5. Goldsmith’s best poems are +The Traveller+ and +The Deserted Village+,-- both written in the Popian couplet. His best play is +She Stoops to Conquer+. His best prose work is +The Vicar of Wakefield+, “the first genuine novel of domestic life.” He also wrote histories of England, of Rome, of Animated Nature. All this was done as professional, nay, almost as hack work; but always in a very pleasant, lively, and readable style. Ease, grace, charm, naturalness, pleasant rhythm, purity of diction-- these were the chief characteristics of his writings. “Almost to all things could he turn his hand”-- poem, essay, play, story, history, natural science. Even when satirical, he was good-natured; and his +Retaliation+ is the friendliest and pleasantest of satires. In his poetry, his words seem artless, but are indeed delicately chosen with that consummate art which conceals and effaces itself: where he seems most simple and easy, there he has taken most pains and given most labour. 6. EDMUND BURKE (+1730-1797+) was born at Dublin in the year 1730. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin; and in 1747 was entered of the Middle Temple, with the purpose of reading for the Bar. In 1766 he was so fortunate as to enter Parliament as member for Wendover, in Buckinghamshire; and he sat in the House of Commons for nearly thirty years. While in Parliament, he worked hard to obtain justice for the colonists of North America, and to avert the separation of them from the mother country; and also to secure good government for India. At the close of his life, it was his intention to take his seat in the House of Peers as Earl Beaconsfield-- the title afterwards assumed by Mr Disraeli; but the death of his son, and only child-- for whom the honour was really meant and wished-- quite broke his heart, and he never carried out his purpose. He died at Beaconsfield in the year 1797. The lines of Goldsmith on Burke, in his poem of “Retaliation,” are well known:-- “Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much; Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind; Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, And thought of convincing while they thought of dining.”