One evening he gave away his blankets to a woman who told him a pitiful tale. The cold was so bitter during the night that he had to open the ticking of his bed and crawl inside. Although this happened when he was a young man, it was typical of his usual response to appeals for help. When his landlady had him arrested for failing to pay his rent, he sent for Johnson to come and extricate him. Johnson asked him if he had nothing that would discharge the debt, and Goldsmith handed him the manuscript of _The Vicar of Wakefield_. Johnson reported his action to Boswell, as follows:-- "I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return; and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds." [Illustration: CANONBURY TOWER, LONDON, WHERE GOLDSMITH WROTE SOME OF HIS FAMOUS WORK.] During his last years, Goldsmith sometimes received as much as £800 in twelve months; but the more he earned, the deeper he plunged into debt. When he died, in 1774, at the age of forty-five, he owed £2000. He was loved because-- "...e'en his failings leaned to virtue's side." His grave by the Temple Church on Fleet Street, London, is each year visited by thousands who feel genuine affection for him in spite of his shortcomings. Masterpieces.--His best work consists of two poems, _The Traveler_ and _The Deserted Village_; a story, _The Vicar of Wakefield_; and a play,_She Stoops to Conquer_. The object of _The Traveler_ (1765), a highly polished moral and didactic poem, was to show that happiness is independent of climate, and hence to justify the conclusion:-- "Vain, very vain, my weary search to find That bliss which only centers in the mind." _The Deserted Village_ (1770) also has a didactic aim, for which we care little. Its finest parts, those which impress us most, were suggested to Goldsmith by his youthful experiences. We naturally remember the sympathetic portrait of the poet's father, "the village preacher":-- "A man he was to all the country dear And passing rich with forty pounds a year. * * * * * His house was known to all the vagrant train; He chid their wanderings but relieved their pain." The lines relating to the village schoolmaster are almost as well known as Scripture. Previous to this time, the eighteenth century had not produced a poem as natural, sincere, and sympathetic in its descriptions and portraits as _The Deserted Village_. _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is a delightful romantic novel, which Andrew Lang classes among books "to be read once a year." Goldsmith's own criticism of the story in the _Advertisement_ announcing it has not yet been surpassed:--