Oliver Goldsmith: Commentary & Quotations

Commentary

[ See the life of Oliver Goldsmith by J. H. Plumb - online; accessed 08.03.2011 ]

Samuel Johnson: According to Boswell Johnson said that Goldsmith ‘seldom comes where he is not more ignorant than anyone else.’ [Var. ‘never in company where there was anyone more ignorant than himself.’] Johnson also said that ‘[n]o man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, nor more wise when he had’, while David Garrick famously remarked of Goldsmith: ‘He wrote like an Angel, but talked like poor Poll.’

James Hardiman, “Memoir of Carolan”, in Irish Minstrelsy (1831), calls Goldsmith’s article on Carolan a ‘trifling Essay’ [see rep. edn. IUP 1971, Vol. 1, p.lxiii].

Joshua Reynolds, ‘No man’s company was so eagerly sought after, for in his company the ignorant and illiterate were not only easy and free from any mortifying restraint, but even their vanity was gratified to find so admirable a writer so much upon a level, or inferior to themselves, in the arts of conversation.’

W. M. Thackeray, The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853): ‘Who, of the millions whom he has amused, does not love him? To be the most beloved of English writers, what a title that is for a man! A wild youth wayward but full of tenderness and affection, quits the country village where his boyhood has been passed in happy musing, in idle shelter, in fond longing to see the great world out of doors, and achieve name and fortune - and after years of dire struggle, and neglect, and poverty, his heart turning back fondly to his native place, as it had longed eager]y for change when sheltered there, he writes a book and a poem, full of the recollections and feelings of home - he paints the friends and scenes of his youth, and peoples Auburn and Wakefield with remembrances of Lissoy. Wander he must, but he carries away a home-relic with him, and dies with it on his breast. His nature is truant, in repose it longs for change: as on the journey it looks back for friends and quiet. He passes to-day in building an air-castle for to-morrow, or in writing yesterday’s elegy; and he would fly away this hour, but that a cage of necessity keeps him. What is the charm of his verse, of his style and humour? His sweet regrets, his delicate compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the weakness which he owns? Your love for him is half pity. You come hot and tired from the day’s battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could harm the kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon - save the harp on which he plays to you, and with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the captains in the tents, or the soldiers round the fire, or the women and children in the villages, at whose porches he stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty.’ (Quoted in biog. essay, subscribed C. W. [Charles Welch], in Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature, 1904, vol. IV, p.1301; note that Welsh is the author of a work on John Newbury, whom he defends rather irrelevantly in his biog. introduction to Oliver Goldsmith in the same anthology.)

W. M. Thackeray, ‘[G]entle, whimsical, incorrigible’; ‘His sweet regrets, his delicate compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the weakness which he owns? Your love for him is half pity. You come hot and tired from the day’s battle and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could harm the kind vagrant harper? Who did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon - save the harp on which he plays to you [...] his simple songs of love and beauty.’ (English Humourists; quoted in Frank O’Connor, Book of Ireland, 1979, p.180-183.)

Lord Macaulay [Thos. B. Macaulay] objected against The Deserted Village that, besides contradicting the political economists, it is made up of incongruous parts, a mixture between ‘a hamlet in Kent’ and ‘an ejectment in Munster’, which ‘belong to two different countries, and to two different stages in the progress of society.’

Further: ‘The village in its happy days is a true English village [...] The village in decay is an Irish village. By joining these two he has produced something which never was and never will be seen in any part of the world.’ Also’ ‘He knew nothing accurately, his reading had been desultory; nor had he meditated on what he had read [...] There have been many greater writers, but perhaps no writer was ever so uniformly agreeable. His style always easy and pure, and on the proper occasions, pointed and energetic [with] an occasional tinge of amiable sadness. About everything he wrote ... there was a certain natural grave and decorum, hardly to be expected from a man a great part of whose life had been spent among thieves and beggars and streetwalkers and merryandrews.’

Further: ‘Straight veracity was never one of his virtues; squalid distress and squalid dissipation.’ (Quoted [in part] in John Montague, ‘The Sentimental Prophecy: A Study of The Deserted Village’, in The Cave and Other Essays, Dublin: Lilliput Press 1989, p.74.)

Note: Declan Kiberd writes: ‘One could in fact reverse Macaulay’s reading, for when the speaker moves his evicted, exiled peasantry into a fallen, urban setting, there to witness a profusion in which they cannot share, the backdrop seems remarkably close to Goldsmith’s London.’ (‘Nostalgia as Protest: Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village”’, in Irish Classics, London: Granta 2000, p.117.)

