But what in the Chinese letters is even more remarkable than their clever raillery of social incongruities and abuses, is their occasional indication of the author's innate but hitherto undisclosed gift for the delineation of humorous character. Up to this time he had exhibited no particular tendency in this direction. The little sketches of Jack Spindle and 'my cousin Hannah,' in 'The Bee,' go no farther than the corresponding personifications of particular qualities in the 'Spectator' and 'Tatler;' and they are not of the kind which, to employ a French figure, 'enter the skin' of the personality presented. But in the case of the eccentric philanthropist of 'The Citizen of the World,' whom he christens the 'Man in Black,' he comes nearer to such a definite embodiment as Addison's 'Will Wimble.' The 'Man in Black' is evidently a combination of some of those Goldsmith family traits which were afterwards so successfully recalled in Dr. Primrose, Mr. Hardcastle, and the clergyman of 'The Deserted Village.' The contrast between his credulous charity and his expressed distrust of human nature, between his simulated harshness and his real amiability, constitutes a type which has since been often used successfully in English literature; it is clear, too, that in the account of his life he borrows both from his author and his author's father. When he speaks of his unwillingness to take orders, of his dislike to wear a long wig when he preferred a short one, or a black coat when he dressed in brown, he is only giving expression to that incompatibility of temper which led to Goldsmith's rejection for ordination by the Bishop of Elphin; while in his picture of his father's house, with its simple, kindly prodigality, its little group of grateful parasites who laugh, like Mr. Hardcastle's servants, at the host's old jokes, and the careless paternal benevolence which makes the children 'mere machines of pity,' 'instructed in the art of giving away thousands before they were taught the more necessary qualifications of getting a farthing,' one recognizes the environment of that emphatically Irish household on the road from Ballymahon to Athlone, in which Goldsmith's own boyhood had been spent.