LITTLE of his conversation at this period is preserved, and that little meagre and unsatisfactory. The business of Boswell, as he expressly tells us, was with that of Johnson alone, and therefore so much only is given of the remarks of others as serve to make those of his principal not only intelligible, but forcible and triumphant. Thus, few associates of the moralist appear to advantage in his society, even such as were distinguished by talents, extent of knowledge, and conversational readiness; not because they did not exhibit brilliant powers on the immediate topics of discussion, but because so extensive a record was not within the plan, and frequently not within the power of the biographer however well disposed his inclination, or accurate his memory, to accomplish.

Neither had he, as we find from the accurate investigation of Mr. Croker, so many opportunities of hearing these conversations as might be imagined from a cursory perusal of his volumes of

such moments indeed he made the best use; and it is our business not to lament that he did not do more, but to be grateful for his having done so much. Goldsmith therefore, notwithstanding the latent disinclination towards him already noticed, fares little worse than Burke, and so many other celebrated men, in being shorn of some of their interlocutory honours; and we may be permitted to regret that no other person among the circle of their acquaintance, excepting in a slight degree Mrs. Piozzi, found time or inclination to add much to Boswell's labours.

One of the opinions hazarded by Goldsmith in conversation, though nowhere noticed by either of those writers, was a lower estimate of our older dramatists than most persons of poetical taste and judgment now entertain. Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, and others, he more than once said were little more than second-rate poets; even Shakspeare appeared in his eyes infinitely lowered by his defects, and once or twice he hinted he was probably estimated beyond his merits; an opinion in which however at variance with the usual decisions of criticism, Lord Byron, who was not aware of the coincidence, seems to join. This conclusion may have been owing less to the deliberate judgment, than to the wayward humour and occasionally hasty opinions of both; for both often said in conversation what the former more particularly would have hesitated to advance in public as his settled conviction. Thus we find no traces

of such opinions in his writings; Shakspeare whenever mentioned, is mentioned with honour; and if the paper formerly noticed, "A Scale of Poets," written in 1758, be really his, he receives all the praise which a judicious admirer can desire. Neither can this degree of praise be considered less equivocal by the lines in Retaliation, written when his taste had been long settled, in allusion to Garrick, where he tells us

Those poets, who owe their best fame to his skill,
Shall still be his flatterers, go where he will,

Old Shakspeare receive him with praise and with love,
And Beaumont and Bens be his Kellys above.'

That he honoured his genius though fully alive to his defects appears from a criticism written in 1759, where he says, in allusion to the bad taste exhibited in many of the dramas of the age of Elizabeth,

66

Nothing less than a genius like Shakspeare's could make plays wrote to the taste of those times, pleasing now; a man whose beauties seem rather the result of chance than design; who while he laboured to satisfy his audience with monsters and mummery seemed to throw in his inimitable beauties as trifles into the bargain. Massinger however was not such a man; he seldom rises to any pitch of sublimity, and yet it must be owned is never so incorrigibly absurd as we often find his predecessor. His performances are all crowded with incident but want character, the genuine mark of genius in a dramatic poet."

The comedies of Farquhar and Vanbrugh, particularly the former, rejecting their indelicacies, he considered the best on the English stage.

Of Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism he said, "It is easier to write that book than to read it." Johnson admitted there was nothing new in the matter, but old things were told in a new way.

Pope found in him, as in all the poets of the past age, and in Lord Byron and in many of the distinguished names of the present, that warm admiration which his genius, vigour, variety, and harmony must ever command from every reader of taste. The critical opinions of Warton, had failed to render his fallacies, although recent, a fashion, or to convince the judgment of the age he addressed, that the class of poetry to which that of Pope belongs, was necessarily of an inferior order, or that popularity formed, after the lapse of a reasonable time, no criterion of merit. Goldsmith estimated his genius scarcely inferior to that of Dryden; his judgment and versification some degrees higher. His character of Addison he quoted on several occasions as displaying a profound knowledge of the human heart.

Toward the poetry of Gray he was as has been already stated, less favourably disposed, though from no unworthy motive; and without mentioning names, it is indirectly expressed in the Vicar of Wakefield, where we find marked condemnation of redundancy of epithet, one of the admitted faults of that eminent poet. Goldsmith considered this

blemish as bordering upon mere expletive; a symptom of want of variety of expression, or vigour of thought; and seems to have written the Hermit in proof of how successfully one man of genius could avoid what he considered so objectionable in others. That ballad is introduced in the novel with the remark, that whatever be its other defects, it is free at least from the one he

censures:

"It is remarkable that both the poets you mention (Ovid and Gray) have equally contributed to introduce a false taste into their respective countries by loading all their lines with epithet. Men of little genius found them most easily imitated in their defects, and English poetry like that in the latter empire of Rome, is nothing at present but a combination of luxuriant images without plot or connexion; a string of epithets that improve the sound without carrying on the sense.'

His opinion of portions of Gray's poetry seems corroborated by that of another contemporary poet, Langhorne, who thus figuratively expresses himself:-"How enchantingly beautiful was Gray's Muse when she wandered through the churchyard in her morning dress! But when she was arrayed in gorgeous attire, in a monstrous hoop and a brocade petticoat, I could gaze upon her indeed; she made an impression on my eye, but not on my heart." *

*

Correspondence of Hannah More, vol. i. p. 23.