wealth enjoy fewer blessings, if its unwieldy pomp less often spurned the cottage from the green. "It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country," said the Lord Leicester who built Holkham, when complimented on the completion of that princely dwelling. "I look round; not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the giant of Giant Castle, and have eaten up all my neighbors." There is no man who has risen upward in the world, even by ways the most honorable to himself and kindly to others, who may not be said to have a deserted village, sacred to the tenderest and fondest recollections, which it is well that his fancy and his feeling should at times revisit.

Goldsmith looked into his heart, and wrote. From that great city in which his hard-spent life had been diversified with so much care and toil, he travelled back to the memory of lives more simply passed, of more cheerful labor, of less anxious care, of homely affections and humble joys for which the world and all its successes offer nothing in exchange. There are few things in the range of English poetry more deeply touching than the closing image of these lines, the hunted creature panting to its home!

"In all my wanderings round this world of care,
In all my griefs-and God has given my share-
I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,
Amid these humble bowers to lay me down;
To husband out life's taper at the close,
And keep the flame from wasting, by repose.

I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,
Amid the swains to show my book-learned skill;
Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;

And, as an hare whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,

I still had hopes, my long vexations past,

Here to return-and die at home at last."

1 When asked who was his nearest neighbor, he replied, "The King of Denmark."-Potter's Observations on the Poor Laws, quoted in Campbell's British Poets (Ed. 1841), 526.

'This thought was continually at his heart. In his hardly less beautiful prose he has said the same thing more than once, for, as I have elsewhere

That hope is idle for him. Sweet Auburn is no more. But though he finds the scene deserted, for us he peoples it anew; builds up again its ruined haunts and revives its pure enjoyments; from the glare of crowded cities, their exciting struggles and palling pleasures, carries us back to the season of natural pastimes and unsophisticated desires; adjures us all to remember, in our several smaller worlds, the vast world of humanity that breathes beyond; shows us that there is nothing too humble for the loftiest and most affecting associations, and that where human joys and interests have been, their memory is sacred forever!

"Near yonder thorn, that lifts its head on high,

Where once the sign-post caught the passing eye,
Low lies that house where nut-brown draughts inspired,
Where gray-beard mirth and smiling toil retired,
Where village statesmen talked with looks profound,
And news much older than their ale went round.
Imagination fondly stoops to trace,

The parlor splendors of that festive place:
The whitewashed wall, the nicely sanded floor,
The varnished clock that clicked behind the door,
The chest contrived a double debt to pay,

A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day;
The pictures placed for ornament and use,
The twelve good rules, the royal game of goose;
The hearth, except when winter chill'd the day,
With aspen boughs, and flowers, and fennel gay,
While broken tea-cups, wisely kept for show,
Rang'd o'er the chimney, glistened in a row.
Vain transitory splendors! Could not all
Reprieve the tottering mansion from its fall!

remarked, no one ever borrowed from himself oftener or more unscrupulously than Goldsmith did. "A city like this," he writes in letter ciii. of the Citizen of the World, "is the soil for great virtues and great vices.... There are no pleasures, sensual or sentimental, which this city does not produce; yet, I know not how, I could not be content to reside here for life. 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 find an opiate for every calamity." The poet Waller, too, wished to die "like the stag where he was roused."-Johnson, iii. 338.

Obscure it sinks, nor shall it more impart
An hour's importance to the poor man's heart;
Thither no more the peasant shall repair
To sweet oblivion of his daily care;

No more the farmer's news, the barber's tale,
No more the woodman's ballad shall prevail;
No more the smith his dusky brow shall clear,
Relax his ponderous strength, and lean to hear;
The host himself no longer shall be found
Careful to see the mantling bliss go round;
Nor the coy maid, half willing to be prest,
Shall kiss the cup to pass it to the rest.
Yes! let the rich deride, the proud disdain,
These simple blessings of the lowly train ;
To me more dear, congenial to my heart,

One native charm than all the gloss of art."

