THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. EVERY one is familiar with the Vicar of Wakefield. We read it in youth and in age. We return to it, as Walter Scott has said, again and again; "and we bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature." With its ease of style, its turns of thought so whimsical yet wise, and the humour and wit which sparkle freshly through its narrative, we have all of us profitably amused the idle or the vacant hour; from year to year we have had its tender or mirthful incidents, its forms so homely in their beauty, its pathos and its comedy, given back to us from the canvas of our Wilkies, Newtons, and Stothards, our Leslies, Maclises, and Mulreadys; but not in those graces of style, or even in that home-cherished gallery of familiar faces, can the secret of its extraordinary fascination be said to consist. It lies nearer the heart. A something which has found its way there; which, while it amused, has made us happier; which, gently inweaving itself with our habits of thought, has increased our good humour and charity; which, insensibly it may be, has corrected wilful impatiences of temper, and made the world's daily accidents easier and kinder to us all; somewhat thus should be expressed, I think, the charm of the Vicar of Wakefield. It is our first pure example of the simple domestic novel. Though wide as it was various, and most minutely as well as broadly marked with passion, incident, and character, the field selected by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett for the exercise of their genius and display of their powers, had hardly included this. Nor is it likely that Goldsmith would himself have chosen it, if his leading object had been to write a book. Rather as a refuge from the writing of books was this book undertaken. Simple to very baldness are the materials employed. But he threw into the midst of them his own nature; his actual experience; the suffering, discipline, and sweet emotion, of his chequered life; and so made them a lesson and a delight to all men. Good predominant over evil is briefly the purpose and moral of the little story. It is designed to show us that patience in suffering, that persevering reliance on the providence of God, that quiet labour, cheerful endeavour, and an indulgent forgiveness of the faults and infirmities of others, are the easy and certain means of pleasure in this world, and of turning pain to noble uses. It is designed to show us that the heroism and self-denial needed for the duties of life are not of the superhuman sort; that they may coexist with many follies, with some simple weaknesses, with many harmless vanities; and that in the improvement of mankind, near and remote, in its progress through worldly content to final happiness, the humblest of men have their place assigned them, and their part allotted them to play. There had been, in light amusing fiction, no such scene as that where Doctor Primrose, surrounded by the mocking felons of the gaol into which his villainous creditor has thrown him, finds in even those wretched outcasts a common nature to appeal to, minds to instruct, sympathies to bring back to virtue, souls to restore and save. "In less than a fortnight I had formed them into something social and humane." Into how many hearts may this have planted a desire which had as yet become no man's care! Not yet had Howard turned his thoughts to the prison. Romilly was but a boy of nine years old, and Elizabeth Fry had not been born. In Goldsmith's day, as for centuries before it, the gaol existed as the gallows' portal: it was Crime's high school, where Law presided over the science of law-breaking, and did its best to spread guilt abroad. "This prison," says Doctor Primrose, "makes men guilty where it does no find them so; it incloses wretches for commission of one crime, and r very little blood will serve to cement our security." them, if returned alive, fitted for the perpetration of thousands." With what consequence? "New vices call for fresh Still, from all that touches and diverts restraints; penal laws, which are in the us in these harmless vanities of the dehands of the rich, are laid upon the poor; lightful group, we return to the primal and all our paltriest possessions are hung source of what has given this glorious round with gibbets." It scares men now little story its unequalled popularity. It to be told of what no man then took heed. is not simply that a happy fireside is Deliberate murders were committed by depicted there, but that it is one over the state. It was but four years after this which calamity and sorrow can only cast that the government which had reduced the most temporary shade. In his deepest a young wife to beggary by pressing her distress, the Vicar has but to remember husband to sea, sentenced her to death how much kinder Heaven is to us, than for entering a draper's shop, taking some we are to ourselves, and how few are the