Sir Walter Scott, ‘Lissoy, near Balymahon, where his brother the clergyman had a living, claims the honor [of being Auburn]; a hawthorn has suffered the penalty of poetical celebrity, being cut to pieces by those admirers of the bard who desire to have classical toothpick cases and tobacco stoppers. Much of the supposed locality may be fanciful but it is a pleasing tribute to the poet in the land of his fathers; further, Scott reported, ‘Even when George III was on the throne [Goldsmith] maintained that nothing but the restoration of the banished dynasty could save the country’.

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Mary Frances Cusack, Illustrated History of Ireland, 400-1800 (1868) - Chap. XXXV: ‘Goldsmith’s father was a Protestant clergyman. The poet was born at Pallas, in the county Longford. After a series of adventures, not always to his credit, and sundry wanderings on the Continent in the most extreme poverty, he settled in London. Here he met with considerable success as an author, and enjoyed the society of the first literary men of the day. After the first and inevitable struggles of a poor author, had he possessed even half as much talent for business as capacity for intellectual effort, he might soon have obtained a competency by his pen; but, unfortunately, though he was not seriously addicted to intemperance, his convivial habits, and his attraction for the gaming table, soon scattered his hard-won earnings. His “knack of hoping,” however, helped him through life. He died on the 4th April, 1774. His last words were sad indeed, in whatever sense they may be taken. He was suffering from fever, but his devoted medical attendant, Doctor Norton, perceiving his pulse to be unusually high even under such circumstances, asked, “Is your mind at ease?” “No, it is not,” was Goldsmith’s sad reply; and these were the last words he uttered.’ [Available at Gutenberg Project - online; accessed 30.08.2017; incls. ill. of Goldsmith’s Mill at Auburn.

James Joyce (Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, 19 July 1905): ‘The preface to The Vicar of Wakefield which I read yesterday gave me a moment of doubt as to the excellence of my literary manners. It seems improbable that Hardy, for example, will be spoken of in two hundred years. And yet when I arrived at page two of the narrative I saw the extreme putridity of the social system out of which Goldsmith had reared his flower. Is it possible that, after all, men of letters are no more than entertainers? These discouraging reflections arise perhaps from my surroundings.’ [Goes on to speak of Dubliners and the moral obtuseness of contemporary Irish writing.] (Letters, II, 1966, p.99; Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: Faber 1975, p.70.)

T. S. Eliot, ‘Their [Goldsmith and Johnson’s] kind of originality is as remarkable as any other: indeed, to be original with the minimum of alteration is sometimes more distinguished than to be original with the maximum of alteration.’ (Quoted in The Art of Oliver Goldmith, London: Vision Press 1982, p.13.)

Allardyce Nicoll, British Drama: An Historical Survey from the Beginnings to the Present Time (London: George Harrap 1925; 5th rev. edn. 1962) [of Arthur Murphy and other writers of sentimental comedies]: ‘These comedies, which are merely a few selected from among many others, demonstrate that even the force of prevailing sentimentalism could not completly banish laughter from the playhouses. [...] Oliver Goldsmith first took up the cudgels against the sentimental drama in 1759 when he published his essay on The Present State of Polite Learning, and a decade later, in 1768, his The Good-natured Man directed its barbed shafts at the style of Kelly, Cumberland, and their kin. The audience realized fully the cleverness of the work, although their tastes were too squeamish to permit them to accept without protest the “low” scenes which Goldsmith had introduced into his play. Reading this comedy now, we may perhaps fail to discern wherein exactly Goldsmith departed from the sentimental camp. The concluding lines seem cast entirely in the spirit of the Cumberland [here quotes - as infra.] Certainly this shows that Goldsmith had not completely thrown over the shackles of the style he condemned. and similar passages may be found scattered throughout the play. But when we come to the bailiff scenes in the third act Goldsmith’s sly satire becomes dearly apparent. Says the minion of the law: “Looky, Sir, I have arrested as good men as you in my time-no disparagement of you neither-men that would go forty guineas on a game of cribbage. (...; &c.”; here quotes - as infra.)

