"Yet let them only share the praises due;
If few their wants, their pleasures are but few.
For every want that stimulates the breast
Becomes a source of pleasure when redrest;
Whence from such lands each pleasing science flies
That first excites desires and then supplies.
Unknown those powers that raise the soul to flame,
Catch every nerve, and vibrate through the frame.
Their level life is but a smouldering fire
Unquenched by want, unfanned by strong desire,
Unfit for raptures, or if raptures cheer
On some high festival of once a year,
In wild excess the vulgar breast takes fire
Till, buried in debauch, the bliss expire.
But not their joys alone thus coarsely flow,
Their morals, like their pleasures, are but low;
For as refinement steps from sire to son,
Unaltered, unimproved the manners run."

Then the Traveller looks at France, with its splendid Court and rich nobles; but here corruption, frivolity, and tawdry ostentation have spread from the Court among the people, and they are idle and vain. In Holland industry has brought wealth, but—

"At gold's superior charms all freedom flies,

The needy sell it, and the rich man buys;
A land of tyrants and a den of slaves."

The Traveller returns home to England, the land of freedom.

"But fostered e'en by Freedom, ills annoy :

That independence Britons prize too high
Keeps man from man, and breaks the social tie.
The self-dependent lordlings stand alone,
All claims that bind and sweeten life unknown.
Here, by the bonds of Nature feebly held,
Minds combat minds, repelling and repelled,
Ferments arise, imprisoned factions roar,
Represt ambition struggles round her shore.

Nor this the worst. As Nature's ties decay,
As duty, love, and honour fail to sway,

Fictitious bonds, the bonds of wealth and law,

Still gather strength, and force unwilling awe."

Seeing thus in every state evils which no legislature or special form of government can prevent or cure, Goldsmith looks to the growth of each individual man, and to the rule of "reason, faith, and conscience," as the means by which evils are overcome and happiness secured.

“Vain, very vain, my weary search to find
That bliss which only centres in the mind.

How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,

Our own felicity we make or find.

With secret course, which no loud storms annoy,
Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.
The lifted axe, the agonising wheel,

Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel,
To men remote from power but rarely known,
Leave reason, faith, and conscience all our own.

In "The Deserted Village," Goldsmith sees the result of the commercial prosperity of which England was beginning to boast, as the source of greatness and happiness. It seemed to him that the amassing of large fortunes by a few was the cause of impoverishing many, and that wealth and luxury must exist at the expense of excessive toil and poverty among the labouring class. Those who thus made large fortunes in trade bought up the land once tilled by the peasants in order to build mansions and make parks, so that the poor were obliged to leave their country and find the means of life in other lands.

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade,
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;

But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,

When once destroyed can never be supplied."

In the rising commercial prosperity of the time, Goldsmith sees a false splendour gilding a certain class, but not a means of raising and providing for the poor. The true greatness of a nation consists in each individual having his share in the prosperity

"Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen who survey
The rich man's joys increase, the poor's decay,
'Tis yours to judge how wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and a happy land.
Proud swells the tide with load of freighted ore,
And shouting folly hails them from her shore ;
Hoards e'en beyond the miser's wish abound,
And rich inen flock from all the world around.
Yet count our gains. This wealth is but a name
That leaves our useful products still the same.
Not so the loss. The man of wealth and pride
Takes up a space that many poor supplied-
Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds,
Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds—
While thus the land adorned for pleasure all
In barren splendour feebly waits the fall."

The "deserted village" is "Sweet Auburn," once "the loveliest village of the plain;" but the village population has been turned out, and obliged to emigrate, for "one only master grasps the whole domain," and the peasants' little fields have been turned into one large estate.

We shall see later on how the line of thought started by Goldsmith is followed in Cowper, the poet of the close of the eighteenth century, and in Wordsworth, the poet of the nineteenth.

CHAPTER XX.

SAMUEL JOHNSON AND HIS FRIENDS (1709—1784).

THE great activity of original and independent thought which preceded the French Revolution led not only to the overturning of political tyranny, and the reconstruction of government, but it roused men to examine into all social forms and customs, and to see whether these were placed on a true basis, and whether they were fulfilling rightly the reason of their existence. One of the most important directions taken by this spirit of the time was that relating to the true position of literature, and the right of the author to live by the just payment of his work. In earlier times, when readers were few, this might have been impossible, but now education had made many readers, and created a demand for books; still, however, literature was regarded too much as a means for gratifying the vanity of a writer, and as giving opportunity to a rich man to patronise intellect, and keep it in his pay. Pope had attacked this system, and Swift and Steele and Goldsmith had held themselves, in a measure, independent of patronage; but it needed great strength of character in an author to keep himself wholly free from the service of any party, and great courage and self-denial to be the first to trust to the general intelligence of the people to find out the merit of his work, and to pay him for it according to its real value. There is high honour due, therefore, to Samuel Johnson, who was the first to lead the way along the nobler path of honest, hard work, with a free mind and will, instead of living a life of dependence

on the bounty of others, for which flattery and the use of the author's pen were expected in return. Johnson's work, therefore, in relation to English literature is most important, and reaches beyond the influence of his books themselves; for it is the beginning of a new era, such as Milton foresaw in his "Areopagitica," when literature, free from all the shackles of public interference or private interest, should assert the truth with simple faith and courage, trusting to God, and to the light of God in man, for its recognition and reception.

Samuel Johnson was born on the 18th of September, 1709. He was the son of a bookseller at Lichfield, and was named Samuel after Dr. Swinfen, who was lodging in the house. He was naturally of an unhealthy constitution, and he suffered from this all his life long. It affected his nerves and muscles, and gave him odd twitchings and contortions of his face, and made him most clumsy and awkward in his movements; there was a fear, also, that disease might at some time attack his brain, and bring on insanity; but it was a part of his brave life to struggle against all these difficulties, instead of making them an excuse for idleness and selfindulgence. At seven years old he was sent to Lichfield Grammar School, where Addison had been more than thirty years before. At fifteen he went to school at Stourbridge, where he gave help in teaching in return for instruction. With some aid from his godfather, Dr. Swinfen, he went to Oxford when he was nineteen. He had made up his mind to "fight his way by literature," and he already showed the way he meant to do it. On one occasion, when some one saw that the poor scholar was in want of new shoes, and put a pair at his door, Johnson indignantly threw them down-stairs. Want of money, probably, prevented his returning home even for the vacations, and the length of his residence at the university is not exactly known. Illness or poverty caused him to leave before he had taken his degree. In 1731 his father died, leaving him £20, and he then had