We already find in _The Traveller_ that strange hallucination which seems to have haunted him, and which he more fully expressed in the subsequent poem of _The Deserted Village_—that England was being depopulated! What could have conducted him to a conclusion so utterly at variance with the fact, it is useless to inquire. It was his crotchet. He had probably seen decay in some places, and took no calculation of the more than proportionate increase of others. For Goldsmith did not limit himself to the mistaken notion, which many had expressed, that the towns were growing large at the expense of the country, but entertained—what to us must seem the strangest of paradoxes—entertained the conviction that the population of the whole country was wasting away. Happily, as we have already remarked, no one thinks of the theory of depopulation, or over-population, or any other theory of political economy, whilst reading _The Deserted Village_. We have all learned to love “Sweet Auburn” long before any idea connected with so crabbed and distressful a subject entered our minds. Indeed the village, with all its accessories, is brought with such distinctness before us, that even the decay of Auburn itself, is not the most prominent impression which the poem produces. The deserted Auburn is made to live again so vividly in the imagination, that the desolation in which it lies only occurs occasionally to the mind, throwing a feeling of sadness and melancholy over the picture. For ourselves, we can well remember that when we first became acquainted with the village of Auburn, we always thought of it—notwithstanding the use of the past tense—as somewhere still existing. It existed, at all events, very palpably in the imagination. The scene is English: it is, in the main, a description of an English village; but because the poet has also drawn materials from the recollections of his early home, some of his critics have been resolved to place Auburn in Ireland, and to identify what is clearly an ideal picture with the definite locality of Lissoy. On this ground they have even proceeded to convict him of an error for introducing the nightingale in one of his descriptions, there being no such bird in Ireland. This line, in which the nightingale is introduced, we should venture to quarrel with on quite another ground. Here is the passage. No one will object to read it again, though he has read it fifty or twice fifty times.