of interest than ordinary men.  Both were not only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, “saturated with ideas,” but saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary men’s lives; nothing human was alien from them.  Burke’s language is, therefore, always interesting and always appropriate to his thought; it is also on occasion very beautiful.  He had a wonderful command of clear and ringing utterance and could appeal when he liked very powerfully to the sensibilities of his readers.  Rhetoricians are seldom free from occasional extravagance, and Burke fell under the common danger of his kind.  He had his moments of falsity, could heap coarse and outrageous abuse on Warren Hastings, illustrate the horrors of the Revolution by casting a dagger on the floor of the House of Commons, and nourish hatred beyond the bounds of justice or measure.  But these things do not affect his position, nor take from the solid greatness of his work.

Boswell we have seen; after Burke and Boswell, Goldsmith was the most brilliant member of the Johnson circle.  If part of Burke’s genius is referable to his nationality, Goldsmith’s is wholly so.  The beginning and the end of him was Irish; every quality he possessed as a man and as a writer belongs to his race.  He had the Irish carelessness, the Irish generosity, the Irish quick temper, the Irish humour.  This latter gift, displayed constantly in a company which had little knowledge of the peculiar quality of Irish wit and no faculty of sympathy or imagination, is at the bottom of the constant depreciation of him on the part of Boswell and others of his set.  His mock self-importance they thought ill-breeding; his humorous self-depreciation and keen sense of his own ridiculousness, mere lack of dignity and folly.  It is curious to read Boswell and watch how often Goldsmith, without Boswell’s knowing it, got the best of the joke.  In writing he had what we can now recognise as peculiarly Irish gifts.  All our modern writers of light half-farcical comedy are Irish.  Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, is only the first of a series which includes The School for Scandal, The Importance of being Earnest, and You Never can Tell.  And his essays—­particularly those of the Citizen of the World with its Chinese vision of England and English life—­are the first fruit of that Irish detachment, that ability to see “normally” English habits and institutions and foibles which in our own day has given us the prefaces of Mr. Shaw.  As a writer Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate ease which belongs rather to the school of the earlier eighteenth century than to his own day; the enthusiasm of Addison for French literature which he retained gave him a more graceful model than the “Johnsonian” school, to which he professed himself to belong, could afford.

(3)

The eighteenth century novel demands separate treatment, and of the other prose authors the most eminent, Edward Gibbon, belongs to historical rather than to literary studies.  It is time to turn to poetry.