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their red top-knots, each holding an orange? But Olivia Et. 38. Primrose! who, to her mother's knowledge, has a great deal to say upon every subject, and is very well skilled in controversy; who has read Thwackum and Square's disputes in Tom Jones, the argument of man Friday and his master in Robinson Crusoe, and the dialogues in Religious Courtship; -is it not somehow quite as much in character with the flighty vivacity of this ambitious little Livy, that she should wish to be drawn as an Amazon sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green joseph richly laced with gold, a whip in her hand, and the young squire as Alexander the Great lying captive at her feet; as it certainly suits the more sober simplicity and prudent good sense of her sister Sophy, to figure in the same composition as a shepherdess, with as many sheep as the painter can put in for nothing? Mrs. Deborah Primrose triumphing in her lamb's-wool and gooseberry-wine, and claiming to be represented as the Mother of Love with plenty of diamonds in her hair and stomacher, is at first a little startling: but it admits of an excellent introduction of honest old Dick and chubby little Bill, by way of Cupids; and to what conceivable creature so much in need as Venus of conversion to monogamy, could the Vicar "in his gown and band " have presented his books on the Whistonian controversy ? There remains only Moses to complete the master-piece; and is not his hat and white feather typical of both his arguments and his bargains, his sale of Dobbin the colt and his purchase of the gross of green spectacles? The simple, credulous, generous, inoffensive family habits, are common to all; but in each a separate identity is yet as broadly marked, as in the Amazon, the Venus, or the Shepherdess, of the immortal family picture.

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Still, from all that touches and diverts us in these harmless vanities of the delightful group, we return to the primal Et. 38. source of what has given this glorious little story its unequalled popularity. It is not that we enjoy a secret charm of assumed superiority over the credulity and simplicity of almost every actor in it, but that the better secret is laid open to us of the real superiority of such credulous ways over much of what the world mistakes for its shrewdest wisdom.* It is not simply that a happy fireside is depicted there, but that it is one over which calamity and sorrow can only cast the most temporary shade. In his deepest distress, the Vicar has but to remember how much kinder Heaven is to us than we are to ourselves, and how few are the misfortunes of nature's making, to recover his cheerful patience. There never was a book in which indulgence and charity made virtue look so lustrous. Nobody is straightlaced if we except Miss Carolina Wilelmina Amelia Skeggs, whose pretensions are summed up in Burchell's noble monosyllable. "Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but where is that to be found?" Fudge." When worldly reverses visit the good Doctor Primrose, they are of less account than the equanimity they cannot deprive him of; than the belief in good to which they only give wider scope; than the happiness which even in its worldliest sense they ultimately strengthen, by enlarged activity, and increased necessity for labour. It is only when struck through the sides of his children, that for an instant his faith gives way. Most lovely is the pathos of that scene;

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...

"I think, from my own experience," says the sharp Mr. Jenkinson, "that the "knowing one is the silliest fellow under the sun. I used often to laugh at 66 your honest simple neighbour Flamborough, and one way or another generally "cheated him once a year. Yet still the honest man went forward without sus"picion, and grew rich, while I still continued tricksy and cunning, and was poor "without the consolation of being honest." Chap. xxvi.

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Æt. 38.

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so briefly and beautifully told. The little family at night are gathered round a charming fire, telling stories of the past, laying schemes for the future, and listening to Moses's thoughtful opinion of matters and things in general, to the effect that all things, in his judgment, go on very well, and that he has just been thinking, when sister Livy is married to Farmer Williams they'll get the loan of his cyder press and brewing-tubs for nothing. The best gooseberry-wine has been this night much in request. "Let us have one "bottle more, Deborah, my life," says the Vicar; “and "Moses, give us a good song... But where is my darling "Olivia?" Little Dick comes running in. "O pappa, pappa, she is gone from us, she is gone from us, my sister Livy is gone from us for ever!" "Gone, child!" "Yes, "she is gone off with two gentlemen in a post-chaise, and one of them kissed her, and said he would die for her; "and she cried very much, and was for coming back; but " he persuaded her again, and she went into the chaise, and said, O what will my poor pappa do when he knows I am "undone!" "Now then, my children, go and be miserable; "for we shall never enjoy one hour more;" and the old man, struck to the heart, cannot help cursing the seducer. But Moses is mindful of happier teaching, and with a loving simplicity rebukes his father. . . " You should be my mother's "comforter, sir, and you increase her pain... You should

