of the idealized treatment of poor human nature.  But into this pretty and perfect scene of domestic felicity come trouble and disgrace:  the serpent creeps into the unsullied nest, the villain, Thorn-hill, ruins Olivia, their house burns, and the softhearted, honorable father is haled to prison.  There is no blinking the darker side of mortal experience.  And the prison scenes, with their noble teaching with regard to penal punishment, showing Goldsmith far in advance of his age, add still further to the shadows.  Yet the idealization is there, like an atmosphere, and through it all, shining and serene, is Dr. Primrose to draw the eye to the eternal good.  We smile mayhap at his simplicity but note at the same time that his psychology is sound:  the influence of his sermonizing upon the jailbirds is true to experience often since tested.  Nor are satiric side-strokes in the realistic vein wanting—­as in the drawing of such a high lady of quality as Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs—­the very name sending our thoughts forward to Thackeray.  In the final analysis it will be found that what makes the work a romance is its power to quicken the sense of the attraction, the beauty of simple goodness through the portrait of a noble man whose environment is such as best to bring out his qualities.  Dr. Primrose is humanity, if not actual, potential:  he can be, if he never was.  A helpful comparison might be instituted between Goldsmith’s country clergyman and Balzac’s country doctor in the novel of that name; another notable attempt at the idealization of a typical man of one of the professions.  It would bring out the difference between the late eighteenth and the middle nineteenth centuries, as well as that between a great novelist, Balzac, and a great English writer, Goldsmith, who yet is not a novelist at all.  It should detract no whit from one’s delight in such a work as “The Vicar of Wakefield” to acknowledge that its aim is not to depict society as it then existed, but to give a pleasurable abstract of human nature for the purpose of reconciling us through art with life, when lived so sanely, simply and sweetly as by Primrose of gentle memory.  Seldom has the divine quality of the forgiveness of sins been portrayed with more salutary effect than in the scene where the erring and errant Olivia is taken back to the heart of her father—­just as the hard-headed landlady would drive her forth with the words: 

“’Out I say!  Pack out this moment! tramp, thou impudent strumpet, or I’ll give thee a mark that won’t be better for this three months.  What! you trumpery, to come and take up an honest house without cross or coin to bless yourself with!  Come along, I say.’

“I flew to her rescue while the woman was dragging her along by her hair, and I caught the dear forlorn wretch in my arms.  ’Welcome, anyway welcome, my dearest lost one, my treasure, to your poor old father’s bosom.  Though the vicious forsake thee,