Allardyce Nicoll (British Drama ... 1925) - cont.: The Good-natured Man cannot be regarded as a truly successful play; the plot moves creakingly, much of the dialogue is stilted, and there are scenes which show that the author has not grasped fully the requirements of the stage. All these defects, however, are remedied in She Stoops to Conquer; or, The Mistakes of a Night (1773). This comedy, of richly deserved fame, presents a peculiar and interesting fusion of different forces. Clearly it owes part of its inspiration to the school of which Farquhar was the last true representative, but in essence it approaches more nearly to the spirit of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, which, it may be noted, were at that time winning an esteem they had not enjoyed since the early seventeenth century. In effect, the conception of Hardcastle, Tony Lumpkin, Diggory, and the lovers exhibits, not a witty intellectual approach, but the exercise of humour. Here are the sly smiles. the subtle sallies, the humane sensitiveness characteristic of that mood. Basically, Tony Lumpkin is born of Falstaff’s company: he is a fool and yet a wit; for his follies we laugh at him and at the same time we recognize that often the laugh is turned back upon ourselves. Although the setting and the persons of the comedy seem far off from Shakespeare’s Rosalinds and Orlandos, Bottoms and Dogberrys, it [193] seems certain that in penning its scenes Goldsmith was looking back fondly over a period of nearly two hundred years.’

Peter Kavanagh, Irish Theatre (Tralee 1946), Goldsmith criticised the sentimental drama in his Enquiry into the Polite State of Learning in Europe (1759), and carried his attack to the actors themselves so vigorously in one passage that it was cut from succeeding editions for the offence it gave. It now seems mild, ‘Our actors assume all that state off the stage which they do on it; and to use an expression borrowed from the Green Room, every one is up in his part. I am sorry to say it, they seem to forget their real characters; more provoking still, the public seem to forget them too.’ Further: He continued the attack on Aristotelian grounds in the Westminster Magazine (13 Jan 1773), defining ‘sentimental drama’ as that in which ‘the virtues of private life are exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the distresses rather than the faults of mankind made our interest in the piece. [...] the comic part is invading the province of the tragic muse [...] Of this however he is in no way solicitous, as he measures his fame by his profits [...] It is, of all others, the most written. Those abilities that can hammer out a novel, are fully sufficient [...] and there is no doubt but all the ladies will cry, and all the gentlemen applaud.’ (From Essay on the Theatre or a Comparison between the Sentimental and Laughing Comedy.)

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W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; 1984), Oliver Goldsmith, entered College in 1745, in his Present State of Polite Learning (1759), approvd educational methods of Dublin University, in distinguishing between three types of university in Europe, ‘those upon the old scholastic establishment, where the pupils are immured, talk nothing but Latin, and support everyday syllogistical disputations in school-philosophy’, such as Prague, Louvain and Padua, others ‘where pupils are under few restrictions, where all scholastic jargon is banished’, and pupils took their degrees when they chose, like Leiden, Gottingen and Geneva, and a third being a mixture of the two. Goldsmith thought the third type best for rich, and the second type the best for poorer students. In the Life of Parnell, Goldsmith says the TCD entrance exam was harder than at Oxbridge. [50] Also, W. MacDonald, Reminiscences of a Maynooth Professor (London 1925), this writer found Pinnock’s edition of Goldsmith’s histories of Greece and Rome and oasis in his own arid education in the classics at Maynooth.

W. B. Stanford (Ireland and the Classical Tradition, IAP 1976; 1984 - cont.), on classical models, Goldsmith, Horace (narrative poems) [Stanford 93]. Goldsmith received instruction in Classics under Leland at TCD, 1745-50, and afterward made use of Leland’s Philip in his Grecian History. [...] His own Roman History from the Foundation of the City of Rome to the Destruction of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (1769), he describes as ‘a compilation for schools’. Much criticised, it ran to 14 editions up to 1800, as well as many translations. His Grecian History from the Earliest Date to the Death of Alexander (1744) was completed at his death by another author who condensed the ensuing sixteen hundred years down to the Fall of Constantinople in a chapter of ten pages. The work went into 20 editions in fifty years [150] Note, It was in connection with his praise of Goldsmith as a historian to Boswell that Johnson cited the ‘old tutor’s’ advice, ‘Read your composition, and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.’ Of Goldsmith, he said, ‘it is the excellence of a writer to put into his book as much as his book will hold. Goldsmith has done this in his history ... Goldsmith tell you shortly all you want to know [...] he has the art of compiling, and of saying everything he has to say in a pleasing manner.’ Johnson opens the dialogue with this remark, ‘What Goldsmith comically says of himself is very true - he always gets the better when he argues alone; meaning, that he is master of a subject in his study, and can write well upon it; but when he comes into company, grows confused, and unable to talk [...] as a comic writer, or as an historian, he stand in the first class.’ (Life of Johnson, chap. xxvii.) [150-51] Bibl, A. Friedman, ed., Oliver Goldsmith, Works (Oxford 1966); his translations from Latin, in vol. iv, 363. [notes, 179.]

