[Illustration:  GOLDSMITH GIVES DR. JOHNSON THE MS. OF THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. From a drawing by B. Westmacott.]

It was not until the last ten years of his life that Goldsmith became famous.  He certainly earned enough then to be free from care, had he but known how to use his money.  His improvidence in giving to beggars and in squandering his earnings on expensive rooms, garments, and dinners, however, kept him always in debt.

One evening he gave away his blankets to a woman who told him a pitiful tale.  The cold was so bitter during the night that he had to open the ticking of his bed and crawl inside.  Although this happened when he was a young man, it was typical of his usual response to appeals for help.  When his landlady had him arrested for failing to pay his rent, he sent for Johnson to come and extricate him.  Johnson asked him if he had nothing that would discharge the debt, and Goldsmith handed him the manuscript of The Vicar of Wakefield.  Johnson reported his action to Boswell, as follows:—­

  “I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon
  return; and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds.”

[Illustration:  CANONBURY TOWER, LONDON, WHERE GOLDSMITH WROTE SOME OF HIS FAMOUS WORK.]

During his last years, Goldsmith sometimes received as much as L800 in twelve months; but the more he earned, the deeper he plunged into debt.  When he died, in 1774, at the age of forty-five, he owed L2000.  He was loved because—­

  “...e’en his failings leaned to virtue’s side.”

His grave by the Temple Church on Fleet Street, London, is each year visited by thousands who feel genuine affection for him in spite of his shortcomings.

Masterpieces.—­His best work consists of two poems, The Traveler and The Deserted Village; a story, The Vicar of Wakefield; and a play,_She Stoops to Conquer_.

The object of The Traveler (1765), a highly polished moral and didactic poem, was to show that happiness is independent of climate, and hence to justify the conclusion:—­

  “Vain, very vain, my weary search to find
  That bliss which only centers in the mind.”

The Deserted Village (1770) also has a didactic aim, for which we care little.  Its finest parts, those which impress us most, were suggested to Goldsmith by his youthful experiences.  We naturally remember the sympathetic portrait of the poet’s father, “the village preacher":—­

  “A man he was to all the country dear
  And passing rich with forty pounds a year.
       * * * * *
  His house was known to all the vagrant train;
  He chid their wanderings but relieved their pain.”

The lines relating to the village schoolmaster are almost as well known as Scripture.  Previous to this time, the eighteenth century had not produced a poem as natural, sincere, and sympathetic in its descriptions and portraits as The Deserted Village.