de l’ondeRespectent à l’égal du nid des alcyons.On the other hand, Goldsmith may have gone no further than Young’sComplaint: Night the Second, 1742, p. 42, where, as Mitford points out, occur these lines:—As some tall Tow’r, or lofty Mountain’s Brow,Detains the Sun, Illustrious from its Height,While rising Vapours, and descending Shades,With Damps, and Darkness drown the Spatious Vale:Undampt by Doubt, Undarken’d by Despair,Philander, thus, augustly rears his Head.Prior also (Life, 1837, ii. 252) prints a passage fromAnimated Nature, 1774, i. 145, derived from Ulloa, which perhaps served as the raw material of the simile.Full well they laugh’d,etc. Steele, inSpectator, No. 49 (for April 26, 1711) has a somewhat similar thought:—‘Eubulushas so great an Authority in his little Diurnal Audience, that when he shakes his Head at any Piece of publick News, they all of them appear dejected; and, on the contrary, go home to their Dinners with a good Stomach and chearful Aspect, whenEubulusseems to intimate that Things go well.’Yet he was kind,etc. For the rhyme of ‘fault’ and ‘aught’ in this couplet Prior cites the precedent of Pope:—Before his sacred name flies ev’ry fault,And each exalted stanza teems with thought!(Essay on Criticism, l. 422). He might also have cited Waller, who elides the ‘l’:—Were we but less indulgent to our fau’ts,And patience had to cultivate our thoughts.Goldsmith uses a like rhyme inEdwin and Angelina, Stanza xxxv:—But mine the sorrow, mine the fault,And well my life shall pay;I’ll seek the solitude he sought,And stretch me where he lay.Cf. alsoRetaliation, ll. 73–4. Perhaps—as indeed Prior suggests—he pronounced ‘fault’ in this fashion.[Illustration: ]THE SCHOOL HOUSE(R. H. Newell)That one small head could carry all he knew.Some of the traits of this portrait are said to be borrowed from Goldsmith’s own master at Lissoy:—‘He was instructed in reading, writing, and arithmetic’—says his sister Catherine, Mrs. Hodson—‘by a schoolmaster in his father’s village, who had been a quartermaster in the army in Queen Anne’s wars, in that detachment which was sent to Spain: having travelled over a considerable part of Europe and being of a very romantic turn, he used to entertain Oliver with his adventures; and the impressions these made on his scholar were believed by the family to have given him that wandering and unsettled turn which so much appeared in his future life.’ (Percy Memoir, 1801, pp. 3–4.) The name of this worthy, according to Strean, was Burn (Byrne). (Mangin’sEssay on Light Reading, 1808, p. 142.)Near yonder thorn.See note to l. 13.The chest contriv’d a double debt to pay.Cf. theDescription of an Author’s Bedchamber, p. 48, l. ult.:—A cap by night—a stocking all the day!The twelve good rules.‘A constant one’ (i.e. picture) ‘in every house was “King Charles’ Twelve Good Rules.”’ (Bewick’sMemoir, ‘Memorial Edition,’ 1887, p. 262.) This old broadside, surmounted by a rude woodcut of the King’s execution, is still prized by collectors. The rules, as ‘found in the study of King Charles the First, of Blessed Memory,’ are as follow:— ‘1. Urge no healths; 2. Profane no divine ordinances; 3. Touch no state matters; 4. Reveal no secrets; 5. Pick no quarrels; 6. Make no comparisons; 7. Maintain no ill opinions; 8. Keep no bad company; 9. Encourage no vice; 10. Make no long meals; 11. Repeat no grievances; 12. Lay no Wagers.’ Prior,Misc. Works, 1837, iv. 63, points out that Crabbe alsomakes the ‘Twelve Good Rules’ conspicuous in theParish Register(ll. 51–2):—There is King Charles, and all his Golden Rules,Who proved Misfortune’s was the best of schools.Her late Majesty, Queen Victoria, kept a copy of these rules in the servants’ hall at Windsor Castle.the royal game of goose.The ‘Royal and Entertaining Game of the Goose’ is described at length in Strutt’sSports and Pastimes, bk. iv, ch. 2 (xxv). It may be briefly defined as a game of compartments with different titles through which the player progresses according to the numbers he throws with the dice. At every fourth or fifth compartment is depicted a goose, and if the player’s cast falls upon one of these, he moves forward double the number of his throw.While broken tea-cups.Cf. theDescription of an Author’s Bedchamber, p. 48, l. 18:—And five crack’d teacups dress’d the chimney board.Mr. Hogan, who repaired or rebuilt the ale-house at Lissoy, did not forget, besides restoring the ‘Royal Game of Goose’ and the ‘Twelve Good Rules,’ to add the broken teacups, ‘which for better security in the frail tenure of an Irish publican, or the doubtful decorum of his guests, were embedded in the mortar.’ (Prior,Life, 1837, ii. 265.)Shall kiss the cup.Cf. Scott’sLochinvar:—The bride kissed the goblet: the knight took it up,He quaff’d off the wine and he threw down the cup.Cf. alsoThe History of Miss Stanton(British Magazine, July, 1760).—‘The earthen mug went round.Miss touched the cup, the stranger pledged the parson,’ etc.Between a splendid and a happy land.Prior comparesThe Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 98:—‘Too much commerce may injure a nation as well as too little; and . . . there is a wide difference between a conquering and a flourishing empire.’To see profusion that he must not share.Cf.Animated Nature, iv. p. 43:—‘He only guards those luxuries he is not fated to share.’ [Mitford.]To see those joys.Up to the third edition the words wereeach joy.There the black gibbet glooms beside the way.The gallows, under the savage penal laws of the eighteenth century, by which horse-stealing, forgery, shop-lifting, and even the cutting of a hop-bind in a plantation were punishable with death, was a common object in the landscape. Cf.Vicar of Wakefield, 1706, ii. 122:—‘Our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets to scare every invader’; andCitizen of the World, 1762, ii. 63–7. Johnson, who wrote eloquently on capital punishment inThe Ramblerfor April 20, 1751, No. 114, also refers to the ceaseless executions in hisLondon, 1738, ll. 238–43:—Scarce can our fields, such crowds at Tyburn die,With hemp the gallows and the fleet supply.Propose your schemes, ye senatorian band,Whose ways and means support the sinking land:Lest ropes be wanting in the tempting spring,To rig another convoy for the king.Where the poor houseless shivering female lies.Mitford compares Letter cxiv ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 211:—‘Thesepoor shivering femaleshave once seen happier days, and been flattered into beauty. They have been prostituted to the gay luxurious villain, and are now turned out to meet the severity of winter. Perhaps now lying at the doors of their betrayers, they sue to wretches whose hearts are insensible, or debauchees who may curse, but will not relieve them.’ The same passage occurs inThe Bee, 1759, p. 126 (A City Night-Piece).Near her betrayer’s door,etc. Cf. the foregoing quotation.wild Altama,i.e. the Alatamaha, a river in Georgia, North America. Goldsmith may have been familiar with this name in connexion with his friend Oglethorpe’s expedition of 1733.crouching tigers,a poetical licence, as there are no tigers in the locality named. But Mr. J. H. Lobban calls attention to a passage fromAnimated Nature[1774, iii. 244], in which Goldsmith seems to defend himself:—‘There is an animal of America, which is usually called the Red Tiger, but Mr. Buffon calls it the Cougar, which, no doubt, is very different from the tiger of the east. Some, however, have thought proper to rank both together, and I will take leave to follow their example.’The good old sire.Cf.Threnodia Augustalis, ll. 16–17:—The good old sire, unconscious of decay,The modest matron, clad in homespun graya father’s.‘Her father’s’ in the first edition.silent.‘Decent’ in the first edition.On Torno’s cliffs, or Pambamarca’s side.‘Torno’=Tornea, a river which falls into the Gulf of Bothnia; Pambamarca is a mountain near Quito, South America. ‘The author’—says Bolton Corney—‘bears in memory the operations of the French philosophers in the arctic and equatorial regions, as described in the celebrated narratives of M. Maupertuis and Don Antonio de Ulloa.’That trade’s proud empire,etc. These last four lines are attributed to Johnson on Boswell’s authority:—‘Dr. Johnson . . . favoured me by marking the lines which he furnished to Goldsmith’sDeserted Village, which are only the ‘last four’.’ (Birkbeck Hill’sBoswell, 1887, ii. 7.)PROLOGUE OF LABERIUS.This translation, or rather imitation, was first published at pp. 176–7 ofAn Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, 1759 (Chap. xii, ‘Of the Stage’), where it is prefaced as follows:— ‘MACROBIUShas preserved a prologue, spoken and written by the poet [Decimus] Laberius, a Roman knight, whom Caesar forced upon the stage, written with great elegance and spirit, which shews what opinion the Romans in general entertained of the profession of an actor.’ In the second edition of 1774 the prologue was omitted. The original lines, one of which Goldsmith quotes, are to found in theSaturnaliaof Macrobius, lib. ii, cap. vii (Opera, London, 1694). He seems to have confined himself to imitating the first fifteen:—Necessitas, cujus cursus transversi impetumVoluerunt multi effugere, pauci potuerunt,Quo me detrusit paene extremis sensibus?Quem nulla ambitio, nulla umquam largitio,Nullus timor, vis nulla, nulla auctoritasMovere potuit in juventa de statu;Ecce in senecta ut facile labefecit locoViri Excellentis mente clemente editaSubmissa placide blandiloquens oratio!Etenim ipsi di negare cui nihil potuerunt,Hominem me denegare quis posset pati?Ergo bis tricenis annis actis sine totaEques Romanus Lare egressus meoDomum revertar mimus. nimirum hoc dieUno plus vixi mihi quam vivendum fuit.Rollin gives a French translation of this prologue in hisTraité des Études. It is quoted by Bolton Corney in hisPoetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 1845, pp. 203–4. In his Aldine edition of 1831, p. 114, Mitford completed Goldsmith’s version as follows:—Too lavish still in good, or evil hour,To show to man the empire of thy power,If fortune, at thy wild impetuous sway,The blossoms of my fame must drop away,Then was the time the obedient plant to strainWhen life was warm in every vigorous vein,To mould young nature to thy plastic skill,And bend my pliant boyhood to thy will.So might I hope applauding crowds to hear,Catch the quick smile, and HIS attentive ear.But ah! for what has thou reserv’d my age?Say, how can I expect the approving stage;Fled is the bloom of youth—the manly air—The vigorous mind that spurn’d at toil and care;Gone is the voice, whose clear and silver toneThe enraptur’d theatre would love to own.As clasping ivy chokes the encumber’d tree,So age with foul embrace has ruined me.Thou, and the tomb, Laberius, art the same,Empty within, what hast thou but a name?Macrobius, it may be remembered, was the author, with a quotation from whom Johnson, after a long silence, electrified the company upon his first arrival at Pembroke College, thus giving (says Boswell) ‘the first impression of that more extensive reading in which he had indulged himself’ (Birkbeck Hill’sBoswell, 1887, i. 59). If the study of Macrobius is to be regarded as a test of ‘more extensive reading’ that praise must therefore be accorded to Goldsmith, who cites him in his first book.ON A BEAUTIFUL YOUTH STRUCK BLIND WITH LIGHTNING.This quatrain, the original of which does not appear to have been traced, was first published inThe Beefor Saturday, the 6th of October, 1759, p. 8. It is there succeeded by the following Latin epigram, ‘in the same spirit’:—LUMINE Acon dextro capta est Leonida sinistroEt poterat forma vincere uterque Deos.Parve puer lumen quod habes concede puellaeSic tu caecus amor sic erit illa Venus.There are several variations of this in theGentleman’s Magazinefor 1745, pp. 104, 159, 213, 327, one of which is said to be ‘By a monk of Winchester,’ with a reference to ‘Cambden’sRemains, p. 413.’ None of these corresponds exactly with Goldsmith’s text; and the lady’s name is uniformly given as ‘Leonilla.’ A writer in theQuarterly Review, vol. 171, p. 296, prints the ‘original’ thus—Lumine Acon dextro, capta est Leonilla sinistro,Et potis est forma vincere uterque Deos.Blande puer, lumen quod habes concede sorori;Sic tu caecus Amor, sic erit illa Venus;and says ‘it was written by Girolamo Amalteo, and will be found in any of the editions of theTrium Fratrum Amaltheorum Carmina, under the title of ‘De gemellis, fratre et sorore, luscis.’ According to Byron on Bowles (Works, 1836, vi. p. 390), the persons referred to are the Princess of Eboli, mistress of Philip II of Spain, and Maugiron, minion of Henry III of France, who had each of them lost an eye. But for this the reviewer above quoted had found no authority.THE GIFT.This little trifle, in which a French levity is wedded to the language of Prior, was first printed inThe Bee, for Saturday, the 13th of October, 1759. Its original, which is as follows, is to be found where Goldsmith found it, namely in Part iii of theMénagiana, (ed. 1729, iii, 397), and not far from the ditty ofle fameux la Galisse. (SeeAn Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize,infra, p. 198):—ETRENEAIRIS.Pour témoigner de ma flame,Iris, du meilleur de mon ameJe vous donne à ce nouvel anNon pas dentelle ni ruban,Non pas essence, ni pommade,Quelques boites de marmelade,Un manchon, des gans, un bouquet,Non pas heures, ni chapelet.Quoi donc? Attendez, je vous donneO fille plus belle que bonne ...Je vous donne: Ah! le puis-je dire?Oui, c’est trop souffrir le martyre,Il est tems de s’émanciper,Patience va m’échaper,Fussiez-vous cent fois plus aimable,Belle Iris, je vous donne ... au Diable.In Bolton Corney’s edition of Goldsmith’sPoetical Works, 1845, p. 77, note, these lines are attributed to Bernard de la Monnoye (1641–1728), who is said to have included them in a collection ofÉtrennes en vers, published in 1715.I’ll give thee.See an anecdoteà proposof this anticlimax in Trevelyan’sLife and Letters of Lord Macaulay, ed. 1889, p. 600:—‘There was much laughing about Mrs. Beecher Stowe [then (16th March, 1853) expected in England], and what we were to give her. I referred the ladies to Goldsmith’s poems for what I should give. Nobody but Hannah understood me; but some of them have since been thumbing Goldsmith to make out the riddle.’THE LOGICIANS REFUTED.These lines, which have often, and even of late years, been included among Swift’s works, were first printed as Goldsmith’s by T. Evans at vol. i. pp. 115–17 ofThe Poetical and Dramatic Works of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B., 1780. They originally appeared inThe Busy Bodyfor Thursday, October the 18th, 1759 (No. v), having this notification above the title: ‘The following Poem written by DR. SWIFT, is communicated to the Public by the BUSYBODY, to whom it was presented by a Nobleman of distinguished Learning and Taste.’ In No. ii they had already been advertised as forthcoming. The sub-title, ‘In imitation of Dean Swift,’ seems to have been added by Evans. The text here followed is that of the first issue.Wise Aristotle and Smiglecius.Cf.The Life of Parnell, 1770, p. 3:—‘His imagination might have been too warm to relish the cold logic of Burgersdicius, or the dreary subtleties ofSmiglesius; but it is certain that as a classical scholar, few could equal him.’ Martin Smiglesius or Smigletius, a Polish Jesuit, theologian and logician, who died in 1618, appears to have been a specialbête noireto Goldsmith; and the reference to him here would support the ascription of the poem to Goldsmith’s pen, were it not that Swift seems also to have cherished a like antipathy:—‘He told me that he had made many efforts, upon his entering the College [i.e. Trinity College, Dublin], to read some of the old treatises on logic writ bySmeglesius, Keckermannus, Burgersdicius, etc., and that he never had patience to go through three pages of any of them, he was so disgusted at the stupidity of the work.’ (Sheridan’sLife of Swift, 2nd ed., 1787, p. 4.)Than reason-boasting mortal’s pride.So inThe Busy Body. Some editors—Mitford, for example—print the line:—Than reason,—boasting mortals’ pride.Deus est anima brutorum.Cf. Addison inSpectator, No. 121 (July 19, 1711): ‘A modern Philosopher, quoted by MonsieurBalein his Learned Dissertation on the Souls of Brutes delivers the same Opinion [i.e.—That Instinct is the immediate direction of Providence], tho’ in a bolder form of words where he saysDeus est Anima Brutorum, God himself is the Soul of Brutes.’ There is much in ‘Monsieur Bayle’ on this theme. Probably Addison had in mind the following passage of theDict. Hist. et Critique(3rd ed., 1720, 2481b.) which Bayle cites from M. Bernard:—‘Il me semble d’avoir lu quelque part cette Thèse,Deus est anima brutorum: l’expression est un peu dure; mais elle peut recevoir un fort bon sens.’B—b=Bob, i.e. Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, for whom many venal ‘quills were drawn’circa1715–42. Cf. Pope’sEpilogue to the Satires, 1738, Dialogue i, ll. 27–32:—Go see Sir ROBERT—P. See Sir ROBERT!—hum—And never laugh—for all my life to come?Seen him I have, but in his happier hourOf Social Pleasure, ill-exchang’d for Pow’r;Seen him, uncumber’d with the Venal tribe,Smile without Art, and win without a Bribe.A courtier any ape surpasses.Cf. Gay’sFables, passim. Indeed there is more of Gay than Swift in this and the lines that follow. Gay’s life was wasted in fruitless expectations of court patronage, and his disappointment often betrays itself in his writings.And footmen, lords and dukes can act.Cf.Gil Blas, 1715–35, liv. iii, chap. iv:—‘Il falloit voir comme nous nous portions des santés à tous moments, en nous donnant les uns aux autres les surnoms de nos maîtres. Le valet de don Antonio appeloit Gamb celuiet nous nous enivrions peu à peu sous ces noms empruntés, tout aussi bien que les seigneurs qui les portoient véritablement.’ But Steele had already touched this subject inSpectator, No. 88, for June 11, 1711, ‘On the Misbehaviour of Servants,’ a paper supposed to have afforded the hint for Townley’s farce ofHigh Life below Stairs, which, about a fortnight afterThe Logicians Refutedappeared, was played for the first time at Drury Lane, not much to the gratification of the gentlemen’s gentlemen in the upper gallery. Goldsmith himself wrote ‘A Word or two on the late Farce, calledHigh Life below Stairs,’ inThe Beefor November 3, 1759, pp. 154–7.A SONNET.This little piece first appears inThe Beefor October 20, 1759 (No. iii). It is there called ‘A Sonnet,’ a title which is only accurate in so far as it is ‘a little song.’ Bolton Corney affirms that it is imitated from the French of Saint-Pavin (i.e. Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin, d. 1670), whose works were edited in 1759, the year in which Goldsmith published the collection of essays and verses in which it is to be found. The text here followed is that of the ‘new edition’ ofThe Bee, published by W. Lane, Leadenhall Street, no date, p. 94. Neither by its motive nor its literary merits—it should be added—did the original call urgently for translation; and the poem is here included solely because, being Goldsmith’s, it cannot be omitted from his complete works.This and the following linein the first version run:—Yet, why this killing soft dejection?Why dim thy beauty with a tear?STANZAS ON THE TAKING OF QUEBEC.Quebec was taken on the 13th September, 1759. Wolfe was wounded pretty early in the action, while leading the advance of the Louisbourg grenadiers. ‘A shot shattered his wrist. He wrapped his handkerchief about it and kept on. Another shot struck him, and he still advanced, when a third lodged in his breast. He staggered, and sat on the ground. Lieutenant Brown, of the grenadiers, one Henderson, a volunteer in the same company, and a private soldier, aided by an officer of artillery who ran to join them, carried him in their arms to the rear. He begged them to lay him down. They did so, and asked if he would have a surgeon. “There’s no need,” he answered; “it’s all over with me.” A moment after, one of them cried out, “They run; see how they run!” “Who run?” Wolfe demanded, like a man roused from sleep. “The enemy, sir. They give way everywhere!” “Go, one of you, to Colonel Burton,” returned the dying man; “tell him to march Webb’s regiment down to Charles River, to cut off their retreat from the bridge.” Then, turning on his side, he murmured, “Now, God be praised, I will die in peace!” and in a few moments his gallant soul had fled.’ (Parkman’sMontcalm and Wolfe, 1885, ii. 296–7.) In hisHistory of England in a Series of Letters, 1764, ii. 241, Goldsmith says of this event:—‘Perhaps the loss of such a man was greater to the nation than the conquering of all Canada was advantageous; but it is the misfortune of humanity, that we can never know true greatness till the moment when we are going to lose it.’* The present stanzas were first published inThe Busy Body(No. vii) for Tuesday, the 22nd October, 1759, a week after the news of Wolfe’s death had reached this country (Tuesday the 16th). According to Prior (Life, 1837, i. 6), Goldsmith claimed to be related to Wolfe by the father’s side, the maiden name of the General’s mother being Henrietta Goldsmith. It may be noted that Benjamin West’s popular rendering of Wolfe’s death (1771)—a rendering which Nelson never passed in a print shop without being stopped by it—was said to be based upon the descriptions of an eye-witness. It was engraved by Woollett and Ryland in 1776. A key to the names of those appearing in the picture was published in theArmy and Navy Gazetteof January 20, 1893.