Page:The English humourists of the eighteenth century. A series of lectures, delivered in England, Scotland, and the United States of America (IA englishhumourist00thacrich).pdf/307

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"Jeté sur cette boule,
Laid, chétif et souffrant;
Etouffé dans la foule,
Faute d'être assez grand;

"Une plainte touchante
De ma bouche sortit;
Le bon Dieu me dit: Chante,
Chante, pauvre petit!

"Chauter, ou je m'abuse,
Est ma tâche ici bas.
Tous ceux qu'ainsi j'amuse,
Ne m'aimcront ils pas?"

In those charming lines of Béranger, one may fancy described the career, the sufferings, the genius, the gentle nature of Goldsmith, and the esteem in which we hold him. Who, of the millions whom he has amused, doesn't love him? To be the most beloved of English writers, what a title that is for a man!^[1] 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

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1. "He was a friend to virtue, and in his most playful pages never forgets what is due to it. A gentleness, delicacy, and purity of feeling distinguishes whatever he wrote, and bears a correspondence to the generosity of a disposition which knew no bounds but his last guinea. . . . . . .
   "The admirable ease and grace of the narrative, as well as the pleasing truth with which the principal characters are designed, make the 'Vicar of Wakefield' one of the most delicious morsels of fictitious composition on which the human mind was ever employed.
   . . . . "We read the 'Vicar of Wakefield' in youth and in age—we return to it again and again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature."—Sir Walter Scott.