123:--
'Every want thus becomes a means of pleasure, in the redressing.'
l. 228. -----
"Their morals, like their pleasures, are but low".
Probably Goldsmith only uses 'low' here in its primitive sense,
and not in that which, in his own day, gave so much umbrage to
so many eighteenth-century students of humanity in the rough.
Cf. Fielding, 'Tom Jones', 1749, iii. 6:--'Some of the Author's
Friends cry'd--"Look'e, Gentlemen, the Man is a Villain; but it
is Nature for all that." And all the young Critics of the Age,
the Clerks, Apprentices, etc., called it 'Low' and fell a
Groaning.' See also 'Tom Jones', iv. 94, and 226-30. 'There's
nothing comes out but the 'most lowest' stuff in nature'--says
Lady Blarney in ch. xi of the 'Vicar', whose author is eloquent
on this topic in 'The Present State of Polite Learning', 1759,
pp. 154-6, and in 'She Stoops to Conquer, 1773 (Act i); while
Graves ('Spiritual Quixote', 1772, bk.
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