coarse linen off the counter, and laying it misfortunes of Nature's making, to redown again as the shopman gazed at her; cover his cheerful patience. There never listened unmoved to a defence which was a book in which indulgence and might have penetrated stone, that inas- charity made virtue look so lustrous. much, since her husband was stolen from Nobody is straight-laced, if we except her, she had no bed to lie upon, nothing|Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, to clothe her children, nothing to give whose pretensions are summed up in Burthem to eat, perhaps she might have done chell's noble monosyllable. "Virtue, my something wrong, for she hardly knew dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any what she did; and finally sent her to price; but where is that to be found?” Tyburn, with her infant sucking at her "Fudge." When worldly reverses visit breast. Not without reason did Horace the good Doctor Primrose, they are of Walpole call the country one great less account than the equanimity they shambles." Hardly a Monday passed that cannot deprive him of; than the belief was not Black Monday at Newgate. An in good, to which they only give wider execution came round as regularly as any scope; than the happiness which, even other weekly show; and when it was that in its worldliest sense, they ultimately "shocking sight of fifteen men executed," strengthen by enlarged activity, and inwhereof Boswell makes more than one creased necessity for labour. It is only mention, the interest was of course the when struck through the sides of his greater. Men not otherwise hardened, children, that for an instant his faith found here a debasing delight. George gives way. Most lovely is the pathos of Selwyn passed as much time at Tyburn that scene; so briefly and beautifully told. as at White's; and Mr. Boswell had a The little family at night are gathered special suit of execution black, to make round a charming fire, telling stories of a decent appearance near the scaffold. the past, laying schemes for the future, Not uncalled for, therefore, though soli- and listening to Moses's thoughtful opitary and as yet unheeded, was the warn- nion of matters and things in general, to ing of good Doctor Primrose. Nay, not the effect that all things, in his judgment, uncalled for is it now, though eighty go on very well, and that he has just years have passed. "Do not," he said, been thinking, when sister Livy is married "draw the cords of society so hard, that to Farmer Williams, they'll get the loan a convulsion must come to burst them; of his cyder-press and brewing-tubs for do not cut away wretches as useless, nothing. The best gooseberry wine has before you have tried their utility; make been this night much in request. law the protector, not the tyrant of the us have one bottle more, Deborah, my people. You will then find that crea- life," says the Vicar, "and, Moses, give tures, whose souls are held as dross, us a good song. But where is my darling want only the hand of a refiner; and that Olivia?" Little Dick comes running in. "Let 66 "O papa, papa, she has gone from us, she is gone from us, my sister Livy is gone from us for ever!" "Gone, child!" Yes, she is gone off with two gentlemen in a post-chaise, and one of them kissed her, and said he would die for her; and she cried very much, and was for coming back; but he persuaded her again, and she went into the chaise, and said, O what will my poor papa do when he knows I am undone!" Now then, my children, go and be miserable, for we shall never enjoy one hour more;" and the old man, struck to the heart, cannot help cursing the seducer. But Moses is mindful of happier teaching, and with a loving simplicity rebukes his father. "You should be my mother's comforter, sir, and you increase her pain. You should not have curst him, villain as he is." "I did not curse him, child, did I?" "Indeed, sir, you did; you curst him twice." "Then may Heaven forgive me and him if I did." Charity resumes its place in his heart: with forgiveness, happiness half visits him again; by kindly patience even Deborah's reproaches are subdued and stayed; he takes back with most affecting tenderness his penitent child; and the voices of all his children are heard once more in their simple concert on the honeysuckle bank. We feel that it is better than cursing; and are even content that the rascally young squire should have time and hope for a sort of shabby repentance, and be allowed the intermediate comfort (it seems, after all one hardly knows why or wherefore, the most appropriate thing he can do) of "blowing the French horn." Mr. Abraham Adams has infinite claims on respect and love, nor ever to be forgotten are his groans over Wilson's worldly narrative, his sermon on vanity, his manuscript Eschylus, his noble independence to Lady Booby, and his grand rebuke to Peter Pounce; but he is put to no such trial as this which has been illustrated here, and