Goldsmith, whose Bohemianism helped to release him from subservience to declining fashions in literature, treats childhood in a more genuine and artless fashion. In his prose and poetry I hear the first faint notes of that song of childhood which in a generation more was to burst from many lips. The sweetness which trembles in the Deserted Village finds easy expression in forms and images which call up childhood to memory, as in those lines,— “The playful children just let loose from school,” “E’en children followed with endearing wile, And plucked his gown, to share the good man’s smile,”— and in the quaint picture of the village school. It is in the Vicar of Wakefield, however, that one finds the freest play of fancy about childish figures. Goldsmith says of his hero that “he unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth,—he is a priest, a husbandman, and the father of a family;” and the whole of the significant preface may lead one to revise the estimate of Goldsmith which his contemporaries have fastened upon English literary history. The waywardness and unconventionality of this man of genius and his eager desire to be accepted by the world, which was then the great world, were the characteristics which most impressed the shallower minds about him. In truth, he had not only an extraordinary sympathy with the ever-varying, ever-constant flux of human life, but he dropped a deeper plummet than any English thinker since Milton. It was in part his loneliness that threw him upon children for complete sympathy; in part also his prophetic sense, for he had an unerring vision of what constituted the strength and the weakness of England. After the portraiture of the Vicar himself, there are no finer sketches than those of the little children. “It would be fruitless,” says the unworldly Vicar, “to deny exultation when I saw my little ones about me;” and from time to time in the tale, the youngest children, Dick and Bill, trot forward in an entirely natural manner. They show an engaging fondness for Mr. Thornhill. “The whole family seemed earnest to please him.... My little ones were no less busy, and fondly stuck close to the stranger. All my endeavors could scarcely keep their dirty fingers from handling and tarnishing the lace on his clothes, and lifting up the flaps of his pocket holes to see what was there.” The character of Mr. Burchell is largely drawn by its association with the children. The account given by little Dick of the carrying off of Olivia is full of charming childish spirit, and there is an exquisite passage where the Vicar returns home with the news of Olivia’s recovery, and discovers his house to be on fire, while in a tumult of confusion the older members of the family rush out of the dwelling.