Oliver Goldsmith, a writer who (as Dr. Johnson said) left no genre untouched, and touched none that he did not adorn, gave us two of the most characteristic poems, the best-loved novel, the most delightful stage comedy, and much of the best periodical writing of his day. His friends, distracted by his clowning and ineptitude, could never quite decide which was greater: their admiration for the writer, or their bemusement at the buffoon. Joshua Reynolds found it necessary to assert that "such a genius could not be a fool." But posterity, spared the spectacle of the genial bumbler, has been less ambivalent. At eighty, Goethe said that The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) had formed him when he was twenty. William Butler Yeats envisioned Goldsmith "sipping at the honey-pot of his mind." For Virginia Woolf, he had "the born writer's gift of being in touch with the thing itself and...