The secret of its universal and enduring popularity is
undoubtedly its truth to nature, but to nature of the most amiable kind; to
nature such as Goldsmith saw it. The author, as we have occasionally shown
in the course of this memoir, took his scenes and characters in this as in
his other writings, from originals in his own motley experience; but he has
given them as seen through the medium of his own indulgent eye, and has set
them forth with the colorings of his own good head and heart. Yet how
contradictory it seems that this, one of the most delightful pictures of
home and homefelt happiness, should be drawn by a homeless man; that the
most amiable picture of domestic virtue and all the endearments of the
married state should be drawn by a bachelor, who had been severed from
domestic life almost from boyhood; that one of the most tender, touching,
and affecting appeals on behalf of female loveliness should have been made
by a man whose deficiency in all the graces of person and manner seemed to
mark him out for a cynical disparager of the sex.
We cannot refrain from transcribing from the work a short passage
illustrative of what we have said, and which within a wonderfully small
compass comprises a world of beauty of imagery, tenderness of feeling,
delicacy and refinement of thought, and matchless purity of style.
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