Oliver Goldsmith comprising The Vicar of Wakefield London Macmillan and Co. Limited New York The Macmillan Company BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THE one immortal novel, the poems and two comedies, here printed comprise all the writings of Oliver Goldsmith, which indisputably belong neither to journalism nor to hack-work. It is noteworthy that no publisher has ever had the courage to bring out a complete edition of his works, and since a selection had to be made it seemed best to confine the present volume to those of his writings which are on a uniform level of excellence. A man might be forced to decide which he would rather lose of The Vicar of Wakefield, She Stoops to Conquer, or The Deserted Village, but it would only be force which would extort a comparison between works equally good in their respective kinds. If the Citizen of the World were as good throughout as it is at its best, it might vie with these. None of Goldsmith's other works have any pretensions to the same excellence. To be consistent, we ought perhaps to have excluded a few of the miscellaneous poems, for the world would not have been perceptibly the poorer had neither The Captivity' nor the 'Threnodia Augustalis' ever been written. But the sum total of Goldsmith's poetry is so small that it would have been ungracious to pick and choose, and the Threnodia Augustalis' and 'The Captivity' are therefore here given. The bibliography of Goldsmith is not very interesting, |