Seamus Deane, ‘Oliver Goldsmith’, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature (Derry: Filed Day 1991), Vol. 1, pp.658-61: (on ‘Goldsmith’s essay ‘The Revolution of Low Life’), ‘[He] saw only that the new wealth from the Empire had increased the gap between the very rich and the very poor and had led to an increasingly rapid proliferation of feuds and fashions, which Goldsmith deplored as a symptom of profound instability.’ (p.659); further, ‘Like Burke, Goldsmith believed in the importance of affection in the preservation of social systems and, like many before and since, thought that the  “new” systems of selfishness were leading to economic developments at the expense of moral decay.’(idem); ‘Goldsmith was aware that the contrast between England and Ireland was one of the most painful examples of the discrepancy between rich and poor which modern Europe had to offer. He inclined to see this as deriving from the different national characteristics of the two races [...] His native land he viewed almost with the eyes of a foreigner, seeing it as attractive and cultured in ways not usually noticed or accepted by English commentators [... T]here is a degree of blandness in Goldsmith’s attitude towards Ireland, which disguises his success in effacing from his occasional writings on the country [...] the drastic effects of English misrule there. This is not the Ireland of the penal laws and of occasional famines, agrarian disturbances and judicial murders. It is an idyll, comparable to his view of Irish society of which The Deserted Village is the appealing remnant. It is therefore not surprising that Victorian commentators on Goldsmith, and later Yeats and many other Irish writers were able to use this pastoral version of Ireland to support the notion of the Anglo-Irish honeymoon which had intervened between the seventeenth-century wars and the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century [...] Goldsmith was anxious to gain support for the idea that the form of liberty gained in England in 1688 was a commodity that had been exported to Ireland. Its sluggish reception [...] is, he claims, a consequence of the Irish national character [...] his rather naive Enlightenment faith [is] British not Irish in origin.’ [… &c.]

Richard Cargill Cole, Irish Booksellers and English Writers, 1740-1800 (London: Mansell Pub.; NJ: Atlantic Heights), ‘Eighteenth-century reprints of Oliver Goldsmith’s works appear in thirty-seven institutional libaries almost entirely in the United States with 153 copies’ (p.xi); remarks in the context of the statement that ‘the Irish book trade in the eighteenth century was essentially a reprint industry’ (p.x); further, ‘The grievances of another Irish writer in exile, [Goldsmith], aginat the booksellers of his native land will be discuss in chapter six on Irish reprints of [his] works.’ (p.9.); bibl. Katherine C. Balderston, The History and Sources of Percy’s Memoirs of Goldsmith (Cambridge UP 1926); Richard Harp, ed., Thomas Percy’s Life of Dr. Oliver Goldsmith (Salzburg: Institüt f[ü]r Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg 1976) [n. 243].

Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael (1986), writes of Goldsmith that in ‘Descriptions of the manners and customs of the native Irish’ in the Weekly Magazine (1759), under the subtitle of ‘a letter from an English gentleman’, prefers the native character to that of the ‘Protestants’ who share in the traditional shortcomings of the Irish without having their ‘national virtues to recompense these defects’; includes a tale of hospitality in a humble cottage, and pretends to be agreeably surprised by the chastity of the comely daughter. Since Goldsmith never returned to Ireland after 1952, the narrative is self-evidently fictitious. Further, his review of a work called ‘Remains of the mythology and poetry of the Celtes [sic], particularily in Scandanavia’, in Works, Vol. 1, 5ff., cited in Leerssen, 1986, ftn. 414 [p.485].

Andrew Swarbrick, The Art of Oliver Goldmith, London: Vision Press 1982), writes: ‘The originality of Goldsmith consists in his having the old and the new in such just proportion that there is no conflict: he is Augustan and also sentimental and rural without discordance.’ (p.13).

John Montague, ‘The Sentimental Prophecy, A Study of The Deserted Village’ , in Dolmen Miscellany of Irish Writing, eds., J. Montague and T. Kinsella (1962), p.62-80, writes: ‘The rural virtues for Goldsmith, as for the agrarians in Ireland or America, are actually rooted virtures of the good society.’ (Do., rep. in The Cave and Other Essays, Lilliput 1989, p.74.)