* He repeats this sentiment, in different words, in the laterHistory of Englandof 1771, iv. 400.AN ELEGY ON MRS. MARY BLAIZE.The publication in February, 1751, of Gray’sElegy Wrote in a Country Church Yardhad set a fashion in poetry which long continued. Goldsmith, who considered that work ‘a very fine poem, but overloaded with epithet’ (Beauties of English Poesy, 1767, i. 53), and once proposed to amend it ‘by leaving out an idle word in every line’ [!] (Cradock’sMemoirs, 1826, i. 230), resented these endless imitations, and his antipathy to them frequently reveals itself. Only a few months before the appearance of Mrs. Blaize inThe Beefor October 27, 1759, he had written in theCritical Review, vii. 263, when noticing Langhorne’sDeath of Adonis, as follows:—‘It is not thus that many of our moderns have composed what they call elegies; they seem scarcely to have known its real character. If an hero or a poet happens to die with us, the whole band of elegiac poets raise the dismal chorus, adorn his herse with all the paltry escutcheons of flattery, rise into bombast, paint him at the head of his thundering legions, or reining Pegasus in his most rapid career; they are sure to strew cypress enough upon the bier, dress up all the muses in mourning, and look themselves every whit as dismal and sorrowful as an undertaker’s shop.’ He returned to the subject in aChinese Letterof March 4, 1761, in thePublic Ledger(afterwards Letter ciii ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 162–5), which contains the linesOn the Death of the Right Honourable ***; and again, inThe Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, i. 174,à proposof theElegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, he makes Dr. Primrose say, ‘I have wept so much at all sorts of elegies of late, that without an enlivening glass I am sure this will overcome me.’The model forAn Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaizeis to be found in the old French popular song of Monsieur de la Palisse or Palice, about fifty verses of which are printed in Larousse’sGrand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXmeSiècle, x. p. 179. It is there stated to have originated in some dozen stanzas suggested to la Monnoye (v. supra, p. 193) by the extreme artlessness of a military quatrain dating from the battle of Pavia, and the death upon that occasion of the famous French captain, Jacques de Chabannes, seigneur de la Palice:—Monsieur d’La Palice est mort,Mort devant Pavie;Un quart d’heure avant sa mort,Il était encore en vie.The remaining verses, i.e. in addition to those of la Monnoye, are the contributions of successive generations. Goldsmith probably had in mind the version in Part iii of theMénagiana, (ed. 1729, iii, 384–391) where apparently by a typographical error, the hero is called‘le fameux la Galisse, homme imaginaire.’The verses he imitated most closely are reproduced below. It may be added that this poem supplied one of its last inspirations to the pencil of Randolph Caldecott, who published it as a picture-book in October, 1885. (See alsoAn Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, p. 212.)Who left a pledge behind.Caldecott cleverly converted this line into the keynote of the poem, by making the heroine a pawnbroker.When she has walk’d before.Cf. the French:—On dit que dans ses amoursIl fut caresse des belles,Qui le suivirent toujours,Tant qu’il marcha devant elles.Her last disorder mortal.Cf. the French:—Il fut par un triste sortBlesse d’une main cruelle.On croit, puis qu’il en est mort,Que la plaie étoit mortelle.Kent Street,Southwark, ‘chiefly inhabited,’ said Strype, ‘by Broom Men and Mumpers’; and Evelyn tells us (Diary5th December, 1683) that he assisted at the marriage, to her fifth husband, of a Mrs. Castle, who was ‘the daughter of one Burton, a broom-man . . . in Kent Street’ who had become not only rich, but Sheriff of Surrey. It was a poor neighbourhood corresponding to the present ‘old Kent-road, from Kent to Southwark and old London Bridge’ (Cunningham’sLondon).* Goldsmith himself refers to it inThe Beefor October 20, 1759, being the number immediately preceding that in whichMadam Blaizefirst appeared:—‘You then, O ye beggars of my acquaintance, whether in rags or lace; whether inKent-streetor the Mall; whether at the Smyrna or St. Giles’s, might I advise as a friend, never seem in want of the favour which you solicit’ (p. 72). Three years earlier he had practised as ‘a physician, in a humble way’ in Bankside, Southwark, and was probably well acquainted with the humours of Kent Street.* In contemporary maps Kent (now Tabard) Street is shown extending between the present New Kent Road and Blackman Street.DESCRIPTION OF AN AUTHOR’S BEDCHAMBER.In a letter written to the Rev. Henry Goldsmith in 1759 (Percy Memoir, 1801, pp. 53–9), Goldsmith thus refers to the first form of these verses:—‘Your last letter, I repeat it, was too short; you should have given me your opinion of the design of the heroicomical poem which I sent you: you remember I intended to introduce the hero of the poem, as lying in a paltry alehouse. You may take the following specimen of the manner, which I flatter myself is quite original. The room in which he lies, may be described somewhat this way:—The window, patch’d with paper, lent a ray,That feebly shew’d the state in which he lay.The sanded floor, that grits beneath the tread:The humid wall with paltry pictures spread;The game of goose was there expos’d to viewAnd the twelve rules the royal martyr drew:The seasons, fram’d with listing, found a place,And Prussia’s monarch shew’d his lamp-black faceThe morn was cold; he views with keen desire,A rusty grate unconscious of a fire.An unpaid reck’ning on the frieze was scor’d,And five crack’d tea-cups dress’d the chimney board.And now imagine after his soliloquy, the landlord to make his appearance, in order to dun him for the reckoning:—Not with that face, so servile and so gay,That welcomes every stranger that can pay,With sulky eye he smoak’d the patient man,Then pull’d his breeches tight, and thus began, etc.All this is taken, you see, from nature. It is a good remark of Montaign[e]’s, that the wisest men often have friends, with whom they do not care how much they play the fool. Take my present follies as instances of regard. Poetry is a much easier, and more agreeable species of composition than prose, and could a man live by it, it were no unpleasant employment to be a poet.’In Letter xxix ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 119–22, which first appeared inThe Public Ledgerfor May 2, 1760, they have a different setting. They are read at a club of authors by a ‘poet, in shabby finery,’ who asserts that he has composed them the day before. After some preliminary difficulties, arising from the fact that the laws of the club do not permit any author to inflict his own works upon the assembly without a money payment, he introduces them as follows:—‘Gentlemen, says he, the present piece is not one of your common epic poems, which come from the press like paper kites in summer; there are none of your Turnuses or Dido’s in it; it is an heroical description of nature. I only beg you’ll endeavour to make your souls unison* with mine, and hear with the same enthusiasm with which I have written. The poem begins with the description of an author’s bedchamber: the picture was sketched in my own apartment; for you must know, gentlemen, that I am myself the heroe. Then putting himself into the attitude of an orator, with all the emphasis of voice and action, he proceeded.Where the Red Lion, etc.’* i.e. accord, conform.The verses then follow as they are printed in this volume; but he is unable to induce his audience to submit to a further sample. In a slightly different form, some of them were afterwards worked intoThe Deserted Village, 1770. (See ll. 227–36.)Where Calvert’s butt, and Parsons’ black champagne.The Calverts and Humphrey Parsons were noted brewers of ‘entire butt beer’ or porter, also known familiarly as ‘British Burgundy’ and ‘black Champagne.’ Calvert’s ‘Best Butt Beer’ figures on the sign in Hogarth’sBeer Street, 1751.The humid wall with paltry pictures spread.Bewick gives the names of some of these popular, if paltry, decorations:—‘In cottages everywhere were to be seen the “Sailor’s Farewell” and his “Happy Return,” “Youthful Sports,” and the “Feats of Manhood,” “The Bold Archers Shooting at a Mark,” “The Four Seasons,” etc.’ (Memoir, ‘Memorial Edition,’ 1887, p. 263.)The royal game of goose was there in view.(See note,p. 188.)And the twelve rules the royal martyr drew.(See note,p. 187.)The Seasons, fram’d with listing.See note to l. 10 above, as to ‘The Seasons.’ Listing, ribbon, braid, or tape is still used as a primitiveencadrement. In a letter dated August 15, 1758, to his cousin, Mrs. Lawder (Jane Contarine), Goldsmith again refers to this device. Speaking of some ‘maxims of frugality’ with which he intends to adorn his room, he adds—‘my landlady’s daughter shall frame them with the parings of my black waistcoat.’ (Prior,Life, 1837, i. 271.)And brave Prince William.William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, 1721–65. The ‘lamp-black face’ would seem to imply that the portrait was a silhouette. In the letter quoted on p. 200 it is ‘Prussia’s monarch’ (i.e. Frederick the Great).With beer and milk arrears.See the lines relative to the landlord in Goldsmith’s above-quoted letter to his brother. In another letter of August 14, 1758, to Robert Bryanton, he describes himself as ‘in a garret writing for bread, and expecting to be dunned for a milk score.’ Hogarth’sDistrest Poet, 1736, it will be remembered, has already realized this expectation.A cap by night—a stocking all the day.‘With this last line,’ saysThe Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 121, ‘he [the author] seemed so much elated, that he was unable to proceed: “There gentlemen, cries he, there is a description for you; Rab[e]lais’s bed-chamber is but a fool to it:A cap by night—a stocking all the day!There is sound and sense, and truth, and nature in the trifling compass of ten little syllables.”’ (Letter xxix.) Cf. alsoThe Deserted Village, l. 230:—A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day.If Goldsmith’s lines did not belong to 1759, one might suppose he had in mind the laterPauvre Diableof his favourite Voltaire. (See alsoAPPENDIXB.)ON SEEING MRS. ** PERFORM IN THE CHARACTER OF ****.These verses, intended for a specimen of the newspaper Muse, are from Letter lxxxii ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 87, first printed inThe Public Ledger, October 21, 1760.ON THE DEATH OF THE RIGHT HON. ***From Letter ciii ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 164, first printed inThe Public Ledger, March 4, 1761. The verses are given as a ‘specimen of a poem on the decease of a great man.’ Goldsmith had already used the trick of the final line of the quatrain inAn Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize, ante, p. 198.AN EPIGRAM.From Letter cx ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 193, first printed inThe Public Ledger, April 14, 1761. It had, however, already been printed in the ‘Ledger’, ten days before. Goldsmith’s animosity to Churchill (cf. note to l. 41 of the dedication toThe Traveller) was notorious; but this is one of his doubtful pieces.virtue.‘Charity’ (Author’s note).bounty.‘Settled at One Shilling—the Price of the Poem’ (Author’s note).TO G. C. AND R. L.From the same letter as the preceding. George Colman and Robert Lloyd of theSt. James’s Magazinewere supposed to have helped Churchill inThe Rosciad, the ‘it’ of the epigram.TRANSLATION OF A SOUTH AMERICAN ODE.From Letter cxiii ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 209, first printed inThe Public Ledger, May 13, 1761.THE DOUBLE TRANSFORMATION.The Double Transformationfirst appeared inEssays: By Mr. Goldsmith, 1765, where it figures as Essay xxvi, occupying pp. 229–33. It was revised for the second edition of 1766, becoming Essay xxviii, pp. 241–45. This is the text here followed. The poem is an obvious imitation of what its author calls (Letters from a Nobleman to his Son, 1764, ii. 140) that ‘French elegant easy manner of telling a story,’ which Prior had caught from La Fontaine. But the inherent simplicity of Goldsmith’s style is curiously evidenced by the absence of those illustrations and ingenious allusions which are Prior’s chief characteristic. And although Goldsmith includedThe LadleandHans Carvelin hisBeauties of English Poesy, 1767, he refrained wisely from copying the licence of his model.Jack Book-worm led a college life.The version of 1765 reads ‘liv’d’ for ‘led’.And freshmen wonder’d as he spoke.The earlier version adds here—Without politeness aim’d at breeding,And laugh’d at pedantry and reading.Her presence banish’d all his peace.Here in the first version the paragraph closes, and a fresh one is commenced as follows:—Our alter’d Parson now beganTo be a perfect ladies’ man;Made sonnets, lisp’d his sermons o’er,And told the tales he told before,Of bailiffs pump’d, and proctors bit,At college how he shew’d his wit;And, as the fair one still approv’d,He fell in love—or thought he lov’d.So with decorum, etc.The fifth line was probably a reminiscence of the college riot in which Goldsmith was involved in May, 1747, and for his part in which he was publicly admonished. (SeeIntroduction,p. xi, l. 3.)usage.This word, perhaps by a printer’s error, is ‘visage’ in the first version.Skill’d in no other arts was she.Cf. Prior:—For in all Visits who but She,To Argue, or to Repartee.Five greasy nightcaps wrapp’d her head.Cf.Spectator, No. 494— ‘At length the Head of the Colledge came out to him, from an inner Room, with half a Dozen Night-Caps upon his Head.’ See also Goldsmith’s essay on the Coronation (Essays, 1766, p. 238), where Mr. Grogan speaks of his wife as habitually ‘mobbed up in flannel night caps, and trembling at a breath of air.’By day, ’twas gadding or coquetting.The first version after ‘coquetting’ begins a fresh paragraph with—Now tawdry madam kept, etc.A sigh in suffocating smoke.Here in the first version follows:—She, in her turn, became perplexing,And found substantial bliss in vexing.Thus every hour was pass’d, etc.Thus as her faults each day were known.First version: ‘Each day, the more her faults,’ etc.Now, to perplex.The first version has ‘Thus.’ But the alteration in line 61 made a change necessary.paste.First version ‘pastes.’condemn’d to hack,i.e. to hackney, to plod.
[Illustration: ]KILKENNY WEST CHURCH(R. H. Newell)
KILKENNY WEST CHURCH(R. H. Newell)
The hawthorn bush.The Rev. Annesley Strean, Henry Goldsmith’s successor at Kilkenny West, well remembered the hawthorn bush in front of the village ale-house. It had originally three trunks; but when he wrote in 1807 only one remained, ‘the other two having been cut, from time to time, by persons carrying pieces of it away to be made into toys, etc., in honour of the bard, and of the celebrity of his poem.’ (Essay on Light Reading, by the Rev. Edward Mangin, M.A., 1808, 142–3.) Its remains were enclosed by a Captain Hogan previously to 1819; but nevertheless when Prior visited the place in 1830, nothing was apparent but ‘a very tender shoot [which] had again forced its way to the surface.’ (Prior,Life, 1837, ii. 264.) An engraving of the tree by S. Alken, from a sketch made in 1806–9, is to be found at p. 41 of Goldsmith’sPoetical Works, R. H. Newell’s edition, 1811, and is reproduced in the present volume.
[Illustration: ]HAWTHORN TREE(R. H. Newell)
HAWTHORN TREE(R. H. Newell)
How often have I bless’d the coming day.Prior,Life, 1837, ii. 261, finds in this an allusion ‘to the Sundays or numerous holidays, usually kept in Roman Catholic countries.’
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen.Strean’s explanation (Mangin,ut supra, pp. 140–1) of this is as follows:—‘The poem ofThe Deserted Village, took its origin from the circumstance of general Robert Napper [Napier or Naper], (the grandfather of the gentleman who now [1807] lives in the house, within half a mile of Lissoy, and built by the general) having purchased an extensive tract of the country surrounding Lissoy, orAuburn; in consequence of which many families, here calledcottiers, were removed, to make room for the intended improvements of what was now to become the wide domain of a rich man, warm with the idea of changing the face of his new acquisition; and were forced, “with fainting steps,” to go in search of “torrid tracts” and “distant climes.”’
Prior (Life, 1837, i. 40–3) points out that Goldsmith was not the first to give poetical expression to the wrongs of the dispossessed Irish peasantry; and he quotes a long extract from theWorks(1741) of a Westmeath poet, Lawrence Whyte, which contains such passages as these:—
Their native soil were forced to quit,So Irish landlords thought it fit;Who without ceremony or rout,For their improvements turn’d them out ...How many villages they razed,How many parishes laid waste ...Whole colonies, to shun the fateOf being oppress’d at such a rate,By tyrants who still raise their rent,Sail’d to the Western Continent.
The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest. ‘Of all those sounds,’ says Goldsmith, speaking of the cries of waterfowl, ‘there is none so dismally hollow as the booming of the bittern.’ . . . ‘I remember in the place where I was a boy with what terror this bird’s note affected the whole village; they considered it as the presage of some sad event; and generally found or made one to succeed it.’ (Animated Nature, 1774, vi. 1–2, 4.)
Bewick, who may be trusted to speak of a bird which he has drawn with such exquisite fidelity, refers (Water Birds, 1847, p. 49) to ‘the hollow booming noise which the bittern makes during the night, in the breeding season, from its swampy retreats.’ Cf. also that close observer Crabbe (The Borough, Letter xxii, ll. 197–8):—
And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home,Gave from the salt-ditch side the bellowing boom.
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;A breath can make them, as a breath has made.
Mitford comparesConfessio Amantis, fol. 152:—
A kynge may make a lorde a knave,And of a knave a lord also;
and Professor Hales recalls Burns’s later line in theCotter’s Saturday Night, 1785:—
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings.
But Prior finds the exact equivalent of the second line in the verses of an old French poet, De. Caux, upon an hour-glass:—
C’est un verre qui luit,Qu’un souffle peut détruire, et qu’un souffle a produit.
A time there was, ere England’s griefs began.Here wherever the locality of Auburn, the author had clearly England in mind. A caustic commentator has observed that the ‘time’ indicated must have been a long while ago.
opulence.In the first edition the word is ‘luxury.’
And, many a year elapsed, return to view.‘It is strongly contended at Lishoy, that “the Poet,” as he is usually called there, after his pedestrian tour upon the Continent of Europe, returned to and resided in the village some time. . . . It is moreover believed, that the havock which had been made in his absence among those favourite scenes of his youth, affected his mind so deeply, that he actually composed great part of the Deserted Village ‘at’ Lishoy.’ (Poetical Works, with Remarks, etc., by the Rev. R. H. Newell, 1811, p. 74.)
Notwithstanding the above, there is no evidence that Goldsmith ever returned to his native island. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Daniel Hodson, written in 1758, he spoke of hoping to do so ‘in five or six years.’ (Percy Memoir, 1801, i. 49). But in another letter, written towards the close of his life, it is still a thing to come. ‘I am again,’ he says, ‘just setting out for Bath, and I honestly say I had much rather it had been for Ireland with my nephew, but that pleasure I hope to have before I die.’ (Letter to Daniel Hodson, no date, in possession of the late Frederick Locker Lampson.)
Where once the cottage stood, the hawthorn grew.Here followed, in the first edition:—
Here, as with doubtful, pensive steps I range,Trace every scene, and wonder at the change,Remembrance, etc.
In all my griefs—and God has given my share.Prior notes a slight similarity here to a line of Collins:—
Ye mute companions of my toils, that bear,In all my griefs, a more than equal share!Hassan; or, The Camel Driver.
InThe Present State of Polite Learning, 1759, p. 143, Goldsmith refers feelingly to ‘the neglected author of the Persian eclogues, which, however inaccurate, excel any in our language.’ He included four of them inThe Beauties of English Poesy, 1767, i. pp. 239–53.
To husband out,etc. In the first edition this ran:—
My anxious day to husband near the close,And keep life’s flame from wasting by repose.
Here to return—and die at home at last.Forster compares a passage inThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 153:—‘There is something so seducing in that spot in which we first had existence, that nothing but it can please; whatever vicissitudes we experience in life, however we toil, or wheresoever we wander, our fatigued wishes still recur to home for tranquillity, we long to die in that spot which gave us birth, and in that pleasing expectation opiate every calamity.’ The poet Waller too—he adds—wished to die ‘like the stag where he was roused.’ (Life, 1871, ii. 202.)
