emotion, of his chequered life; and so made them a lesson and a delight to all men.

Good predominant over evil is briefly the purpose and moral of the little story. It is designed to show us that patience in suffering, that persevering reliance on the providence of God, that quiet labour, cheerful endeavour, and an indulgent forgiveness of the faults and infirmities of others, are the easy and certain means of pleasure in this world, and of turning pain to noble uses. It is designed to show us that the heroism and self-denial needed for the duties of life are not of the superhuman sort; that they may co-exist with many follies, with some simple weaknesses, with many harmless vanities; and that in the improvement of mankind, near and remote, in its progress through worldly content to final happiness, the humblest of men have their place assigned them, and their part allotted them to play.

There had been, in light amusing fiction, no such scene as that where Doctor Primrose, surrounded by the mocking felons of the gaol into which his villainous creditor has thrown him, finds in even those wretched outcasts a common nature to appeal to, minds to instruct, sympathies to bring back to virtue, souls to restore and save. In less than a fortnight I had formed them into something social and humane.' Into how many hearts may this have planted a desire which had as yet become no man's care! Not yet had Howard turned his thoughts to the prison, Romilly was but a boy of nine years old, and Elizabeth Fry had not been born. In Goldsmith's day, as for centuries before it, the gaol existed as the gallows' portal: it was crime's high school, where Law presided over the science of law-breaking, and did its best to spread guilt abroad. This prison,' says Dr. Primrose, makes men guilty where it does not find them so: it incloses wretches for the commission of one crime, and returns them, if returned alive, fitted for the perpetration of thousands.' With what consequence? New vices call for fresh restraints; penal laws, which are in the hands of the rich, are laid upon the poor; and all our paltriest possessions are hung round with gibbets.' It scares men now to be told of what no man then took heed. Deliberate murders were committed by the state. It was but four years after this that the government which had reduced a young wife to beggary by pressing her husband to sea, sentenced her to death for entering a draper's shop, taking some coarse linen off the co nter, and laying it down again as the shopman gazed at her;

listened unmoved to a defence which might have penetrated stone, that inasmuch, since her husband was stolen from her, she had had no bed to lie upon, nothing to clothe her children, nothing to give them to eat, perhaps she might have done something wrong, for she hardly knew what she did; and finally sent her to Tyburn, with her infant sucking at her breast. Not without reason did Horace Walpole call the country one great shambles.' Hardly a Monday passed that was not Black Monday at Newgate. An execution came round as regularly as any other weekly show; and when it was that shocking sight of fifteen men executed,' whereof Boswell makes more than one mention, the interest was of course the greater. Men not otherwise hardened, found here a debasing delight. George Selwyn passed as much time at Tyburn as at White's; and Mr. Boswell had a special suit of execution black, to make a decent appearance near the scaffold. Not uncalled for, therefore, though solitary and as yet unheeded, was the warning of the good Doctor Primrose. Nay, not uncalled for is it now, though eighty years have passed. Do not,' he said, draw the cords of society so hard, that a convulsion must come to burst them; do not cut away wretches as useless, before you have tried their utility; make law the protector, not the tyrant of the people. You will then find that creatures, whose souls are held as dross, want only the hand of a refiner; and that very little blood will serve to cement our security.'

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Resemblances have been found, and may be admitted to exist, between Charles Primrose and Mr. Abraham Adams. They arose from kindred genius; and from the manly habit which Fielding and Goldsmith shared, of discerning what was good and beautiful in the homeliest aspects of humanity. In the Parson's saddle-bag of sermons would hardly have been found this prison sermon of the Vicar: and there was in Mr. Adams not only a capacity for beef and pudding, but for beating and being beaten, which would ill have consisted with the simple dignity of Doctor Primrose. But unquestionable learning, unsuspecting simplicity, amusing traits of credulity and pedantry, and a most Christian purity and benevolence of heart, are common to both these master-pieces of English fiction; and are in each with such exquisite touch discriminated, as to leave no possible doubt of the origi nality of either. Anything like the charge of imitation is preposterous. Fielding's friend, Young, sat for the Parson, as in Goldsmith's father,

Charles, we have seen the original of the Vicar; and as long as nature pleases to imitate herself will such simple-hearted spirits reveal kindred with each other. At the same time, and with peculiar mastery, art vindicates in such cases her power and skill; and the general truth of the resemblance is after all perceived to be much less striking than the local accidents of difference. Does it not well nigh seem incredible, indeed, comparing the tone of style and incident in the two stories, that a space of twenty years should have comprised Joseph Andrews and the Vicar of Wakefield?