Geoffrey Tyack, reviewing Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (Times Literary Supplement, 11 Nov. 1994) offers remarks: ‘Everitt [sic] does not quote Poet Laureate William Whitehead, who, in a poem entitled ‘The Removal of the Village of Nuneham’ (which Mavis Batey has shown to be the original of Goldsmith’s ‘sweet Auburn’), wrote that, “The careful matrons of the plain / Had left their cots without a sigh, / Well pleased to house their little train / In happier mansions warm and dry”. For all the possible bias of Whitehead, who was a frequent visitor at the “big house”, the cottages were well built, pleasing to the eye, and, what is more, they still survive as bijou residences alonside the Oxford-Reading road[ ...] as Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy pointed out in their excellent Property and Landscape (1987), many eighteenth-century aristocratic landscapes were created out of ancient parkland, and some “deserted villages” were already depopulated before the local squire administered the final coup de grâce.’

Kevin Myers (Irish Times, 20 May 1995), reviews a production of She Stoops to Conquer (‘the most brilliantly funny theatrical production Dublin has seen for years’), and remarks that the song originally written for the part played by Rosaleen Linehan was omitted from the first production since Mrs Bulkeley couldn’t sing, and has never been replaced since; as follows, ‘Ah me! When shall I marry me?/He, fond youth, that could carry me, / Offers to love but means to deceive me’; sung to now-lost air of of ‘The Humours of Balamagairy’, acc. Boswell; Myers further characterises Goldsmith as a ‘citizen of the Middle Kingdom of Anglo-Irish writing’, and calls to evidence the setting of the play: ‘And is it not a curiously Irish phenomenon, that one’s host could be so gregarious and accommodating as to be confusable with an importunate innkeeper? Is it possible that an English squire could relinquish so much propriety and authority in his own house as to permit the impresson of innery?’

Tom Davis, Introduction, She Stoops to Conquer [Mermaid Edn.] (London: A & C Black 1996), ‘The plot is deeply concerned with the concept of class, and examines it by a whole series of […] reversals. In this distorted pastoral world, no one know which class they belong to.’ (p.xx); ‘What Goldsmith wanted from comedy was that it should be “perfectly satirical yet perfectly good-natured” at the same time. … The satire beneath the kindliness is felt but not perceived: the audience is too busy laughing.’ (p.xx; quoted in by C. Canniffe, course essay, MA Dip., UUC, 1997.)

Declan Kiberd, ‘Nostalgia as Protest: Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village”’, in Irish Classics, London: Granta 2000): ‘The knockabout treatrment of the mother figure Mrs Hardcaslte at the end of She Stoops to Conquer may have its source in the desire for revenge by a buffoon son, who is in the play but the half-son of the house. Perhaps Goldsmith sensed that his pattern of learned helplessness derived from his mother’s early cosseting. In the play Tony Lumpkin intuits something almost erotic in his mother’s drive towards him: the device of a mother who hides rom her son the knowledge that he has come of age suggests that he is being held in a posture of dependency against his real interests. Goldsmith may have feared a mother-love that was suffocating, denying him his youthful autonomy. / The family romance in Ireland often enables initial growth, but then prevents any further development within that structure. [...;’ p.100.) ‘Yet the family remained for him the ideal unit by whcih to measure the state of socier, being itself a haven in a heartless world. Goldsmith’s exile was more from the family than from any ideaof “Ireland” (for him that term was but a code word for family life). Over a century later, G. K. Chesterton would remark on the intensity of family life among Irish people, who could give their consent to no larger institution, whether the colonial state or the established church (Autobiography, NY 1936, p.136). Goldsmith understood early the subversive quality of hte family, whose members within the secrecy of the home’s four walls might enter into a conspiracy against the codes of a new commercial order. The more remote and secretive such people might be, the more subversive, finding in the family a unit of resistance. [Exiled from the intaimacies of family life, Goldsmith felt himself an outsider looking longingly in. So he idolised the family, much as de Valera would in the twentieth century and for similar reasons: his early uncertainties about his mother led him to idealise as an absolute moral value the parental world he lad “lost”. / Having gone, Goldsmith discovered that nobody really emigrates: people simply bring their native landscape and personal baggage with them wherever they go. [...]’ (pp.110.) Kiberd quotes: ‘As they had almost all the conveniences of life within themselves, they seldom visited towns or cities in search of superfluity. Remote from the polite, they still retained the primaeval simplicity of manners; and frugal by habit, they scare knew that temperance was a virtue. They wrought with cheerfulness on days of labour, but observed festivals as intervals of idleness and pleasure.’ (The Vicar of Wakefield; quoted in Boris Ford, “Oliver Goldsmith”, Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. 4, 1968, p.380.)

