“Who ran Through each mode of the pen and was master of all.” Goldsmith, in society, was not the oddity he is represented to be by Boswell, Walpole and the others. There is no such contradictory monster as they would have us think him. The man who was “inspired” with such true genius—who drew the Vicar of Wakefield—could not have been the “idiot” that the artificial Walpole would depict him. Nor could any man who “wrote like an angel” ever come to “talk like poor Poll,” as Garrick says with such antithetical fallacy. The fact was, Oliver’s broad Westmeath accent, his stammering mode of speaking, and the careless impulses of his thoroughly Irish temperament gave his manners a strange, it may be said an intolerable originality, in an age of forms and observances in literature and life. It was only in a stiff, artificial age, like that in which his lot was cast, that Goldsmith would have been so rudely treated and ridiculed. It is felt that it was not Julian but the polished Antiochans which were ridiculous. We also know that though they laughed at Socrates he was not _laughed at_, as he himself expresses it. Absurdity was the cant word of Goldsmith’s day for the good-nature, generosity, originality and independence which he brought with him, along with that _Shibboleth_ of his from the simple and honorable home of his childhood, and which he never lost in all the mazes and trials of the great metropolis. His absurdities, as they termed them, did not, after all, prevent Goldsmith from being well received in the best society of London—a very strong proof, in itself, that the doctor was as much a gentleman in demeanor as he was by his birth and education, and could mingle with the polite and the fashionable on very easy terms and without any violence to his habits. His sayings in company—such as have been remembered—are full of point and pleasantry, and show that he could command, even with his shy utterance, much of the happy spirit of his written style. He was once explaining to a friend, in Johnson’s presence, that in fables where inferior creatures are interlocutors, these should be made to speak in character—that animals on land, for instance, should converse differently from little fishes. This idea, which is, after all, only that which Shakspeare has so beautifully realized, with a difference, in his elves of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, his Caliban and his Ariel, set Johnson a-chuckling at its childishness, which Goldsmith perceiving, he retorted very happily—laughing, too—“You may laugh, doctor, but if _you_ had to make little fishes speak, they would talk like whales!” A palpable hit at the sesquipedalian moralist.