ABSTRACT
The utmost and most charitable ingenuity can only say that Oliver Goldsmith's business was not fact but fiction; and that in this last he was utterly and felicitously genuine. Any child that had any doubts about the Vicar should be spanked and bread-and-watered, if not actually cupboarded, in the good old style. Between the periods, however, of merely uncritical enjoyment and that of placid chewing the cud of purely sweet fancy, all bitters of criticism got over, there are few more interesting exercises of that criticism itself than those suggested by this Vicar. That Goldsmith should himself, and independently, have put the cap on, and then taken it off, does not seem very likely. Mr. Dobson most justly describes as "a most characteristic sentence, but too nearly applicable to Goldsmith himself to be allowed to stand". But as Balzac said one of his own work, "Let them come to the real business!" to The Vicar of Wakefield itself.