Arthur Freeman, ‘New Goldsmith?’, in Times Literary Supplement (15 Dec. 2006), pp.15-16. ‘Another “French Novel” translation is fully documented, however, through an autograph receipt undated but signed “Oliver Goldsmith”, for ten guineas paid him by the publisher Ralph Griffiths, “for the translation of a book entituled Memoirs of My Lady W” - and this supposedly lost title has long puzzled Goldsmith’s biographers and critics. (The original receipt, known to most scholars from its transcript and publication by Prior in 1837, is now in the Osborn Collection at Yale.) Prior thought it referred to the “French Novel” of 1758, but Katharine C. Balderston ( Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, 1928) pointed out the impossibility of that, since the translation was listed among “New Books” in the Gentleman’s Magazine for January 1761 as “Memoirs of Lady B. from the F[rench] Griffiths”, and the original work, Mémoires de Miledi B., by Charlotte-Marie Anne Charhonnière de la Guesnerie, was not published until 1760. No trace of the English version, paid for by the notoriously tight-fisted Griffiths and advertised as forthcoming (no price is mentioned), has hitherto been identified. Ralph M. Wardle (Oliver Goldsmith, 1957) gave it up for lost, as did the Goldsmith editor Arthur B. Friedman, in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: “no copy known”. Freeman goes on to identify the lost translation with Memoirs of Lady Harriot Butler ... M.DCC.LXI [1761].’; see full text, infra.)

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Quotations

Available on Internet ....

“The Traveller” (I): ‘Have we not seen at pleasure’s lordly call / The smiling long-frequented village fall?’; ‘Where’er I roam, whatever realms I see, / My heart untravell’d fondly turns to thee; / Still to my brother turns, with ceaseless pain, / And drags at each remove a lengthened chain’; ‘But where to find the happiest spot below, / Who can direct, whrn all pretend to know? / The shudd’ring tenant of the frigid zone / Boldly proclaims the happiest spot his own, / Extols the treasures of his stormy seas,.and his long nights of revelry and ease; / The naked Negro, panting at the lin, / Boats of his golden sands and palmy wine, / baks in the glare, or stems the tepid wave, / And thanks his Gods for all the good they gave. / Such is the patriot’s boast where’er we roam, / His first best country every is at home.’ (Commencement of The Traveller); Also, ‘Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed, / Who long was a bookseller’s hack; / he led such a damnable life in this word,- / I don’t think he’ll want to come back.’ (J. McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature, 1904, Vol. 4, p.1383].

“The Traveller” (2): ‘Eternal blessings crown my earliest friend, / And round his dwelling guardian saints attend; / Blest be that spot, where cheerful guests retire / To pause from toil, and trim their evening fire; / Blest that abode, where want and pain repair, / And every stranger finds a ready chair; / Blest be those feasts with simple plenty crown’d, / Where all the ruddy family around / Laugh at the jests and pranks that never fail, / Or sigh with pity at some mournful tale, / Or press the bashful stranger to his food, / And learn the luxury of doing good.’

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The Deserted Village: ‘Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn, / Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn; / Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen, / And Desolation saddens all thy green: / One only master grasps the whole domain, / And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain.’ [l.40]; ‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. / Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; / A breath can make them, as a breath has made: / But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, / When once destroy’d, can never be supplied. [l.56] // ‘A time there was, ere England’s griefs began, / When every rood of ground maintain’d its man; / For him light Labour spread her wholesome store, / Just gave what life required, but gave no more: / His best companions, Innocence and Health; / And his best riches, ignorance of wealth. // But times are alter’d; Trade’s unfeeling train / Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain; / Along the lawn, where scatter’d hamlets rose, / Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose; / And every want to luxury allied, / And every pang that folly pays to pride. / Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom, / Those calm desires that ask’d but little room, / Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene, / Lived in each look, and brighten’d all the green - / These, far departing, seek a kinder shore, / And rural mirth and manners are no more. // Sweet Auburn! parent of the blissful hour, / Thy glades forlorn confess the tyrant’s power / ... [l.76]. [For full text, go to Irish Classics, infra.]

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She Stoops to Conquer (1773): Mr. Hardcastle, ‘I wonder why London cannot keep its own fools at home? In my time the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stage-coach. Its fopperies come down not only as invisible passengers, but in the very basket.’ (Mr. Hardcastle; Act. 1, sc. I, l.8.); Tony Lumpkin, ‘The genteel thing is the genteel thing at any time. If so be that a gentleman bees in a concantation accordingly.’ (Act. I, sc. ii, l.40.); Miss Neville: ‘Prudence once more comes to my relief, and I will obey as it dictates. In the moment of passion, fortune may be despised, but it ever produces a lasting repentance. I’m resolved to apply to Mr. Hardcastle’s compassion and justive for redress.’ (Davis, ed., She Stoops to Conquer, 1996, p.88); (Marlow), ‘It must not be, madam. I have already trifled too long with my heart. My very pride begins to submit to my passion. The disparity of education and fortune, the anger of a parent, and the contempt of my equals, begin to lose their weight; and nothing can restore me to myself, but this painful effort of resolution.’ (ibid., p.89).

