But to return to our sketch of English fiction, it is now delightful to find a snow-drop springing from this muck of the classics. In the year 1766 appeared Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_. One likes to recall the impression which the purity of this charming book made upon the German Goethe. Fifty years after Goethe had read it--or rather after Herder read to him a translation of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ while he was a law-student at Strasburg--the old poet mentions in one of his letters to Zelter the strong and healthy influence of this story upon him, just at the critical point of his mental development; and yesterday while reading the just published _Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle_ I found a pleasant pendant to this testimony of Goethe's in favor of Goldsmith's novel in an entry of the rugged old man in which he describes the far outlook and new wisdom which he managed to conquer from Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, after many repulsions. "Schiller done, I began _Wilhelm Meister_, a task I liked perhaps rather better, too scanty as my knowledge of the element, and even of the language, still was. Two years before I had at length, after some repulsion, got into the heart of _Wilhelm Meister_, and eagerly read it through; my sally out, after finishing, along the vacant streets of Edinburgh, a windless, Scotch-misty morning, is still vivid to me. 'Grand, serenely, harmoniously built together, far-seeing, wise and true. Where, for many years, or in my whole life before, have I read such a book?' Which I was now, really in part as a kind of duty, conscientiously translating for my countrymen, if they would read it--as a select few of them have ever since kept doing." Of the difference between the moral effect of Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ and the classical works just mentioned I need not waste your time in speaking. No great work in the English novel appears until we reach Scott whose _Waverley_ astonished the world in 1814; and during the intervening period from this book to the _Vicar of Wakefield_ perhaps there are no works notable enough to be mentioned in so rapid a sketch as this unless it be the society novels of Miss Burney, _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_, the dark and romantic stories of Mrs. Radcliffe, the _Caleb Williams_ of William Godwin--with which he believed he was making an epoch because it was a novel without love as a motive--Miss Edgeworth's moral tales and the quiet and elegant narratives of Jane Austen.