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Little, it must be confessed, had past experience in fiction, from the days of De Foe to those of Smollett, prepared the age for a simple novel of English domestic life. Least of all for that picture, so purely and delicately shaded, of the Vicar, in his character of pastor, of pa rent, and of husband; of his helpmate, with her motherly cunning and housewifely prudence, loving and respecting him, but at the dictates of maternal vanity counterplotting his wisest schemes;' of both, with their children around them, their quiet labour and domestic happiness: which Walter Scott declares to be without a parallel, in all his novel reading, as a fireside picture of perfect beauty. It may be freely admitted that there are many grave faults, some improbabilities, some even palpable absurdities, in the construction of the story. Goldsmith knew this. There are a hundred faults in this thing,' he said, in his brief advertisement to it; and a hundred things might be said to prove them beauties. But it is needless.' (His meaning is, that to make beauties out of faults, be the proof ever so successful, does not mend the matter.) A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity.' He rested, with well-grounded faith, on the vital reality of his characters. It is wonderful with what nice variety the family likeness of each Primrose is preserved, and how little the defects of the story interfere with any of them. Cannot one see that there is a propriety, an eternal fitness, in even the historical family picture? Those rosy Flamborough girls, who do nothing but flaunt in red top-knots, hunt the slipper, burn nuts, play tricks, dance country dances, and scream with laughter; who have not the least idea of high life or high lived company, or such fashionable topics as pictures, taste, Shakspere, and the musicalglasses; how should it be possible for them to have any other notion or desire than just to be painted in their red top-knots, each holding

an orange? But Olivia Primrose! who, to her mother's knowledge, has a great deal to say upon every subject, and is very well skilled in controversy; who has read Thwackum and Square's disputes in Tom Jones, the argument of man Friday and his master in Robinson Crusoe, and the dialogues in Religious Courtship: is it not somehow quite as much in character with the flighty vivacity of this ambitious little Livy, that she should wish to be drawn as an Amazon sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green joseph richly laced with gold, a whip in her hand, and the young squire as Alexander the Great lying captive at her feet; as it certainly suits the more sober simplicity and prudent good sense of her sister Sophy, to figure in the same composition as a shepherdess, with as many sheep as the painter can put in for nothing? Mrs. Deborah Primrose, triumphing in her lamb's-wool and gooseberry-wine, and claiming to be represented as the mother of Love, with plenty of diamonds in her hair and stomacher, is at first a little startling: but it admits of an excellent introduction of honest old Dick and chubby little Bill by way of Cupids; and to what conceivable creature so much in need as Venus of conversion to monogamy, could the Vicar, in his gown and band,' have presented his books on the Whistonian Controversy? There remains only Moses to complete the masterpiece; and is not his hat and white feather' typical of both his arguments and his bargains, his sale of Dobbin, the colt, and his purchase of the gross of green spectacles? The simple, credulous, generous, inoffensive family habits are common to all; but in each a separate identity is yet as broadly marked, as in the Amazon, the Venus, or the Shepherdess, of the immortal family picture.

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Still, from all that touches and diverts us in these harmless vanities of the delightful group, we return to the primal source of what has given this glorious little story its unequalled popularity. It is not simply that a happy fireside is depicted there, but that it is one over which calamity and sorrow can only cast the most temporary shade. In his deepest distress, the Vicar has but to remember how much kinder Heaven is to us, than we are to ourselves, and how few are the misfortunes of Nature's making, to recover his cheerful patience. There never was a book in which indulgence and charity made virtue look so lustrous. Nobody is straight-laced, if we except Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, whose pretensions are summed up in Burchell's noble monosyllable. Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue

VOL. IV.

P

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is worth any price; but where is that to be found?' Fudge.' When worldly reverses visit the good Doctor Primrose, they are of less account than the equanimity they cannot deprive him of; than the belief in good, to which they only give wider scope; than the happiness which, even in its worldliest sense, they ultimately strengthen by enlarged activity, and increased necessity for labour. It is only when struck through the sides of his children, that for an instant his faith gives way. Most lovely is the pathos of that scene; so briefly and beautifully told. The little family at night are gathered round a charming fire, telling stories of the past, laying schemes for the future, and listening to Moses's thoughtful opinion of matters and things in general, to the effect that all things, in his judgment, go on very well, and that he has just been thinking, when sister Livy is married to Farmer Williams, they'll get the loan of his cyder-press and brewing-tubs for nothing. The best gooseberry wine has been this night much in request. Let us have one bottle more, Deborah, my life,' says the Vicar, and, Moses, give us a good song. darling Olivia?' Little Dick comes running in. is gone from us, she is gone for ever! 6 Gone, child!' in a post-chaise, and one of them kissed her, and said he would die for her; and she cried very much, and was for coming back; but he persuaded her again, and she went into the chaise, and said, O what will my poor papa do when he knows I am undone!' Now then, my

sir,

But where is my ‘O papa, papa, she

from us, my sister Livy is gone from us Yes, she is gone off with two gentlemen

children, go and be miserable; for we shall never enjoy one hour more;' and the old man, struck to the heart, cannot help cursing the seducer. But Moses is mindful of happier teaching, and with a loving simplicity rebukes his father. 'You should be my mother's comforter, and you increase her pain. You should not have curst him, villain as he is.' 'I did not curse him, child, did I?' 'Indeed, sir, you did; you curst him twice.' 'Then may Heaven forgive me and him if I did.' Charity resumes its place in his heart; with forgiveness, happiness half visits him again; by kindly patience even Deborah's reproaches are subdued and stayed; he takes back with most affecting tenderness his penitent child; and the voices of all his children are heard once more in their simple concert on the honeysuckle bank. We feel that it is better than cursing; and are even content that the rascally young squire should have time and hope for a sort of shabby