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The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Opening: ‘I was ever of the opinion that the honest man, who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this [no]tice, I had scarcely taken orders a year, before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and choose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well.’ ‘I cannot tell whether it were from the number of our penal laws, or the licentiousness of our people, that this country should show more convicts in one year than half the dominions of Europe united.’ (Ibid., the prison scene.) [See full-text copy in RICORSO Library > Irish Classics - via index or as attached.]

“Essay on the Theatre [... &c.]” (1773): ‘Humour at present seems to be departing from the stage, and it will soon happen that our comic players will have nothing left for it but a fine coat and a song.’ (Viz., “Comparison between the Laughing and Sentimental Comedy”; quoted in Thomas Kilroy, op. cit., 1979, idem.)

Carolan (Essay on Turlough O’Carolan): ‘His death was not more remarkable than his life. Homer was never more fond of a glass than he; he would drink whole pints of Usquebaugh, and, as he used to think, without any ill consequence. His intemperance, however, in this respect, at length brought on an incurable disorder, and when just at the pint of death, he called for a cup of his beloved liquor ... and when the bowl was brought him, attempted to drink but could not; wherefore, giving away the bowl he observed with a smile, that it would be hard if two such friends as he and the cup should part at least without kissing; and then expired.’ (q.source.)

Comedy defined: ‘Comedy is defined by Artistotle to be a picture of the Frailties of the lower part of Mankind, to distinguish it from Tragedy, which is an exhibition of the Misfortunes of the Great [...] The principal question therefore is, whether in describig Low or Middle Life, an exhibition of its Follies be not preferable to a detail of its Calamities? Or, in other words, Which deserves the preference? The Weeping Sentimental Comedy, so much in fashion at present, or the Laughing and even Low Comedy, which seems to have been last exhibited by Vanbrugh and Cibber?’ Yet, notwithstanding this weight of authority, and the universal practice of former ages [...] a new species of Dramatic Composition has been introduced under the name of Sentimental Comedy, in which the virtues of Private Life are exhibited, rather than the Vices exposed; and the Distresses, rather than the Faults of Mankind, make our interest in the piece. These Comedies have had of late great success, perhaps from their novelty, and also from their flattering every man in his favourite foible. In these Plays almost all the Characters are good, and exceedingly generous; they are lavish enough of their Tin Money on the Stage, and though they want Humour, have abundance of Sentiment and Feeling. If they happen to have Faults or Foibles, the Spectator is taught not only to pardon, but to applaud them, in consideration of the goodness of their hearts; so that Folly, instead of being ridiculed, is commended, and the Comedy aims at touching our Passions without the power of being truly pathetic: in this manner we are likely to lose one great source of Entertainment on the Stage; for while the Comic Muse is invading the province of the Tragic Muse, he leaves his lovely Sister quite neglected. Of this, however, he is no way solicitous, as he measures his fame by his profits. / But there is one Argument in Favour of Sentimental Comedy which will keep it on the Stage in spite of all that can be said against it. It is, of all others, the most easily written. Those abilities that can hammer out a Novel are fully sufficient for the production of a sentimental Comedy. It is only sufficient to raise the characters a little, to deck out the Hero with a Ribbon, or give the Heroine a Title; then to put an Insipid Dialogue, without Character or Humours into their mouths, give then mighty good hearts, very fine clothes, furnish a new set of Scenes, make a Pathetic Scene or two, with a sprinkling of tender Melancholy Conversation through the whole, and there is no doubt that all the Ladies will cry, and all the Gentlemen applaud.’ (Quoted in O’Leary, 1965, p.206; Works, VI, pp.104-106.)

Early life: ‘When I reflect on the unambitous retirement in which I passed the earlier part of my life in the country I cannot avoid feeling some pain in thinking that those happy days are never to return. In that retreat all nature seemed capable of affording pleasure; I then made no refinements on happiness, but could be pleased with the most awkward efforts of rustic mirth; thought cross-purposes the highest stretch of human wit, and question and commands the most rational amusement for spending the evening. Happy could so charming an illusion still continue! I find that age and knowledge only contribute to sour our dispositions. My present enjoyments may be more refined, but they are infinitely less pleasing. The pleasure Garrick gives can no way compare to that I had received from a country wag, who imitated a Quaker’s sermon. The music of Mattei is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairy-maid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong’s “Last Good Night” or “The Cruelty of Barbara Allen”. (Essay in The Bee, 1958; quoted in A. N. Jeffares, ‘Good-Natured Goldsmith’, in Images of Invention: Essays on Irish Writing, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1996, pp.90-105; p.95.)

