Since its first night on 15 March 1773, Oliver Goldsmith's second play, the comedy She Stoops to Conquer, has appeared in over three hundred different editions and has been produced in the London West End approximately once every three years. Tom Davis, a recent editor, refers to it as "the most popular play outside Shakespeare." Goldsmith's one novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), averaged two printings a year during the nineteenth century, thirty printings being published in France in the period from 1830 to 1870 alone. It "found entry into every castle and every hamlet in Europe," said William Makepeace Thackeray, in his English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1851). But in Goldsmith's own age his fame rested on the reputation of his two major poems, The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770), which were immediately taken to be the best, most representative English poems of their age: "a production...