Boswell we have seen; after Burke and Boswell, Goldsmith was the most brilliant member of the Johnson circle. If part of Burke's genius is referable to his nationality, Goldsmith's is wholly so. The beginning and the end of him was Irish; every quality he possessed as a man and as a writer belongs to his race. He had the Irish carelessness, the Irish generosity, the Irish quick temper, the Irish humour. This latter gift, displayed constantly in a company which had little knowledge of the peculiar quality of Irish wit and no faculty of sympathy or imagination, is at the bottom of the constant depreciation of him on the part of Boswell and others of his set. His mock self-importance they thought ill-breeding; his humorous self-depreciation and keen sense of his own ridiculousness, mere lack of dignity and folly. It is curious to read Boswell and watch how often Goldsmith, without Boswell's knowing it, got the best of the joke. In writing he had what we can now recognise as peculiarly Irish gifts. All our modern writers of light half-farcical comedy are Irish. Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, is only the first of a series which includes _The School for Scandal, The Importance of being Earnest_, and _You Never can Tell_. And his essays--particularly those of the _Citizen of the World_ with its Chinese vision of England and English life--are the first fruit of that Irish detachment, that ability to see "normally" English habits and institutions and foibles which in our own day has given us the prefaces of Mr. Shaw. As a writer Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate ease which belongs rather to the school of the earlier eighteenth century than to his own day; the enthusiasm of Addison for French literature which he retained gave him a more graceful model than the "Johnsonian" school, to which he professed himself to belong, could afford. (3) The eighteenth century novel demands separate treatment, and of the other prose authors the most eminent, Edward Gibbon, belongs to historical rather than to literary studies. It is time to turn to poetry. There orthodox classicism still held sway; the manner and metre of Pope or Thomson ruled the roost of singing fowl. In the main it had done its work, and the bulk of fresh things conceived in it were dull and imitative, even though occasionally, as in the poems of Johnson himself and of Goldsmith, an author arose who was able to infuse sincerity and emotion into a now moribund convention. The classic manner--now more that of Thomson than of Pope--persisted till it overlapped romanticism; Cowper and Crabbe each owe a doubtful allegiance, leaning by their formal metre and level monotony of thought to the one and by their realism to the other. In the meantime its popularity and its assured position were beginning to be assailed in the coteries by the work of two new poets.