In this sketch ‘the decent church,’ at the top of the hill in the distance, is an important object, from its exact correspondence with the situation given it in the poem. Half-way up stands the solitary ruin of Lord Dillon’s castle. The hill in shadow, on the left, is above the village, and is supposed to be alluded to in the line— Up yonder hill the distant murmur rose. A flat of bogland extends from the narrow lake in the centre to the mount on the right of the foreground (p. 84). THE PARSONAGE. A south view from the Athlone road, which runs parallel with the stone wall, and nearly east and west: the gateway is that mentioned in Goldsmith’s letter,* the mount being directly opposite, in a field contiguous with the road. * See note to l. 114 of _The Deserted Village_. The ruinous stone wall in this and three other sketches, which is a frequent sort of fence in the neighbourhood, gives a characteristic propriety to the line (48) And the long grass o’ertops the mould’ring wall. (pp. 84–5). [Illustration: ] THE PARSONAGE (R. H. Newell) THE SCHOOL-HOUSE. This cottage is situated, as the poem describes it, by the road-side, just where it forms a sharp angle by branching out from the village eastward: at this point a south-west view was taken (p. 85). Newell’s book was reissued in 1820; but no alterations were made in the foregoing descriptions which, it must be borne in mind, refer to 1806–9. His enthusiastic identifications will no doubt be taken by the reader with the needful grain of salt. Goldsmith probably remembered the hawthorn bush, the church upon the hill, the watercress gatherer, and some other familiar objects of the ‘seats of his youth.’ But distance added charm to the regretful retrospect; and in the details his fancy played freely with his memories. It would be unwise, for example, to infer—as Mr. Hogan did—the decorations of the _Three Pidgeons_ at Lissoy from the account of the inn in the poem.* Some twelve years before its publication, when he was living miserably in Green Arbour Court, Goldsmith had submitted to his brother Henry a sample of a heroi-comic poem describing a Grub Street writer in bed in ‘a paltry ale-house.’ In this ‘the sanded floor,’ the ‘twelve good rules’ and the broken tea-cups all played their parts as accessories, and even the double-dealing chest had its prototype in the poet’s night-cap, which was ‘a cap by night—a stocking all the day.’ A year or two later he expanded these lines in the _Citizen of the World_, and the scene becomes the Red Lion in Drury Lane. From this second version he adapted, or extended again, the description of the inn parlour in _The Deserted Village_. It follows therefore, either that he borrowed for