which sets before us with such blended grandeur, simplicity, and pathos, the Christian heroism of the loving father, and forgiving ambassador of God to man. It was not an age of a particular earnestness, this Hume and Walpole age; but no one can be in earnest himself without in some degree affecting others. "I remember a passage in the Vicar of Wakefield," said Johnson, a few years after its author's death, "which Goldsmith was afterwards fool enough to expunge. I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing." The words were little, since the feeling was retained; for the very basis of the little tale was a sincerity and zeal for many things. This indeed it was, which, while all the world were admiring it for its mirth and sweetness, its bright and happy pictures, its simultaneous movement of the springs of laughter and tears, gave it a rarer value to a more select audience, and connected it with not the least memorable anecdote of modern literary history. It had been published little more than four years, when two Germans, whose names became afterwards world-famous, one a student at that time in his twentieth, the other a graduate in his twenty-fifth year, met in the city of Strasburg. The younger, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, a law scholar of the university with a passion for literature, sought knowledge from the elder, Johann Gottfried Herder, for the course on which he was moved to enter. der, a severe and masterly though somewhat cynical critic, laughed at the likings of the young aspirant, and roused him to other aspirations. Producing a German translation of the Vicar of Wakefield, he read it out aloud to Goethe in a manner which was peculiar to him; and as the incidents of the little story came forth in his serious simple voice, in one unmoved unaltering tone ("just as if nothing of it was present before him, but all was only historical; as if the shadows of this poetic creation did not affect him in a life-like manner, but only glided gently by"), a new ideal of letters and of life arose in the mind of his listener. Years passed on; and while that younger student raised up and re-established the literature of his country: and came at last, in his prime and in his age, to be acknowledged for the wisest of modern men, he never ceased Her throughout to confess what he owed to those old evenings at Strasburg. The strength which can conquer circumstance; the happy wisdom of irony which elevates itself above every object, above fortune and misfortune, good and evil, death and life, and attains to the possession of a poetical world; first visited Goethe in the tone with which Goldsmith's tale is told. The fiction became to him life's first reality; in country clergymen of Drusenheim there started up Vicars of Wakefield; for Olivias and Sophias of Alsace, first love fluttered at his heart; and at every stage of his illustrious after career, impressions still vividly recurred to him. He remembered it, when, at the height of his worldly honour and success, he made his written Life ("Wahrheit und Dichtung") record what a blessing it had been to him; he had not forgotten it when, standing, at the age of eighty-one, on the very brink of the grave, he told a friend that in the decisive moment of mental development the Vicar of Wakefield had formed his education, and that he had lately, with unabated delight, "read the charming book again from beginning to end, not a little affected by the lively recollection" how much he had been indebted to the author sixty years before.-Life of Goldsmith. THE heart which can peruse the fate of Chatterton without being moved, is little to be envied for its tranquillity; but the intellects of those men must be as deficient as their hearts are uncharitable, who, confounding all shades of moral distinction, have ranked his literary fiction of Rowley in the same class of crimes with pecuniary forgery, and have calculated that if he had not died by his own hand, he would have probably ended his days upon a gallows. This disgusting sentence has been pronounced upon a youth who was exemplary for severe study, temperance, aad natural affection. His Rowleian forgery must indeed be pronounced improper by the general law, which condemns all falsifications of history; but it deprived no man of his fame, it had no sacrilegious interference with the memory of departed genius, it had not, like Lauder's imposture, any malignant motive, to rob a party, or a country, of a name which was its pride and ornament. Setting aside the opinion of those uncharitable biographers whose imaginations have conducted him to the gibbet, it may be owned that his unformed character exhibited strong and conflicting elements of good and evil. Even the momentary project of the infidel boy to become a methodist preacher, betrays an obliquity of design, and a contempt of human credulity, that is not very amiable. But, had he been spared, his pride and ambition