It is almost with a feeling of awe that I enter upon my wet-day studies the name of Oliver Goldsmith:  I love so much his tender story of the good Vicar; I love so much his poems.  The world is accustomed to regard that little novel, which Dr. Johnson bargained away for sixty guineas, as a rural tale:  it is so quiet; it is so simple; its atmosphere is altogether so redolent of the country.  And yet all, save some few critical readers, will be surprised to learn that there is not a picture of natural scenery in the book of any length; and wherever an allusion of the kind appears, it does not bear the impress of a mind familiar with the country, and practically at home there.  The Doctor used to go out upon the Edgeware road,—­not for his love of trees, but to escape noise and duns.  Yet we overlook literalness, charmed as we are by the development of his characters and by the sweet burden of his story.  The statement may seem extraordinary, but I could transcribe every rural, out-of-door scene in the “Vicar of Wakefield” upon a single half-page of foolscap.  Of the first home of the Vicar we have only this account:—­“We had an elegant house, situated in a fine country and a good neighborhood.”  Of his second home there is this more full description:—­“Our little habitation was situated at the foot of a sloping hill, sheltered with a beautiful underwood behind, and a prattling river before:  on one side a meadow, on the other a green.  My farm consisted of about twenty acres of excellent land, having given a hundred pounds for my predecessor’s good-will.  Nothing could exceed the neatness of my little inclosures:  the elms and hedge-rows appearing with inexpressible beauty.  My house consisted of but one story, and was covered with thatch, which gave it an air of great snugness.”  It is quite certain that an author familiar with the country, and with a memory stocked with a multitude of kindred scenes, would have given a more determinate outline to this picture.  But whether he would have given to his definite outline the fascination that belongs to the vagueness of Goldsmith, is wholly another question.

Again, in the sixth chapter, Mr. Burchell is called upon to assist the Vicar and his family in “saving an after-growth of hay.”  “Our labors,” he says, “went on lightly; we turned the swath to the wind.”  It is plain that Goldsmith never saved much hay; turning a swath to the wind may be a good way of making it, but it is a slow way of gathering it.  In the eighth chapter of this charming story, the Doctor says,—­“Our family dined in the field, and we sat, or rather reclined, round a temperate repast, our cloth spread upon the hay.  To heighten our satisfaction, the blackbirds answered each other from opposite hedges, the familiar redbreast came and pecked the crumbs from our hands, and every sound seemed but the echo of tranquillity.”  This is very fascinating; but it is the veriest romanticism of country-life.  Such sensible girls as Olivia and Sophia would, I am quite sure, never have spread the dinner-cloth upon hay, which would most surely have set all the gravy aflow, if the platters had not been fairly overturned; and as for the redbreasts, (with that rollicking boy Moses in my mind,) I think they must have been terribly tame birds.