We should not censure artists and writers for their attachment to their favourite excellence.  Who but an artist can value the ceaseless inquietudes of arduous perfection; can trace the remote possibilities combined in a close union; the happy arrangement and the novel variation?  He not only is affected by the performance like the man of taste, but is influenced by a peculiar sensation; for while he contemplates the apparent beauties, he traces in his own mind those invisible processes by which the final beauty was accomplished.  Hence arises that species of comparative criticism which one great author usually makes of his own manner with that of another great writer, and which so often causes him to be stigmatised with the most unreasonable vanity.

The character of GOLDSMITH, so underrated in his own day, exemplifies this principle in the literary character.  That pleasing writer, without any perversion of intellect or inflation of vanity, might have contrasted his powers with those of JOHNSON, and might, according to his own ideas, have considered himself as not inferior to his more celebrated and learned rival.

Goldsmith might have preferred the felicity of his own genius, which like a native stream flowed from a natural source, to the elaborate powers of Johnson, which in some respects may be compared to those artificial waters which throw their sparkling currents in the air, to fall into marble basins.  He might have considered that he had embellished philosophy with poetical elegance; and have preferred the paintings of his descriptions, to the terse versification and the pointed sentences of Johnson.  He might have been more pleased with the faithful representations of English manners in his “Vicar of Wakefield,” than with the borrowed grandeur and the exotic fancy of the Oriental Rasselas.  He might have believed, what many excellent critics have believed, that in this age comedy requires more genius than tragedy; and with his audience he might have infinitely more esteemed his own original humour, than Johnson’s rhetorical declamation.  He might have thought, that with inferior literature he displayed superior genius, and with less profundity more gaiety.  He might have considered that the facility and vivacity of his pleasing compositions were preferable to that art, that habitual pomp, and that ostentatious eloquence, which prevail in the operose labours of Johnson.  No one might be more sensible than himself, that he, according to the happy expression of Johnson (when his rival was in his grave), “tetigit et ornavit.”  Goldsmith, therefore, without any singular vanity, might have concluded, from his own reasonings, that he was not an inferior writer to Johnson:  all this not having been considered, he has come down to posterity as the vainest and the most jealous of writers; he whose dispositions were the most inoffensive, whose benevolence was the most extensive, and whose amiableness of heart has been concealed by its artlessness, and passed over in the sarcasms and sneers of a more eloquent rival, and his submissive partisans.