Such a rule would be an obviously dangerous one for an author to follow. But Goldsmith's confidence in the beauties of his novel was fully justified by the verdict of the world. No novelist has more deeply imbued his work with his own genius and spirit, and none have had a more beneficent genius, nor a more beautiful spirit to impart than the author of "The Deserted Village." The exquisite style, the delicate choice of words, the amiability of sentiment, so peculiarly his own, and so well suited to express the simple beauty of his thoughts, give a charm to the work which familiarity can only endear. Dr. Primrose, preserving his simplicity, his modesty, and his nobility of character alike when surrounded by the pleasures of his early and prosperous home, when struggling with the hardships of his ruined fortune, and when rewarded at last by the surfeit of good-fortune which follows his trial, stands high among the most noble conceptions of English fiction. "We read the 'Vicar of Wakefield,'" said the great Sir Walter, "in youth and in age. We return to it again and again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature." Goethe, when in his eighty-first year, declared that Goldsmith's novel "was his delight at the age of twenty, that it had in a manner formed a part of his education, influencing his tastes and feelings throughout life, and that he had recently read it again from beginning to end, with renewed delight, and with a grateful sense of the early benefit derived from it." "Rogers, the Nestor of British literature, whose refined purity of taste and exquisite mental organization rendered him eminently calculated to appreciate a work of the kind, declared that of all the books, which, through the fitful changes of three generations he had seen rise and fall, the charm of the 'Vicar of Wakefield' had alone continued as at first; and could he revisit the world after an interval of many more generations, he should as surely look to find it undiminished." So wrote Washington Irving; and if the reader is inclined to look for the causes of the extraordinary endurance of Goldsmith's work, he can find them nowhere better stated than in the words of John Forster: "Not in those graces of style, nor even in that home-cherished gallery of familiar faces can the secret of its extraordinary fascination be said to consist. It lies nearer the heart. A something which has found its way _there_; which, while it amused, has made us happier; which, gently interweaving itself with our habits of thought, has increased our good-humour and charity; which, insensibly it may be, has corrected wilful impatiences of temper, and made the world's daily accidents easier and kinder to us all; somewhat thus should be expressed, I think, the charm of the 'Vicar of Wakefield.'"