Recall to mind the manner in which she receives back her unfortunate daughter Olivia. Let it be remembered that she had been practising her petty blundering artifices, her most visible palpable manœuvres, to catch the rich young squire. It was her plot, her scheme for elevating the family; in which scheme her daughter was of course to co-operate. Yet this is her speech upon the occasion. It is true human nature, but it is human nature of a very vulgar description. “Ah, Madam,” cried her mother, “this is but a poor place you are come to after so much finery. My daughter Sophy and I can afford but little entertainment to persons who have kept company only with people of distinction. Yes, Miss Livy, your poor father and I have suffered very much of late; but I hope Heaven will forgive you.” This Olivia herself is not made interesting to us by any one trait in her character. Her beauty, and the cruel treatment she meets with from her coarse and brazen seducer, is all she has to depend upon for any claim to our sympathy. Affliction has its worst effect upon her, the effect it has on the selfish and unrefined. “Every tender epithet bestowed on her sister brought a pang to her heart, and a tear to her eye; and as one vice, when cured, ever plants others where it has been, so her former guilt, though driven out by repentance, left jealousy and envy behind.” It is just as well we do not get more intimate with the female part of the family, for it is evident that in proportion as we knew them better, we should like them less. Had the life of Goldsmith brought him acquainted with no higher specimens of the sex? Had his fair cousin Jane, the daughter of good Uncle Contarine, with whom he used to practise music, and talk poetry, left with him no more refined impression of female society than we see reflected in _The Vicar of Wakefield_? Or, must we understand his portraits as fair specimens of the women of his time? Or, shall we seek a third explanation in the want of refinement in the literature of that period? We suspect the last has much to do with it.