For over half a century after Goldsmith’s death, the world continued in a state of uncertainty concerning his writings and himself. The greater part of the task-work he had performed for the booksellers was unknown, and Oliver spoken of, in a traditionary sort of way, as the author of the Vicar of Wakefield and the Deserted Village, and a man of laughable eccentricities. The majority of his readers—and no poet had more of them or enjoyed a wider English popularity—never thought he was other than an Englishman; and those who knew the country of his birth differed about the place of it—some asserting he was born at Lissoy, in Westmeath, and others contending for other localities. Even Dr. Johnson, who has set down his native place—Pallas, in Longford—correctly in his epitaph, makes a mistake of three years in his age. All this is remarkable of the cotemporary of Johnson—one who ranked with that literary colossus in his time and was so closely connected with Burke, Reynolds, Percy and the other celebrities of that period. Resembling, in some measure, Butler, in the obscurity of his personal history and the popularity of his works, Goldsmith seemed to be vaguely merging into the Vicar of Wakefield, or the Good Natured Man—just as the poet of the Restoration had come to be confounded with his Roundhead hero—when Prior’s life of him, twenty years ago, first threw a fair light upon the past; indicated the great mass of his writings (poorly compensated, anonymous and plagiarized, in his life-time,) and cleared away a large amount of the misconceptions and fallacies that had been gathered about his fame. There has hardly been any author in modern times, or perhaps in the ancient, whose personal character contrasts—is made to contrast—so much with the genuine celebrity he has achieved. He would seem to have been laughed at a good deal, and treated with a want of consideration and respect, even by those who loved him and wept at his death; and the impression generally conveyed is, that his manners were uncouth and his conversation ridiculous. Those who have helped to create such a character for Oliver, think they have compounded with their consciences when they have admitted he was a charming writer, and a simple, honest soul, who had no harm in him, and always meant well. Nevertheless, but one half of their portrait can be received. There were no such violent contrarieties in the elements that went to compose Oliver Goldsmith. His biographers—to make the most lenient estimate of them—knew him imperfectly and found it much easier to produce their effects by glaring contrasts than by the patient and loving discrimination due to the truth of every man’s character—especially that of a man like Goldsmith—so marked by peculiarities of education, and so severely tried by circumstances.