[Illustration: ]South View from Goldsmith’s Mount(R.H. Newell)
South View from Goldsmith’s Mount(R.H. Newell)
How happy he.‘How blest is he’ in the first edition.
And, since ’tis hard to combat, learns to fly.Mitford comparesThe Beefor October 13, 1759, p. 56:—‘By struggling with misfortunes, we are sure to receive some wounds in the conflict. The only method to come off victorious, is by running away.’
surly porter.Mr. J. M. Lobban compares theCitizen of the World, 1762, i. 123:—‘I never see a nobleman’s door half opened that some surly porter or footman does not stand full in the breach.’ (Select Poems of Goldsmith, 1900, p. 98.)
Bends.‘Sinks’ in the first edition.unperceived decay. Cf. Johnson,Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, l. 292:—
An age that melts with unperceiv’d decay,And glides in modest innocence away;
andIrene, Act ii, Sc. 7:—
And varied life steal unperceiv’d away.
While Resignation,etc. In 1771 Sir Joshua exhibited a picture of ‘An Old Man,’ studied from the beggar who was his model for Ugolino. When it was engraved by Thomas Watson in 1772, he called it ‘Resignation,’ and inscribed the print to Goldsmith in the following words:—‘This attempt to express a Character inThe Deserted Village, is dedicated to Dr. Goldsmith, by his sincere Friend and admirer, JOSHUAREYNOLDS.’
Up yonder hill.It has been suggested that Goldsmith was here thinking of the little hill of Knockaruadh (Red Hill) in front of Lissoy parsonage, of which there is a sketch in Newell’sPoetical Works, 1811. When Newell wrote, it was already known as ‘Goldsmith’s mount’; and the poet himself refers to it in a letter to his brother-in-law Hodson, dated Dec. 27, 1757:—‘I had rather be placed on the little mount before Lishoy gate, and there take in, to me, the most pleasing horizon in nature.’ (Percy Memoir, 1801, p. 43.)
And fill’d each pause the nightingale had made.InAnimated Nature, 1774, v. 328, Goldsmith says:—‘The nightingale’s pausing song would be the proper epithet for this bird’s music.’ [Mitford.]
No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale.(Cf. Goldsmith’s Essay onMetaphors(British Magazine):—‘Armstrong has used the word ‘fluctuate’ with admirable efficacy, in his philosophical poem entitledThe Art of Preserving Health.
Oh! when the growling winds contend, and allThe sounding forest ‘fluctuates’ in the storm,To sink in warm repose, and hear the dinHowl o’er the steady battlements.
The sad historian of the pensive plain.Strean (see note to l. 13) identified the old watercress gatherer as a certain Catherine Giraghty (or Geraghty). Her children (he said) were still living in the neighbourhood of Lissoy in 1807. (Mangin’sEssay on Light Reading, 1808, p. 142.)
The village preacher’s modest mansion rose.‘The Rev. Charles Goldsmith is allowed by all that knew him, to have been faithfully represented by his son in the character of the Village Preacher.’ So writes his daughter, Catharine Hodson (Percy Memoir, 1801, p. 3). Others, relying perhaps upon the ‘forty pounds a year’ of the Dedication toThe Traveller, make the poet’s brother Henry the original; others, again, incline to kindly Uncle Contarine (vide Introduction). But as Prior justly says (Life, 1837, ii. 249), ‘the fact perhaps is that he fixed upon no one individual, but borrowing like all good poets and painters a little from each, drew the character by their combination.’
with forty pounds a year.Cf. Dedication toThe Traveller, p. 3, l. 14.
Unpractis’d.‘Unskilful’ in the first edition.
More skilled.‘More bent’ in the first edition.
The long remember’d beggar.‘The same persons,’ says Prior, commenting upon this passage, ‘are seen for a series of years to traverse the same tract of country at certain intervals, intrude into every house which is not defended by the usual outworks of wealth, a gate and a porter’s lodge, exact their portion of the food of the family, and even find an occasional resting-place for the night, or from severe weather, in the chimney-corner of respectable farmers.’ (Life, 1837, ii. 269.) Cf. Scott on the Scottish mendicants in the ‘Advertisement’ toThe Antiquary, 1816, and Leland’sHist. of Ireland, 1773, i. 35.
The broken soldier.The disbanded soldier let loose upon the country at the conclusion of the ‘Seven Years’ War’ was a familiar figure at this period. Bewick, in hisMemoir(‘Memorial Edition’), 1887, pp. 44–5, describes some of these ancient campaigners with their battered old uniforms and their endless stories of Minden and Quebec; and a picture of two of them by T. S. Good of Berwick belonged to the late Mr. Locker Lampson. Edie Ochiltree (Antiquary)—it may be remembered—had fought at Fontenoy.
Allur’d to brighter worlds.Cf. Tickell on Addison—‘Saints who taught and led the way to Heaven.’
And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray.Prior compares the opening lines of Dryden’sBritannia Rediviva:—
Our vows are heard betimes, and heaven takes careTo grant, before we can conclude the prayer;Preventing angels met it half the way,And sent us back to praise, who came to pray.
As some tall cliff,etc. Lucan, Statius, and Claudian have been supposed to have helped Goldsmith to this fine and deservedly popular simile. But, considering his obvious familiarity with French literature, and the rarity of his ‘obligations to the ancients,’ it is not unlikely that, as suggested by a writer in theAcademyfor Oct. 30, 1886, his source of suggestion is to be found in the following passage of an Ode addressed by Chapelain (1595–1674) to Richelieu:—
Dans un paisible mouvementTu t’élèves au firmament,Et laisses contre toi murmurer cette terre;Ainsi le haut Olympe, à son pied sablonneux,Laisse fumer la foudre et gronder le tonnerre,Et garde son sommet tranquille et lumineux.
Or another French model—indicated by Mr. Forster (Life, 1871, ii. 115–16) by the late Lord Lytton—may have been these lines from a poem by the Abbé de Chaulieu (1639–1720):—
Au milieu cependant de ces peines cruellesDe notre triste hiver, compagnes trop fidèles,Je suis tranquille et gai. Quel bien plus précieuxPuis-je espérer jamais de la bonté des dieux!Tel qu’un rocher dont la tête,Égalant le Mont Athos,Voit à ses pieds la tempêteTroubler le calme des flots,La mer autour bruit et gronde;Malgré ses emotions,Sur son front élevé règne une paix profonde,Que tant d’agitationsEt que ses fureurs de l’ondeRespectent à l’égal du nid des alcyons.
On the other hand, Goldsmith may have gone no further than Young’sComplaint: Night the Second, 1742, p. 42, where, as Mitford points out, occur these lines:—
As some tall Tow’r, or lofty Mountain’s Brow,Detains the Sun, Illustrious from its Height,While rising Vapours, and descending Shades,With Damps, and Darkness drown the Spatious Vale:Undampt by Doubt, Undarken’d by Despair,Philander, thus, augustly rears his Head.
Prior also (Life, 1837, ii. 252) prints a passage fromAnimated Nature, 1774, i. 145, derived from Ulloa, which perhaps served as the raw material of the simile.
Full well they laugh’d,etc. Steele, inSpectator, No. 49 (for April 26, 1711) has a somewhat similar thought:—‘Eubulushas so great an Authority in his little Diurnal Audience, that when he shakes his Head at any Piece of publick News, they all of them appear dejected; and, on the contrary, go home to their Dinners with a good Stomach and chearful Aspect, whenEubulusseems to intimate that Things go well.’
Yet he was kind,etc. For the rhyme of ‘fault’ and ‘aught’ in this couplet Prior cites the precedent of Pope:—
Before his sacred name flies ev’ry fault,And each exalted stanza teems with thought!
(Essay on Criticism, l. 422). He might also have cited Waller, who elides the ‘l’:—
Were we but less indulgent to our fau’ts,And patience had to cultivate our thoughts.
Goldsmith uses a like rhyme inEdwin and Angelina, Stanza xxxv:—
But mine the sorrow, mine the fault,And well my life shall pay;I’ll seek the solitude he sought,And stretch me where he lay.
Cf. alsoRetaliation, ll. 73–4. Perhaps—as indeed Prior suggests—he pronounced ‘fault’ in this fashion.
[Illustration: ]THE SCHOOL HOUSE(R. H. Newell)
THE SCHOOL HOUSE(R. H. Newell)
That one small head could carry all he knew.Some of the traits of this portrait are said to be borrowed from Goldsmith’s own master at Lissoy:—‘He was instructed in reading, writing, and arithmetic’—says his sister Catherine, Mrs. Hodson—‘by a schoolmaster in his father’s village, who had been a quartermaster in the army in Queen Anne’s wars, in that detachment which was sent to Spain: having travelled over a considerable part of Europe and being of a very romantic turn, he used to entertain Oliver with his adventures; and the impressions these made on his scholar were believed by the family to have given him that wandering and unsettled turn which so much appeared in his future life.’ (Percy Memoir, 1801, pp. 3–4.) The name of this worthy, according to Strean, was Burn (Byrne). (Mangin’sEssay on Light Reading, 1808, p. 142.)
Near yonder thorn.See note to l. 13.
The chest contriv’d a double debt to pay.Cf. theDescription of an Author’s Bedchamber, p. 48, l. ult.:—
A cap by night—a stocking all the day!
The twelve good rules.‘A constant one’ (i.e. picture) ‘in every house was “King Charles’ Twelve Good Rules.”’ (Bewick’sMemoir, ‘Memorial Edition,’ 1887, p. 262.) This old broadside, surmounted by a rude woodcut of the King’s execution, is still prized by collectors. The rules, as ‘found in the study of King Charles the First, of Blessed Memory,’ are as follow:— ‘1. Urge no healths; 2. Profane no divine ordinances; 3. Touch no state matters; 4. Reveal no secrets; 5. Pick no quarrels; 6. Make no comparisons; 7. Maintain no ill opinions; 8. Keep no bad company; 9. Encourage no vice; 10. Make no long meals; 11. Repeat no grievances; 12. Lay no Wagers.’ Prior,Misc. Works, 1837, iv. 63, points out that Crabbe alsomakes the ‘Twelve Good Rules’ conspicuous in theParish Register(ll. 51–2):—
There is King Charles, and all his Golden Rules,Who proved Misfortune’s was the best of schools.
