ee 
33 
maintaining his point, ‘the ‘poor soul will die.’ ‘Ee shall not die, by G—,’ 
cried my Uncle Toby. The accusing spirit which flew up to Heaven’s chancery 
with the oath blushed as he gave it in; and the recording angel as he wrote it 
down, dropped a tear upon the word and blotted it out for ever.” 
I have dealt now with the four leaders of English Fiction, and 
the question probably occurs to you, Why is it that so few now 
read their works? ‘As regards Fielding and Smollett, and, to a 
less degree, Sterne, I believe one principal reason of this neglect 
to be the frequent coarseness of the scenes which they describe, 
and of the language which they put in the mouths of their char- 
acters ; a coarseness which has made them unfit books to put into 
the hands of youth at the time when tastes are first formed. The 
“Vicar of Wakefield” is still a common and appropriate present 
for a boy or girl down to this day; but no one would think of 
setting them down to read “Tom Jones” or “Roderick Random.” 
Grown-up people who have a real taste for literature read them for 
their merits, and find themselves well rewarded ; but the general 
public grow up in ignorance of them, new editions and cheap 
reprints are not called for, and they sink out of sight, replaced 
generally by works of infinitely less talent and interest. 
I spoke just now of the “Vicar of Wakefield,” Oliver Goldsmith’s 
one novel. Epitaphs are proverbially liars ; but that was a true as 
well as a famous sentence, which Dr. Johnson inscribed upon 
Goldsmith’s monument in Westminster Abbey :— 
**Nullum fere scribendi genus 
Non tetigit 
Nullum tetigit quod non ornavit.” * 
If we could take a literary census, I doubt if we should find 
that any author’s works of the last century were so much read at 
the present day as those of Goldsmith. I should assert with 
considerable confidence, that the ‘‘Traveller” and the ‘“ Deserted 
Village” are more read than any other poem of the century, except 
Gray’s Elegy. Certainly the “Vicar of Wakefield” is read ten 
times for once that any other novel of that period is read. The 
only two plays which Goldsmith wrote, “She Stoops to Conquer,” 
and “The Goodnatured Man,” were unqualified successes, and 
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