grave, realistic manner of treating the impossible:  a service, however, shared with Defoe.  He gives us in a matter-of-fact chronicle style the marvelous happenings of Gulliver in Lilliputian land or in that of the Brobdingnagians.  He and Defoe are to be regarded as pioneers who suggested to the literary world, just before the Novel’s advent, that the attraction of a new form and a new method, the exploitation of the truth that, “The proper study of mankind is man,” could not (and should not) kill the love of romance, for the good and sufficient reason that romance meant imagination, illusion, charm, poetry.  And in due season, after the long innings enjoyed by realism with its triumphs of analysis and superfaithful transcriptions of the average life of man, we shall behold the change of mood which welcomes back the older appeal of fiction.

IV

It was the enlargement of this sense of romance which Oliver Goldsmith gave his time in that masterpiece in small, “The Vicar of Wakefield”:  his special contribution to the plastic variations connected with the growing pains of the Novel.  Whether regarded as poet, essayist, dramatist or story-maker, Dr. Goldsmith is one of the best-loved figures of English letters, as Swift is one of the most terrible.  And these lovable qualities are nowhere more conspicuous than in the idyllic sketch of the country clergyman and his family.  Romance it deserves to be called, because of the delicate idealization in the setting and in the portrayal of the Vicar himself—­a man who not only preached God’s love, “but first he followed it himself.”  And yet the book—­which, by the bye, was published in 1766 just as the last parts of “Tristram Shandy” were appearing in print—­offers a good example of the way in which the more romantic depiction of life, in the hands of a master, inevitably blends with realistic details, even with a winning truthfulness of effect.  Some of the romantic charm of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” we must remember, inheres in its sympathetic reproduction of vanished manners, etiquette and social grace; a sweet old-time grace, a fragrance out of the past, emanates from the memory of it if read half a lifetime ago.  An elder age is rehabilitated for us by its pages, even as it is by the canvases of Romney and Sir Joshua.  And with this more obvious romanticism goes the deeper romanticism that comes from the interpretation of humanity, which assumes it to be kindly and gentle and noble in the main.  Life, made up of good and evil as it is, is, nevertheless, seen through this affectionate time-haze, worth the living.  Whatever their individual traits, an air of country peace and innocence hovers over the Primrose household:  the father and mother, the girls, Olivia and Sophia, and the two sons, George and Moses, they all seem equally generous, credulous and good.  We feel that the author is living up to a announcement in the opening chapter which of itself is a sort of promise