Her late Majesty, Queen Victoria, kept a copy of these rules in the servants’ hall at Windsor Castle.
the royal game of goose.The ‘Royal and Entertaining Game of the Goose’ is described at length in Strutt’sSports and Pastimes, bk. iv, ch. 2 (xxv). It may be briefly defined as a game of compartments with different titles through which the player progresses according to the numbers he throws with the dice. At every fourth or fifth compartment is depicted a goose, and if the player’s cast falls upon one of these, he moves forward double the number of his throw.
While broken tea-cups.Cf. theDescription of an Author’s Bedchamber, p. 48, l. 18:—
And five crack’d teacups dress’d the chimney board.
Mr. Hogan, who repaired or rebuilt the ale-house at Lissoy, did not forget, besides restoring the ‘Royal Game of Goose’ and the ‘Twelve Good Rules,’ to add the broken teacups, ‘which for better security in the frail tenure of an Irish publican, or the doubtful decorum of his guests, were embedded in the mortar.’ (Prior,Life, 1837, ii. 265.)
Shall kiss the cup.Cf. Scott’sLochinvar:—
The bride kissed the goblet: the knight took it up,He quaff’d off the wine and he threw down the cup.
Cf. alsoThe History of Miss Stanton(British Magazine, July, 1760).—‘The earthen mug went round.Miss touched the cup, the stranger pledged the parson,’ etc.
Between a splendid and a happy land.Prior comparesThe Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 98:—‘Too much commerce may injure a nation as well as too little; and . . . there is a wide difference between a conquering and a flourishing empire.’
To see profusion that he must not share.Cf.Animated Nature, iv. p. 43:—‘He only guards those luxuries he is not fated to share.’ [Mitford.]
To see those joys.Up to the third edition the words wereeach joy.
There the black gibbet glooms beside the way.The gallows, under the savage penal laws of the eighteenth century, by which horse-stealing, forgery, shop-lifting, and even the cutting of a hop-bind in a plantation were punishable with death, was a common object in the landscape. Cf.Vicar of Wakefield, 1706, ii. 122:—‘Our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets to scare every invader’; andCitizen of the World, 1762, ii. 63–7. Johnson, who wrote eloquently on capital punishment inThe Ramblerfor April 20, 1751, No. 114, also refers to the ceaseless executions in hisLondon, 1738, ll. 238–43:—
Scarce can our fields, such crowds at Tyburn die,With hemp the gallows and the fleet supply.Propose your schemes, ye senatorian band,Whose ways and means support the sinking land:Lest ropes be wanting in the tempting spring,To rig another convoy for the king.
Where the poor houseless shivering female lies.Mitford compares Letter cxiv ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 211:—‘Thesepoor shivering femaleshave once seen happier days, and been flattered into beauty. They have been prostituted to the gay luxurious villain, and are now turned out to meet the severity of winter. Perhaps now lying at the doors of their betrayers, they sue to wretches whose hearts are insensible, or debauchees who may curse, but will not relieve them.’ The same passage occurs inThe Bee, 1759, p. 126 (A City Night-Piece).
Near her betrayer’s door,etc. Cf. the foregoing quotation.
wild Altama,i.e. the Alatamaha, a river in Georgia, North America. Goldsmith may have been familiar with this name in connexion with his friend Oglethorpe’s expedition of 1733.
crouching tigers,a poetical licence, as there are no tigers in the locality named. But Mr. J. H. Lobban calls attention to a passage fromAnimated Nature[1774, iii. 244], in which Goldsmith seems to defend himself:—‘There is an animal of America, which is usually called the Red Tiger, but Mr. Buffon calls it the Cougar, which, no doubt, is very different from the tiger of the east. Some, however, have thought proper to rank both together, and I will take leave to follow their example.’
The good old sire.Cf.Threnodia Augustalis, ll. 16–17:—
The good old sire, unconscious of decay,The modest matron, clad in homespun gray
a father’s.‘Her father’s’ in the first edition.
silent.‘Decent’ in the first edition.
On Torno’s cliffs, or Pambamarca’s side.‘Torno’=Tornea, a river which falls into the Gulf of Bothnia; Pambamarca is a mountain near Quito, South America. ‘The author’—says Bolton Corney—‘bears in memory the operations of the French philosophers in the arctic and equatorial regions, as described in the celebrated narratives of M. Maupertuis and Don Antonio de Ulloa.’
That trade’s proud empire,etc. These last four lines are attributed to Johnson on Boswell’s authority:—‘Dr. Johnson . . . favoured me by marking the lines which he furnished to Goldsmith’sDeserted Village, which are only the ‘last four’.’ (Birkbeck Hill’sBoswell, 1887, ii. 7.)
This translation, or rather imitation, was first published at pp. 176–7 ofAn Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, 1759 (Chap. xii, ‘Of the Stage’), where it is prefaced as follows:— ‘MACROBIUShas preserved a prologue, spoken and written by the poet [Decimus] Laberius, a Roman knight, whom Caesar forced upon the stage, written with great elegance and spirit, which shews what opinion the Romans in general entertained of the profession of an actor.’ In the second edition of 1774 the prologue was omitted. The original lines, one of which Goldsmith quotes, are to found in theSaturnaliaof Macrobius, lib. ii, cap. vii (Opera, London, 1694). He seems to have confined himself to imitating the first fifteen:—
Necessitas, cujus cursus transversi impetumVoluerunt multi effugere, pauci potuerunt,Quo me detrusit paene extremis sensibus?Quem nulla ambitio, nulla umquam largitio,Nullus timor, vis nulla, nulla auctoritasMovere potuit in juventa de statu;Ecce in senecta ut facile labefecit locoViri Excellentis mente clemente editaSubmissa placide blandiloquens oratio!Etenim ipsi di negare cui nihil potuerunt,Hominem me denegare quis posset pati?Ergo bis tricenis annis actis sine totaEques Romanus Lare egressus meoDomum revertar mimus. nimirum hoc dieUno plus vixi mihi quam vivendum fuit.
Rollin gives a French translation of this prologue in hisTraité des Études. It is quoted by Bolton Corney in hisPoetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 1845, pp. 203–4. In his Aldine edition of 1831, p. 114, Mitford completed Goldsmith’s version as follows:—
Too lavish still in good, or evil hour,To show to man the empire of thy power,If fortune, at thy wild impetuous sway,The blossoms of my fame must drop away,Then was the time the obedient plant to strainWhen life was warm in every vigorous vein,To mould young nature to thy plastic skill,And bend my pliant boyhood to thy will.So might I hope applauding crowds to hear,Catch the quick smile, and HIS attentive ear.But ah! for what has thou reserv’d my age?Say, how can I expect the approving stage;Fled is the bloom of youth—the manly air—The vigorous mind that spurn’d at toil and care;Gone is the voice, whose clear and silver toneThe enraptur’d theatre would love to own.As clasping ivy chokes the encumber’d tree,So age with foul embrace has ruined me.Thou, and the tomb, Laberius, art the same,Empty within, what hast thou but a name?
Macrobius, it may be remembered, was the author, with a quotation from whom Johnson, after a long silence, electrified the company upon his first arrival at Pembroke College, thus giving (says Boswell) ‘the first impression of that more extensive reading in which he had indulged himself’ (Birkbeck Hill’sBoswell, 1887, i. 59). If the study of Macrobius is to be regarded as a test of ‘more extensive reading’ that praise must therefore be accorded to Goldsmith, who cites him in his first book.
This quatrain, the original of which does not appear to have been traced, was first published inThe Beefor Saturday, the 6th of October, 1759, p. 8. It is there succeeded by the following Latin epigram, ‘in the same spirit’:—
LUMINE Acon dextro capta est Leonida sinistroEt poterat forma vincere uterque Deos.Parve puer lumen quod habes concede puellaeSic tu caecus amor sic erit illa Venus.
There are several variations of this in theGentleman’s Magazinefor 1745, pp. 104, 159, 213, 327, one of which is said to be ‘By a monk of Winchester,’ with a reference to ‘Cambden’sRemains, p. 413.’ None of these corresponds exactly with Goldsmith’s text; and the lady’s name is uniformly given as ‘Leonilla.’ A writer in theQuarterly Review, vol. 171, p. 296, prints the ‘original’ thus—
Lumine Acon dextro, capta est Leonilla sinistro,Et potis est forma vincere uterque Deos.Blande puer, lumen quod habes concede sorori;Sic tu caecus Amor, sic erit illa Venus;
and says ‘it was written by Girolamo Amalteo, and will be found in any of the editions of theTrium Fratrum Amaltheorum Carmina, under the title of ‘De gemellis, fratre et sorore, luscis.’ According to Byron on Bowles (Works, 1836, vi. p. 390), the persons referred to are the Princess of Eboli, mistress of Philip II of Spain, and Maugiron, minion of Henry III of France, who had each of them lost an eye. But for this the reviewer above quoted had found no authority.
This little trifle, in which a French levity is wedded to the language of Prior, was first printed inThe Bee, for Saturday, the 13th of October, 1759. Its original, which is as follows, is to be found where Goldsmith found it, namely in Part iii of theMénagiana, (ed. 1729, iii, 397), and not far from the ditty ofle fameux la Galisse. (SeeAn Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize,infra, p. 198):—
ETRENEAIRIS.
Pour témoigner de ma flame,Iris, du meilleur de mon ameJe vous donne à ce nouvel anNon pas dentelle ni ruban,Non pas essence, ni pommade,Quelques boites de marmelade,Un manchon, des gans, un bouquet,Non pas heures, ni chapelet.Quoi donc? Attendez, je vous donneO fille plus belle que bonne ...Je vous donne: Ah! le puis-je dire?Oui, c’est trop souffrir le martyre,Il est tems de s’émanciper,Patience va m’échaper,Fussiez-vous cent fois plus aimable,Belle Iris, je vous donne ... au Diable.
In Bolton Corney’s edition of Goldsmith’sPoetical Works, 1845, p. 77, note, these lines are attributed to Bernard de la Monnoye (1641–1728), who is said to have included them in a collection ofÉtrennes en vers, published in 1715.
