Volume 6, Number 7 · April 28, 1966
A Good-Natured Man
By Denis Donoghue
Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith
edited by Arthur Friedman
Oxford, 5 volumes pp., $53.80 the set
Goldsmith must be read in bulk. The works on which his reputation depends fit snugly in two of Mr. Friedman's volumes, but these give a misleading impression. We think of Goldsmith as the author of The Vicar of Wakefield The Good-Natured Man, She Stoops to Conquer, the essays, the poems, especially The Deserted Village and The Traveller. This is fair enough. But the story implied in the list is incomplete. To take its full weight we have to include the things he wrote as a bookseller's hack, the compilations, translations, and biographies. Of this stuff it is necessary to say, as Goldsmith said of Prior's Alma: 'There are some parts very fine; and let them save the badness of the rest.' But Goldsmith spent so much time and spirit as a hack that we exclude this part of his life only at the cost of making the picture prettier than it was. As he wrote of another unfortunate, Edward Purdon:—
Review, 2000 words
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