DESERTED VILLAGE, The. The De serted Village,) the best known of Oliver Goldsmith's poems, appeared in May 1770, and reached a 5th edition by August of that year. There has never been any marked .diminution of the favor in which it is held by lovers of poetry, though pentameter couplets and didacti cism were even in 1770 not the newest poetic fashion and were soon dispossessed. Gold smith's couplets, less epigrammatic than Pope's and less austere than Dr. Johnson's, are easier and more natural than those of either of his masters, not because Goldsmith paid less at tention to his workmanship but because he gave his measure, by means of unusual variety of pauses and a singularly limpid diction, a flow ing rhythm that matches the deeper rhythm of his genuine emotion. The didactic element grew out of his wish to exhibit the harm done by those rich men who, merely to enlarge their private grounds, buy up neighboring farms or villages and drive the inhabitants out. Doubt
less he was somewhat melodramatic in his plea, but the evil did exist, as it does still, and he merely used a poet's weapons against selfish and inhumane luxury. Argument, however, is not the essential merit of the poem. Grief at finding his native village deserted and in ruins brings back to the poet, who is partly Gold smith himself and partly a mere poetic general ization, the memory of its prosperous days. The images which rise within him — the even ing sports on the green, the parsonage, the schoolhouse, the inn — are described with an exquisite fidelity, a kindly humor, a tender sym pathy and an unexcelled felicity of language which, even if there had never been such an abuse as Goldsmith wrote against, would have made his poem unforgettable and universal.