I’ll give thee.See an anecdoteà proposof this anticlimax in Trevelyan’sLife and Letters of Lord Macaulay, ed. 1889, p. 600:—‘There was much laughing about Mrs. Beecher Stowe [then (16th March, 1853) expected in England], and what we were to give her. I referred the ladies to Goldsmith’s poems for what I should give. Nobody but Hannah understood me; but some of them have since been thumbing Goldsmith to make out the riddle.’
These lines, which have often, and even of late years, been included among Swift’s works, were first printed as Goldsmith’s by T. Evans at vol. i. pp. 115–17 ofThe Poetical and Dramatic Works of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B., 1780. They originally appeared inThe Busy Bodyfor Thursday, October the 18th, 1759 (No. v), having this notification above the title: ‘The following Poem written by DR. SWIFT, is communicated to the Public by the BUSYBODY, to whom it was presented by a Nobleman of distinguished Learning and Taste.’ In No. ii they had already been advertised as forthcoming. The sub-title, ‘In imitation of Dean Swift,’ seems to have been added by Evans. The text here followed is that of the first issue.
Wise Aristotle and Smiglecius.Cf.The Life of Parnell, 1770, p. 3:—‘His imagination might have been too warm to relish the cold logic of Burgersdicius, or the dreary subtleties ofSmiglesius; but it is certain that as a classical scholar, few could equal him.’ Martin Smiglesius or Smigletius, a Polish Jesuit, theologian and logician, who died in 1618, appears to have been a specialbête noireto Goldsmith; and the reference to him here would support the ascription of the poem to Goldsmith’s pen, were it not that Swift seems also to have cherished a like antipathy:—‘He told me that he had made many efforts, upon his entering the College [i.e. Trinity College, Dublin], to read some of the old treatises on logic writ bySmeglesius, Keckermannus, Burgersdicius, etc., and that he never had patience to go through three pages of any of them, he was so disgusted at the stupidity of the work.’ (Sheridan’sLife of Swift, 2nd ed., 1787, p. 4.)
Than reason-boasting mortal’s pride.So inThe Busy Body. Some editors—Mitford, for example—print the line:—
Than reason,—boasting mortals’ pride.
Deus est anima brutorum.Cf. Addison inSpectator, No. 121 (July 19, 1711): ‘A modern Philosopher, quoted by MonsieurBalein his Learned Dissertation on the Souls of Brutes delivers the same Opinion [i.e.—That Instinct is the immediate direction of Providence], tho’ in a bolder form of words where he saysDeus est Anima Brutorum, God himself is the Soul of Brutes.’ There is much in ‘Monsieur Bayle’ on this theme. Probably Addison had in mind the following passage of theDict. Hist. et Critique(3rd ed., 1720, 2481b.) which Bayle cites from M. Bernard:—‘Il me semble d’avoir lu quelque part cette Thèse,Deus est anima brutorum: l’expression est un peu dure; mais elle peut recevoir un fort bon sens.’
B—b=Bob, i.e. Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, for whom many venal ‘quills were drawn’circa1715–42. Cf. Pope’sEpilogue to the Satires, 1738, Dialogue i, ll. 27–32:—
Go see Sir ROBERT—P. See Sir ROBERT!—hum—And never laugh—for all my life to come?Seen him I have, but in his happier hourOf Social Pleasure, ill-exchang’d for Pow’r;Seen him, uncumber’d with the Venal tribe,Smile without Art, and win without a Bribe.
A courtier any ape surpasses.Cf. Gay’sFables, passim. Indeed there is more of Gay than Swift in this and the lines that follow. Gay’s life was wasted in fruitless expectations of court patronage, and his disappointment often betrays itself in his writings.
And footmen, lords and dukes can act.Cf.Gil Blas, 1715–35, liv. iii, chap. iv:—‘Il falloit voir comme nous nous portions des santés à tous moments, en nous donnant les uns aux autres les surnoms de nos maîtres. Le valet de don Antonio appeloit Gamb celuiet nous nous enivrions peu à peu sous ces noms empruntés, tout aussi bien que les seigneurs qui les portoient véritablement.’ But Steele had already touched this subject inSpectator, No. 88, for June 11, 1711, ‘On the Misbehaviour of Servants,’ a paper supposed to have afforded the hint for Townley’s farce ofHigh Life below Stairs, which, about a fortnight afterThe Logicians Refutedappeared, was played for the first time at Drury Lane, not much to the gratification of the gentlemen’s gentlemen in the upper gallery. Goldsmith himself wrote ‘A Word or two on the late Farce, calledHigh Life below Stairs,’ inThe Beefor November 3, 1759, pp. 154–7.
This little piece first appears inThe Beefor October 20, 1759 (No. iii). It is there called ‘A Sonnet,’ a title which is only accurate in so far as it is ‘a little song.’ Bolton Corney affirms that it is imitated from the French of Saint-Pavin (i.e. Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin, d. 1670), whose works were edited in 1759, the year in which Goldsmith published the collection of essays and verses in which it is to be found. The text here followed is that of the ‘new edition’ ofThe Bee, published by W. Lane, Leadenhall Street, no date, p. 94. Neither by its motive nor its literary merits—it should be added—did the original call urgently for translation; and the poem is here included solely because, being Goldsmith’s, it cannot be omitted from his complete works.
This and the following linein the first version run:—
Yet, why this killing soft dejection?Why dim thy beauty with a tear?
Quebec was taken on the 13th September, 1759. Wolfe was wounded pretty early in the action, while leading the advance of the Louisbourg grenadiers. ‘A shot shattered his wrist. He wrapped his handkerchief about it and kept on. Another shot struck him, and he still advanced, when a third lodged in his breast. He staggered, and sat on the ground. Lieutenant Brown, of the grenadiers, one Henderson, a volunteer in the same company, and a private soldier, aided by an officer of artillery who ran to join them, carried him in their arms to the rear. He begged them to lay him down. They did so, and asked if he would have a surgeon. “There’s no need,” he answered; “it’s all over with me.” A moment after, one of them cried out, “They run; see how they run!” “Who run?” Wolfe demanded, like a man roused from sleep. “The enemy, sir. They give way everywhere!” “Go, one of you, to Colonel Burton,” returned the dying man; “tell him to march Webb’s regiment down to Charles River, to cut off their retreat from the bridge.” Then, turning on his side, he murmured, “Now, God be praised, I will die in peace!” and in a few moments his gallant soul had fled.’ (Parkman’sMontcalm and Wolfe, 1885, ii. 296–7.) In hisHistory of England in a Series of Letters, 1764, ii. 241, Goldsmith says of this event:—‘Perhaps the loss of such a man was greater to the nation than the conquering of all Canada was advantageous; but it is the misfortune of humanity, that we can never know true greatness till the moment when we are going to lose it.’* The present stanzas were first published inThe Busy Body(No. vii) for Tuesday, the 22nd October, 1759, a week after the news of Wolfe’s death had reached this country (Tuesday the 16th). According to Prior (Life, 1837, i. 6), Goldsmith claimed to be related to Wolfe by the father’s side, the maiden name of the General’s mother being Henrietta Goldsmith. It may be noted that Benjamin West’s popular rendering of Wolfe’s death (1771)—a rendering which Nelson never passed in a print shop without being stopped by it—was said to be based upon the descriptions of an eye-witness. It was engraved by Woollett and Ryland in 1776. A key to the names of those appearing in the picture was published in theArmy and Navy Gazetteof January 20, 1893.
* He repeats this sentiment, in different words, in the laterHistory of Englandof 1771, iv. 400.
The publication in February, 1751, of Gray’sElegy Wrote in a Country Church Yardhad set a fashion in poetry which long continued. Goldsmith, who considered that work ‘a very fine poem, but overloaded with epithet’ (Beauties of English Poesy, 1767, i. 53), and once proposed to amend it ‘by leaving out an idle word in every line’ [!] (Cradock’sMemoirs, 1826, i. 230), resented these endless imitations, and his antipathy to them frequently reveals itself. Only a few months before the appearance of Mrs. Blaize inThe Beefor October 27, 1759, he had written in theCritical Review, vii. 263, when noticing Langhorne’sDeath of Adonis, as follows:—‘It is not thus that many of our moderns have composed what they call elegies; they seem scarcely to have known its real character. If an hero or a poet happens to die with us, the whole band of elegiac poets raise the dismal chorus, adorn his herse with all the paltry escutcheons of flattery, rise into bombast, paint him at the head of his thundering legions, or reining Pegasus in his most rapid career; they are sure to strew cypress enough upon the bier, dress up all the muses in mourning, and look themselves every whit as dismal and sorrowful as an undertaker’s shop.’ He returned to the subject in aChinese Letterof March 4, 1761, in thePublic Ledger(afterwards Letter ciii ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 162–5), which contains the linesOn the Death of the Right Honourable ***; and again, inThe Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, i. 174,à proposof theElegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, he makes Dr. Primrose say, ‘I have wept so much at all sorts of elegies of late, that without an enlivening glass I am sure this will overcome me.’
The model forAn Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaizeis to be found in the old French popular song of Monsieur de la Palisse or Palice, about fifty verses of which are printed in Larousse’sGrand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXmeSiècle, x. p. 179. It is there stated to have originated in some dozen stanzas suggested to la Monnoye (v. supra, p. 193) by the extreme artlessness of a military quatrain dating from the battle of Pavia, and the death upon that occasion of the famous French captain, Jacques de Chabannes, seigneur de la Palice:—
Monsieur d’La Palice est mort,Mort devant Pavie;Un quart d’heure avant sa mort,Il était encore en vie.
The remaining verses, i.e. in addition to those of la Monnoye, are the contributions of successive generations. Goldsmith probably had in mind the version in Part iii of theMénagiana, (ed. 1729, iii, 384–391) where apparently by a typographical error, the hero is called‘le fameux la Galisse, homme imaginaire.’The verses he imitated most closely are reproduced below. It may be added that this poem supplied one of its last inspirations to the pencil of Randolph Caldecott, who published it as a picture-book in October, 1885. (See alsoAn Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, p. 212.)
Who left a pledge behind.Caldecott cleverly converted this line into the keynote of the poem, by making the heroine a pawnbroker.
When she has walk’d before.Cf. the French:—
On dit que dans ses amoursIl fut caresse des belles,Qui le suivirent toujours,Tant qu’il marcha devant elles.
