Akenside had in him the materials of poetry, but he was hardly a great poet.  He improved his Pleasures of the Imagination in the subsequent editions, by pruning away a great many redundances of style and ornament.  Armstrong is better, though he has not chosen a very exhilarating subject—­The Art of Preserving Health.  Churchill’s Satires on the Scotch, and Characters of the Players, are as good as the subjects deserved—­they are strong, coarse, and full of an air of hardened assurance.  I ought not to pass over without mention Green’s Poem on the Spleen, or Dyer’s Grongar Hill.

The principal name of the period we are now come to is that of Goldsmith, than which few names stand higher or fairer in the annals of modern literature.  One should have his own pen to describe him as he ought to be described—­amiable, various, and bland, with careless inimitable grace touching on every kind of excellence—­with manners unstudied, but a gentle heart—­performing miracles of skill from pure happiness of nature, and whose greatest fault was ignorance of his own worth.  As a poet, he is the most flowing and elegant of our versifiers since Pope, with traits of artless nature which Pope had not, and with a peculiar felicity in his turns upon words, which he constantly repeated with delightful effect:  such as—­

“------His lot, though small,
He sees that little lot, the lot of all.”

* * * * *

      “And turn’d and look’d, and turn’d to look again.”

As a novelist, his Vicar of Wakefield has charmed all Europe.  What reader is there in the civilised world, who is not the better for the story of the washes which the worthy Dr. Primrose demolished so deliberately with the poker—­for the knowledge of the guinea which the Miss Primroses kept unchanged in their pockets—­the adventure of the picture of the Vicar’s family, which could not be got into the house—­ and that of the Flamborough family, all painted with oranges in their hands—­or for the story of the case of shagreen spectacles and the cosmogony?

As a comic writer, his Tony Lumpkin draws forth new powers from Mr. Liston’s face.  That alone is praise enough for it.  Poor Goldsmith! how happy he has made others! how unhappy he was in himself!  He never had the pleasure of reading his own works!  He had only the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and the consolation of being harassed to death with his own!  He is the most amusing and interesting person, in one of the most amusing and interesting books in the world, Boswell’s Life of Johnson.  His peach-coloured coat shall always bloom in Boswell’s writings, and his fame survive in his own!—­ His genius was a mixture of originality and imitation:  he could do nothing without some model before him, and he could copy nothing that he did not adorn with the graces of his own mind.  Almost all the latter part of the Vicar of Wakefield, and a great deal of the former, is taken from Joseph Andrews; but the circumstances I have mentioned above are not.