Goldsmith is a romanticist at heart; but he felt the strong classical influences of Johnson and of the earlier school.

After meeting with Johnson, Goldsmith became the object of Boswell's magpie curiosity; and to Boswell's Life of Johnson we are indebted for many of the details of Goldsmith's life,his homeliness, his awkward ways, his drolleries and absurdities, which made him alternately the butt and the wit of the famous Literary Club.

Goldsmith, of course, without any temptation being needed, was the very ideal Micawber of letters, and the result of paying him beforehand was that he had, simply, to be popped into the mill by force, and the copy ground out of him.

I intimated (116) that Oliver Goldsmith was the first author who had a suspicion of the fact that love is not the same everywhere and at all times.

Goldsmith was an excitable Irishman of genius, who tumbled out whatever came uppermost, and revealed the feelings of the moment with utter want of reserve.

Boswell we have seen; after Burke and Boswell, Goldsmith was the most brilliant member of the Johnson circle.

Goldsmith's, he said, would now be the "deserted" village.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), essayist, poet, novelist, playwright, historian, biographer, and editor, was a many-sided genius, who, as Johnson said in his epitaph, left scarcely any kind of writing untouched, and touched none that he did not adorn.

Sir Launcelot Greaves was first printed piecemeal in the British Magazine, or Monthly Repository, a miscellany to which Goldsmith was also a contributor.

Goldsmith was a hopeless dreamer, bound to see everything, as he saw his debts and his gay clothes, in a purely idealistic way.

'Goldsmith is the better for attacks.' JOHNSON.

When this was talked of in Dr. Johnson's company, he said, "Of all men Goldsmith is the most unfit to go out upon such an inquiry; for he is utterly ignorant of such arts as we already possess, and consequently could not know what would be accessions to our present stock of mechanical knowledge.

His old inmates, Levett and Miss Williams, had gone before him; Goldsmith and Garrick and Beauclerk had become memories of the past; and the gloom gathered thickly around him.

"Goldsmith," he added, "was a man who, whatever he wrote, always did it better than any other man could do."

By the way, it is strange that Yorick should incline rather to that which has no form, while Goldsmith is all form, as I myself aspired to be when the worthy Germans had convinced themselves that the peculiarity of true humour is to have no form.