Her last disorder mortal.Cf. the French:—
Il fut par un triste sortBlesse d’une main cruelle.On croit, puis qu’il en est mort,Que la plaie étoit mortelle.
Kent Street,Southwark, ‘chiefly inhabited,’ said Strype, ‘by Broom Men and Mumpers’; and Evelyn tells us (Diary5th December, 1683) that he assisted at the marriage, to her fifth husband, of a Mrs. Castle, who was ‘the daughter of one Burton, a broom-man . . . in Kent Street’ who had become not only rich, but Sheriff of Surrey. It was a poor neighbourhood corresponding to the present ‘old Kent-road, from Kent to Southwark and old London Bridge’ (Cunningham’sLondon).* Goldsmith himself refers to it inThe Beefor October 20, 1759, being the number immediately preceding that in whichMadam Blaizefirst appeared:—‘You then, O ye beggars of my acquaintance, whether in rags or lace; whether inKent-streetor the Mall; whether at the Smyrna or St. Giles’s, might I advise as a friend, never seem in want of the favour which you solicit’ (p. 72). Three years earlier he had practised as ‘a physician, in a humble way’ in Bankside, Southwark, and was probably well acquainted with the humours of Kent Street.
* In contemporary maps Kent (now Tabard) Street is shown extending between the present New Kent Road and Blackman Street.
In a letter written to the Rev. Henry Goldsmith in 1759 (Percy Memoir, 1801, pp. 53–9), Goldsmith thus refers to the first form of these verses:—‘Your last letter, I repeat it, was too short; you should have given me your opinion of the design of the heroicomical poem which I sent you: you remember I intended to introduce the hero of the poem, as lying in a paltry alehouse. You may take the following specimen of the manner, which I flatter myself is quite original. The room in which he lies, may be described somewhat this way:—
The window, patch’d with paper, lent a ray,That feebly shew’d the state in which he lay.The sanded floor, that grits beneath the tread:The humid wall with paltry pictures spread;The game of goose was there expos’d to viewAnd the twelve rules the royal martyr drew:The seasons, fram’d with listing, found a place,And Prussia’s monarch shew’d his lamp-black faceThe morn was cold; he views with keen desire,A rusty grate unconscious of a fire.An unpaid reck’ning on the frieze was scor’d,And five crack’d tea-cups dress’d the chimney board.
And now imagine after his soliloquy, the landlord to make his appearance, in order to dun him for the reckoning:—
Not with that face, so servile and so gay,That welcomes every stranger that can pay,With sulky eye he smoak’d the patient man,Then pull’d his breeches tight, and thus began, etc.
All this is taken, you see, from nature. It is a good remark of Montaign[e]’s, that the wisest men often have friends, with whom they do not care how much they play the fool. Take my present follies as instances of regard. Poetry is a much easier, and more agreeable species of composition than prose, and could a man live by it, it were no unpleasant employment to be a poet.’
In Letter xxix ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 119–22, which first appeared inThe Public Ledgerfor May 2, 1760, they have a different setting. They are read at a club of authors by a ‘poet, in shabby finery,’ who asserts that he has composed them the day before. After some preliminary difficulties, arising from the fact that the laws of the club do not permit any author to inflict his own works upon the assembly without a money payment, he introduces them as follows:—‘Gentlemen, says he, the present piece is not one of your common epic poems, which come from the press like paper kites in summer; there are none of your Turnuses or Dido’s in it; it is an heroical description of nature. I only beg you’ll endeavour to make your souls unison* with mine, and hear with the same enthusiasm with which I have written. The poem begins with the description of an author’s bedchamber: the picture was sketched in my own apartment; for you must know, gentlemen, that I am myself the heroe. Then putting himself into the attitude of an orator, with all the emphasis of voice and action, he proceeded.
Where the Red Lion, etc.’
* i.e. accord, conform.
The verses then follow as they are printed in this volume; but he is unable to induce his audience to submit to a further sample. In a slightly different form, some of them were afterwards worked intoThe Deserted Village, 1770. (See ll. 227–36.)
Where Calvert’s butt, and Parsons’ black champagne.The Calverts and Humphrey Parsons were noted brewers of ‘entire butt beer’ or porter, also known familiarly as ‘British Burgundy’ and ‘black Champagne.’ Calvert’s ‘Best Butt Beer’ figures on the sign in Hogarth’sBeer Street, 1751.
The humid wall with paltry pictures spread.Bewick gives the names of some of these popular, if paltry, decorations:—‘In cottages everywhere were to be seen the “Sailor’s Farewell” and his “Happy Return,” “Youthful Sports,” and the “Feats of Manhood,” “The Bold Archers Shooting at a Mark,” “The Four Seasons,” etc.’ (Memoir, ‘Memorial Edition,’ 1887, p. 263.)
The royal game of goose was there in view.(See note,p. 188.)
And the twelve rules the royal martyr drew.(See note,p. 187.)
The Seasons, fram’d with listing.See note to l. 10 above, as to ‘The Seasons.’ Listing, ribbon, braid, or tape is still used as a primitiveencadrement. In a letter dated August 15, 1758, to his cousin, Mrs. Lawder (Jane Contarine), Goldsmith again refers to this device. Speaking of some ‘maxims of frugality’ with which he intends to adorn his room, he adds—‘my landlady’s daughter shall frame them with the parings of my black waistcoat.’ (Prior,Life, 1837, i. 271.)
And brave Prince William.William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, 1721–65. The ‘lamp-black face’ would seem to imply that the portrait was a silhouette. In the letter quoted on p. 200 it is ‘Prussia’s monarch’ (i.e. Frederick the Great).
With beer and milk arrears.See the lines relative to the landlord in Goldsmith’s above-quoted letter to his brother. In another letter of August 14, 1758, to Robert Bryanton, he describes himself as ‘in a garret writing for bread, and expecting to be dunned for a milk score.’ Hogarth’sDistrest Poet, 1736, it will be remembered, has already realized this expectation.
A cap by night—a stocking all the day.‘With this last line,’ saysThe Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 121, ‘he [the author] seemed so much elated, that he was unable to proceed: “There gentlemen, cries he, there is a description for you; Rab[e]lais’s bed-chamber is but a fool to it:
A cap by night—a stocking all the day!
There is sound and sense, and truth, and nature in the trifling compass of ten little syllables.”’ (Letter xxix.) Cf. alsoThe Deserted Village, l. 230:—
A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day.
If Goldsmith’s lines did not belong to 1759, one might suppose he had in mind the laterPauvre Diableof his favourite Voltaire. (See alsoAPPENDIXB.)
These verses, intended for a specimen of the newspaper Muse, are from Letter lxxxii ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 87, first printed inThe Public Ledger, October 21, 1760.
From Letter ciii ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 164, first printed inThe Public Ledger, March 4, 1761. The verses are given as a ‘specimen of a poem on the decease of a great man.’ Goldsmith had already used the trick of the final line of the quatrain inAn Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize, ante, p. 198.
From Letter cx ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 193, first printed inThe Public Ledger, April 14, 1761. It had, however, already been printed in the ‘Ledger’, ten days before. Goldsmith’s animosity to Churchill (cf. note to l. 41 of the dedication toThe Traveller) was notorious; but this is one of his doubtful pieces.
virtue.‘Charity’ (Author’s note).
bounty.‘Settled at One Shilling—the Price of the Poem’ (Author’s note).
From the same letter as the preceding. George Colman and Robert Lloyd of theSt. James’s Magazinewere supposed to have helped Churchill inThe Rosciad, the ‘it’ of the epigram.
From Letter cxiii ofThe Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 209, first printed inThe Public Ledger, May 13, 1761.
The Double Transformationfirst appeared inEssays: By Mr. Goldsmith, 1765, where it figures as Essay xxvi, occupying pp. 229–33. It was revised for the second edition of 1766, becoming Essay xxviii, pp. 241–45. This is the text here followed. The poem is an obvious imitation of what its author calls (Letters from a Nobleman to his Son, 1764, ii. 140) that ‘French elegant easy manner of telling a story,’ which Prior had caught from La Fontaine. But the inherent simplicity of Goldsmith’s style is curiously evidenced by the absence of those illustrations and ingenious allusions which are Prior’s chief characteristic. And although Goldsmith includedThe LadleandHans Carvelin hisBeauties of English Poesy, 1767, he refrained wisely from copying the licence of his model.
Jack Book-worm led a college life.The version of 1765 reads ‘liv’d’ for ‘led’.
And freshmen wonder’d as he spoke.The earlier version adds here—
Without politeness aim’d at breeding,And laugh’d at pedantry and reading.
Her presence banish’d all his peace.Here in the first version the paragraph closes, and a fresh one is commenced as follows:—
Our alter’d Parson now beganTo be a perfect ladies’ man;Made sonnets, lisp’d his sermons o’er,And told the tales he told before,Of bailiffs pump’d, and proctors bit,At college how he shew’d his wit;And, as the fair one still approv’d,He fell in love—or thought he lov’d.So with decorum, etc.
The fifth line was probably a reminiscence of the college riot in which Goldsmith was involved in May, 1747, and for his part in which he was publicly admonished. (SeeIntroduction,p. xi, l. 3.)
usage.This word, perhaps by a printer’s error, is ‘visage’ in the first version.
Skill’d in no other arts was she.Cf. Prior:—
For in all Visits who but She,To Argue, or to Repartee.
Five greasy nightcaps wrapp’d her head.Cf.Spectator, No. 494— ‘At length the Head of the Colledge came out to him, from an inner Room, with half a Dozen Night-Caps upon his Head.’ See also Goldsmith’s essay on the Coronation (Essays, 1766, p. 238), where Mr. Grogan speaks of his wife as habitually ‘mobbed up in flannel night caps, and trembling at a breath of air.’
By day, ’twas gadding or coquetting.The first version after ‘coquetting’ begins a fresh paragraph with—
Now tawdry madam kept, etc.
A sigh in suffocating smoke.Here in the first version follows:—
She, in her turn, became perplexing,And found substantial bliss in vexing.Thus every hour was pass’d, etc.
Thus as her faults each day were known.First version: ‘Each day, the more her faults,’ etc.
Now, to perplex.The first version has ‘Thus.’ But the alteration in line 61 made a change necessary.
paste.First version ‘pastes.’
condemn’d to hack,i.e. to hackney, to plod.