With darker shadows from the terrible and stony truths that are written in the streets of cities the picture is afterwards completed; and here, too, the poet painted from himself. His own experience, the suffering for which his heart had always bled, the misery his scanty purse was always ready to relieve, are in his contrast of the pleasures of the great with the innocence and the health too often murdered to obtain them. It was this sympathy with the very poor, strongly underlying the most part of all he wrote, though seldom appearing on the surface in any formal political opinion, which seems to have struck his more observing critics as the master-peculiarity in his modes and tendencies of thinking; and hence it may have been that the impression of him, formed in the girlhood of the daughter of his attached friend, Lord Clare, often repeated in her advanced age to her son, Lord Nugent, and by him communicated to me, was "that he was a strong republican in principle, and would have been a very dangerous writer if he had lived to the times of the French revolution." Nor is it difficult to understand how such thoughts and fears came in such quarters to be connected with him, if we merely observe, to take an instance from one of his later books' in addition to

1 Animated Nature, iv. 158. He is speaking of the partridge, and remarks of it that “it is still a favorite delicacy at the tables of the rich; and

others already named, the uncompromising tone of opinion he doubtless never hesitated to indulge, at Lord Clare's table, or wherever he might be, on such a subject as the game laws. It is certain, with reference to the lines I am about to quote, that several "distinguished friends" strongly objected to the views implied in them; but he let them stand. They would, perhaps, as strongly have objected to what was not uncommon with himself, the abandoning his rest at night to give relief to the destitute. They would have thought the parish should have done what a yet more distinguished friend, Samuel Johnson, once did, and which will probably be remembered when all he wrote or said shall have passed away: his picking up a wretched ruined girl, who lay exhausted on the pavement, "in the lowest state of vice, poverty, and disease"; taking her upon his back, carrying her to his house, and placing her in his bed; not harshly upbraiding her; taking care of her, with all tenderness, for a long time;

the desire of keeping it to themselves has induced them to make laws for its preservation, no way harmonizing with the general spirit of English legislation. What can be more arbitrary than to talk of preserving the game, which, when defined, means no more than that the poor shall abstain from what the rich have taken a fancy to keep for themselves? If these birds could, like a cock or hen, be made legal property; could they be taught to keep within certain districts, and only fed on those grounds that belong to the man whose entertainments they improve; it then might, with some show of justice, be admitted, that as a man fed them, so he might claim them. But this is not the case; nor is it in any man's power to lay a restraint upon the liberty of these birds, that, when let loose, put no limits to their excursions. They feed every where, upon every man's ground; and no man can say, These birds are fed only by me. Those birds which are nourished by all belong to all; nor can any one man, nor any set of men, lay claim to them when still continuing in a state of nature. I never walked out about the environs of Paris that I did not consider that the immense quantity of game that was running almost tame on every side of me, as a badge of the slavery of the people; and what they wished me to observe as an object of triumph, I alway regarded with a kind of secret compassion; yet these people have no game laws for the remoter parts of the kingdom; the game is only preserved in a few places for the King, and is free in most places else. In England the prohibition is general; and the peasant has not a right to what even slaves, as he is taught to call them, are found to possess."

and endeavoring, on her restoration to health, to put her in a virtuous way of living.'

"Here, while the courtier glitters in brocade,

There the pale artist plies the sickly trade;

Here, while the proud their long-drawn pomps display,
There the black gibbet glooms beside the way.

The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign,
Here, richly deckt, admits the gorgeous train ;
Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square,
The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare.
Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy!

Sure these denote one universal joy!

Are these thy serious thoughts ?-Ah, turn thine eyes
Where the poor houseless, shivering female lies.
She once, perhaps, in village plenty blest,
Has wept at tales of innocence distrest;
Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn;
Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,

Near her betrayer's door she lays her head,

And pinch'd with cold, and shrinking from the shower,
With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour

When idly first, ambitious of the town,

She left her wheel, and robes of country brown."

Beautifully is it said by Mr. Campbell that "fiction in poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and enchanted resemblance; and this ideal beauty of nature has seldom been united with so much sober fidelity as in the groups and scenery of the Deserted Village." It is to be added that everything in it is English, the feeling, incidents, descriptions, and allusions; and that this consideration may save us needless trouble in seeking to identify sweet Auburn (a name he obtained from Langton) with Lissoy. Scenes of the poet's youth had doubtless risen in his memory as he wrote, mingling with, and taking altered hue from, later experiences; thoughts of those early days could scarcely have been absent from the wish for a quiet close to the struggles and toil of his mature life, and very possibly, nay almost certainly, when the dream of such a retire

1 Boswell, viii. 323–324.