After meeting with Johnson, Goldsmith became the object of Boswell’s magpie curiosity; and to Boswell’s Life of Johnson we are indebted for many of the details of Goldsmith’s life,—­his homeliness, his awkward ways, his drolleries and absurdities, which made him alternately the butt and the wit of the famous Literary Club.  Boswell disliked Goldsmith, and so draws an unflattering Portrait, but even this does not disguise the contagious good humor which made men love him.  When in his forty-seventh year, he fell sick of a fever, and with childish confidence turned to a quack medicine to cure himself.  He died in 1774, and Johnson placed a tablet, with a sonorous Latin epitaph, in Westminster Abbey, though Goldsmith was buried elsewhere.  “Let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man,” said Johnson; and the literary world—­which, like that old dictator, is kind enough at heart, though often rough in its methods—­is glad to accept and record the verdict.

WORKS OF GOLDSMITH.  Of Goldsmith’s early essays and his later school histories little need be said.  They have settled into their own place, far out of sight of the ordinary reader.  Perhaps the most interesting of these is a series of letters for the Public Ledger (afterwards published as The Citizen of the World), written from the view point of an alleged Chinese traveler, and giving the latter’s comments on English civilization.[204] The following five works are those upon which Goldsmith’s fame chiefly rests: 

The Traveller (1764) made Goldsmith’s reputation among his contemporaries, but is now seldom read, except by students who would understand how Goldsmith was, at one time, dominated by Johnson and his pseudo-classic ideals.  It is a long poem, in rimed couplets, giving a survey and criticism of the social life of various countries in Europe, and reflects many of Goldsmith’s own wanderings and impressions.

The Deserted Village (1770), though written in the same mechanical style, is so permeated with honest human sympathy, and voices so perfectly the revolt of the individual man against institutions, that a multitude of common people heard it gladly, without consulting the critics as to whether they should call it good poetry.  Notwithstanding its faults, to which Matthew Arnold has called sufficient attention, it has become one of our best known poems, though we cannot help wishing that the monotony of its couplets had been broken by some of the Irish folk songs and ballads that charmed street audiences in Dublin, and that brought Goldsmith a welcome from the French peasants wherever he stopped to sing.  In the village parson and the schoolmaster, Goldsmith has increased Chaucer’s list by two lovable characters that will endure as long as the English language.  The criticism that the picture of prosperous “Sweet Auburn” never applied to any village in Ireland is just, no doubt, but it is outside the question.  Goldsmith was a hopeless dreamer, bound to see everything, as he saw his debts and his gay clothes, in a purely idealistic way.