This ingenuous elegance is the accent of Goldsmith's work in verse and prose. It is nature improved, not from without but by exquisite and esoteric art, the better to prove its innate virtue and display its artless charm. Such a style is based upon a delicate "sensibility to the graces of natural and moral beauty and decorum." Hence the ideographic power, the directness, the sympathy, the lambent humor that characterize the 'Essays,' the 'Vicar,' the 'Deserted Village,' and 'She Stoops to Conquer.' This is the "plain language of ancient faith and sincerity" that, pretending to no novelty, renovated the prose of the eighteenth century, knocked the stilts from under Addison and Steele, tipped half the Latinity out of Johnson, and readjusted his ballast. Goldsmith goes without sprawling or tiptoeing; he sails without rolling. He borrows the carelessness but not the ostentation of the Spectator; the dignity but not the ponderosity of 'Rasselas'; and produces the prose of natural ease, the sweetest English of the century. It in turn prefaced the way for Charles Lamb, Hunt, and Sydney Smith. "It were to be wished that we no longer found pleasure with the inflated style," writes Goldsmith in his 'Polite Learning.' "We should dispense with loaded epithet and dressing up trifles with dignity.... Let us, instead of writing finely, try to write naturally; not hunt after lofty expressions to deliver mean ideas, nor be forever gaping when we only mean to deliver a whisper." Just this naturalness constitutes the charm of the essay on 'The Bee' (1759), and of the essays collected in 1765. We do not read him for information: whether he knows more or less of his subject, whether he writes of Charles XII., or Dress, The Opera, Poetry, or Education, we read him for simplicity and humor. Still, his critical estimates, while they may not always square with ours, evince not only good sense and æsthetic principle, but a range of reading not at all ordinary. When he condemns Hamlet's great soliloquy we may smile, but in judicial respect for the father of our drama he yields to none of his contemporaries. The selections that he includes in his 'Beauties of English Poetry' would argue a conventional taste; but in his 'Essay on Poetry Distinguished from the Other Arts,' he not only defines poetry in terms that might content the Wordsworthians, he [Pg 6503] also to a certain extent anticipates Wordsworth's estimate of poetic figures.