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not have curst him, villain as he is." " I did not curse him, "child, did I ?" "Indeed, sir, you did; you curst him "twice." "Then may Heaven forgive me and him if I did." Charity resumes its place in his heart; with forgiveness, happiness half visits him again; by kindly patience, even Deborah's reproaches are subdued and stayed; he takes back with most affecting tenderness his penitent child; and

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the voices of all his children are heard once more in their simple concert on the honey-suckle bank. We feel that it Et. 38. is better than cursing; and are even content that the rascally young squire should have time and hope for a sort of shabby repentance, and be allowed the intermediate comfort (it seems after all, one hardly knows why or wherefore, the most appropriate thing he can do) of “blowing the "French horn." Mr. Abraham Adams has infinite claims. on respect and love, nor ever to be forgotten are his groans over Wilson's worldly narrative, his sermon on vanity, his manuscript Eschylus, his noble independence to Lady Booby, and his grand rebuke to Peter Pounce: but he is put to no such trial as this which has been illustrated here, and which sets before us, with such blended grandeur, simplicity, and pathos, the Christian heroism of the loving father, and forgiving ambassador of God to man.

It was not an age of particular earnestness, this Hume and Walpole age: but no one can be in earnest himself without in some degree affecting others. "I remember a

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passage in the Vicar of Wakefield," said Johnson, a few years after its author's death, "which Goldsmith was after"wards fool enough to expunge. I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing.”* The words were little, since the

* vii. 247. Hereupon Boswell remarked that that was a fine passage. "Yes, sir: there was another fine passage too, which he struck out: 'When I "was a young man, being anxious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually "starting new propositions. But I soon gave this over; for I found that 666 generally what was new was false."" Substantially, however, the sentiment is left, though the particular expression is removed. It is where George Primrose describes his Grub-street career : "Finding that the best things remained to be "said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new. . "The jewels of truth have been so often imported by others, that nothing was left " for me to import but some splendid things that at a distance looked every bit as "well." I may add (as another instance of what I have frequent occasion to remark as to the many various and doubtful forms in which stories about Johnson and Goldsmith are apt to appear, when once we lose sight of the trustworthy Boswell)

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Et. 38.

feeling was retained; for the very basis of the little tale was a sincerity and zeal for many things. This indeed it was, which, while all the world were admiring it for its mirth and sweetness, its bright and happy pictures, its simultaneous movement of the springs of laughter and tears, gave it a rarer value to a more select audience, and connected it with not the least memorable anecdote of modern literary history. It had been published little more than four years, when two Germans whose names became afterwards world-famous, one a student at that time in his twentieth, the other a graduate in his twenty-fifth year, met in the city of Strasburg. The younger, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, a law-scholar of the University with a passion for literature, sought knowledge from the elder, Johann Gottfried Herder, for the course on which he was moved to enter. Herder, a severe and masterly though somewhat cynical critic, laughed at the likings of the young aspirant, and roused him to other aspiration. Producing a German translation of the Vicar of Wakefield, he read it out aloud to Goethe in a manner which was peculiar to him; and, as the incidents of the little story came forth in his serious simple voice, in one unmoved unaltering tone ("just as if nothing of it was present before "him, but all was only historical; as if the shadows of this poetical creation did not affect him in a life-like manner, "but only glided gently by "), a new ideal of letters and of life arose in the mind of the listener. Years passed on; and while that younger student raised up and re-established the literature of his country, and came at last, in his prime

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the following item from Dr. Burney's recollections. "Johnson told Dr. Burney, "that Goldsmith said, when he first began to write, he determined to commit to paper nothing but what was new; but he afterwards found that what was new "was generally false, and from that time was no longer solicitous about novelty." This is obviously a mere confused recollection of what is correctly told by Boswell.