would have come to flow in their proper channels; his understanding would have taught him the practical value of truth and the dignity of virtue, and he would have despised artifice when he had felt the strength and security of wisdom. In estimating the promises of his genius, I would rather lean to the utmost enthusiasm of his admirers, than to the cold opinion of those who are afraid of being blinded to the defects of the poems attributed to Rowley, by the veil of obsolete phraseology which is thrown over them. If we look to the ballad of Sir Charles Bawdin, and translate it into modern English, we shall find its strength and interest to have no dependence on obsolete words. In the striking passage of the martyr Bawdin standing erect in his car to rebuke Edward, who beheld him from the window, when "The tyrant's soul rushed to his face," and when he exclaimed, "Behold the man! he speaks the truth, in these, and in all the striking parts of the ballad, no effect is owing to mock antiquity, but to the simple and high conception of a great and just character, who "Summ'd the actions of the day, What a moral portraiture from the hand of a boy! The inequality of Chatterton's various productions may be compared to the disproportions of the ungrown giant. His works had nothing of the definite neatness of that precocious talent which stops short in early maturity. His thirst for knowledge was that of a being taught by instinct to lay up materials for the exercise of great and undeveloped powers. Even in his favourite maxim, pushed it might be to hyperbole, that a man by abstinence and perseverance might accomplish whatever he pleased, may be traced the indications of a genius which nature had meant to achieve works of immortality. Tasso alone can be compared to him as a juvenlie prodigy. No English poet ever equalled him at the same age.-Life of Chatterton. [R. M. MILNES, LORD HOUGHTON] THE POETICAL CHARACTER OF KEATS. THE last few pages have attempted to awaken a personal interest in the story of Keats almost apart from his literary character-a personal interest founded on events that might easily have occurred to a man of inferior ability, and rather affecting from their moral than intellectual bearing. But now "He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny, and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not, and torture not again; From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain; Nor, when the spirit's self had ceased to burn,, With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn: and, ere we close altogether these memorials of his short earthly being, let us revert to the great distinctive peculiarities which singled him out from his fellowmen, and gave him his rightful place "the among inheritors of unfulfilled renown. Let any man of literary accomplishment, though without the habit of writing poetry, or even much taste for reading it, open "Endymion" at random (to say nothing of the latter and more perfect poems), and examine the characteristics of the page before him, and I shall be surprised if he does not feel that the whole range of literature hardly supplies a parallel phenomenon. As a psychological curiosity, perhaps Chatterton is more wonderful; but in him the immediate ability displayed is rather the full comprehension of, and identification with, the old model, than the effluence of creative genius. In Keats, on the contrary, the originality in the use of his scanty materials, his expansion of them to the proportions of his own imagination, and, above all, his field of diction and expression extending so far beyond his knowledge of literature, is quite inexplicable to any of the ordinary processes of mental education. If his classical learning had been deeper, his seizure of the full spirit of Grecian beauty would have been less surprising; if his English reading had been more extensive, his inexhaustible vocabulary of picturesque and mimetic words could more easily be accounted for; but here is a surgeon's apprentice, with the ordinary culture of the middle classes, rivalling, in æsthetic perceptions of antique life and thought, the most careful scholars of his time and country, and reproducing these impressions in a phraseology as complete and unconventional as if he had mastered the whole history and the frequent variations of the English tongue, and elaborated a mode of utterance commensurate with his vast ideas. The artistic absence of moral purpose may offend many readers, and the just harmony of the colouring may appear to others a displeasing monotony; but I think it impossible to lay the book down without feeling that almost every line of it contains solid gold enough to be beaten out, by common literary_manufacturers, into a poem of itself. Concentration of imagery, the hitting off a picture at a stroke, the clear, decisive word that brings the thing before you and will not let it go, are the rarest distinction of the early |