“No high-life scenes, no sentiment: the creature“Still stoops among the low to copy nature.”
“No high-life scenes, no sentiment: the creature“Still stoops among the low to copy nature.”
“No high-life scenes, no sentiment: the creature
“Still stoops among the low to copy nature.”
But all these points, in their way interesting and even absorbing, are rather beyond the object with which I embarked upon this paper, viz.: to do justice to the affectionate side of Goldsmith’s warm Irish nature by bringing into relief the letters which, despite his repugnance to correspondence, he from time to time addressed to members of his own family with ardent and even pitiful appeals for news from Ireland. These appeals, it is to be feared, had no satisfactory response from the recipients of the letters which after their many adventures I have now had the privilege of exhibiting to you, and which I think serve to illustrate the truth of Dr. Johnson’s dictum: “Goldsmith was a man of such variety of powers and such felicity of performance, that he always seemed to do best that which he was doing: a man who had the art of being minute without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was copious without exuberance, exact without constraint and easy without weakness.”