Present situation: ‘I suppose you desire to know my present situation. As there is nothing in it at which I should blush, or which mankind could censure, I see no reason for making it a secret. In short, by a very little practice as a physician, and a very little reputation as a poet, I make a shift to live. Nothing is more apt to introduce us to the gates of the Muses than poverty; but it were well if they only left us at the door. The mischief is, they sometimes choose to give us their company at the entertainment; and want, instead of being gentleman-usher, often turns master of ceremonies. /Thus, upon learning I write, no doubt you imagine I starve; and the name of an author naturally reminds you of a garrett. In this particular I do not think proper to undeceive my friends. But whether I eat or starve, live in a first-floor, or four pair of stairs high, I still remember them with ardour; nay, my very country comes in for a share of my affection. Unaccountable fondness for country, this maladie du pays, as the French call it! Unaccountable that he should still have an affection for a place who never, when in it, received above common civility; who never brought [98] any thing out of it except his brogue and his blunders. Surely my affection for it is equally ridiculous with the Scotchman who refused to be cured of the itch, because it made him unco’ thoughtful of his wife and bonny Inverary. / But now to be serious, - let me ask myself what gives me a wish to see Ireland again? The country is a fine one, perhaps? No. There are good company in Ireland? No. The conversation there is generally made up of a smutty toast or a bawdy song; the vivacity supported by some humble cousin, who has just folly enough to earn his dinner Then perhaps there’s more wit and learning among the Irish? Oh, lord, no! There has been more money spent in the encouragement of the Padareen mare there one season, than given in rewards to learned men since the times of Usher. All their productions in learning amount to perhaps, a translation, or a few tracts in divinities and all their productions in wit, to just nothing at all. Why the plague then so fond of Ireland? Then, all at once, - because you, my dear friend, and a few more who are exceptions to the general picture, have a residence there. This it is that gives me all the pangs I feel in separation. I confess I carry this spirit sometimes to the souring [of] the pleasures I at present possess. If I go to the opera where Signora Columba pours out all the mazes of melody, I sit and sigh for Lishoy’s fireside and Johnny Armstrong’s Last Good night,’ from Peggy Golden. If I climb Hampstead Hill, than where Nature never exhibited a more magnificent prospect I confess it fine; but then I had rather be placed on the little mount before Lishoy gate, and there take in - to me the most pleasing horizon in nature.’ (Letter to his brother Henry, 1758; quoted in A. N. Jeffares, op. cit., 1996, pp.97-98.)

Trinity Sizars: ‘Surely pride itself had dictated to the fellows of our colleges the absurd passion of being attended at meals, and on other public occasions by those poor men who, willing to be scholars, come in upon some chariable foundation. It implies a contradiction, for men to be at once learning the liberal arts and at the same time treated as slaves; at once studying freedom and practising servitude.’ (Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, quoted in Jeffares, op. cit., 1996, pp.90-105; p.94; note that Goldsmith was himself a college servant in this style.)

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The Gaiety Theatre (Dublin) opened its doors for the first time in Nov 1871 with a performance of Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to Conquer.

Ill Fares the Land: The book of that title by Tony Judt (NY: Penguin 2010) is an indictment of corporate greed in America, resulting in a revisitation of - in Galbraith’s phrase - private wealth and public squalor. Judt writes: ‘Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them. [...]’ (Extract in New York Times, 17 March 2010- online.) Reviewer Josef Joffe calls Judt’s book an example of the ‘classic fallacy of the liberal-left intelligentsia [...] the “Doctor State Syndrome”’ (review of same in NYT, 2 May 2010 [online: both accessed 11.09.2010].

Portraits: statue in bronze by J. H. Foley, 1861 [var 1864 CAB], at College Green (TCD); also, portrait in oil by Reynolds, of which there is a copy in Nat. Gallery of Ireland. (See Anne Crookshank, ed., Irish Portrait Exhibition [Catalogue] (Ulster Mus. 1965). See also an engraving after Wheatley, 1791, of a moment from Act V, sc. 3 of She Stoops to Conquer (rep. in Brian de Breffny, Ireland: A Cultural Encyclopaedia, London: Thames & Hudson, p.238.)

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