Like his older friend and fellow club member Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith distinguished himself in a broad variety of literary forms, writing essays, biographies, histories, poems, plays, and a novel in a brief but intensely creative period of sixteen years. In all he wrote he achieved a style of remarkable ease and charm. After his death Johnson commemorated his range and stylistic grace in a Latin epitaph; added to Nollekens's monument when it was erected in Westminster Abbey in 1776, the epitaph states that there were hardly any literary genres Goldsmith did not touch, and none he touched that he did not adorn. Three works earned him enduring fame: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), a novel that succeeded, according to Henry James, by its "incomparable amenity"; The Deserted Village (1770), a pastoral elegy lamenting the loss of rural innocence; and She Stoops to Conquer (1773), a comedy that shares with Sheridan's The...