of a gay spendthrift and again the besoiled uniform of a broken soldier. As these waifs of humanity come and go, as they one by one fill that hospitable chair and are warmed and fed, the one figure which is permanent in the picture is that of the godly host, and his face is ever radiant with tender sympathy. In this lowly cottage, where parting life is laid, it is the same venerable figure, the same kindly face, that bends in loving sorrow over the humble bed. Along the village street, too, we recognise that well-known form, and as the children pluck the flowing gown the same serene countenance bathes them in its smiles. Even when we enter the village church on the holy day of rest, we find the same benign figure claiming of natural right the high position of leader among the simple worshippers within its walls. And as these pictures brighten and face in the chamber of memory we repeat softly to ourselves:

"Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride,
And e'en his failings leaned to virtue's side;
But in his duty prompt at every call,

He watched and wept, he prayed and felt for all;
And, as a bird each fond endearment tries
To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies,
He tried each art, reproved each dull delay,
Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way."

VI

GOLDSMITH'S "DESERTED VILLAGE"

"Who, of the millions whom he has amused, does not love him? To be the most loved of English writers, what a title that for a man!" WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.

THERE is one village we all know and love. The eye of sense may never have rested on its grassy lanes, the ear of sense may never have heard the subdued murmur of its quiet sounds, but its beauties and its harmonies dwell apart in the imagination of us all. Familiar, too, as any friends of flesh and blood are the actors who play their part on this rural stage.

Chief among them, and kindly father of all, stands the village preacher, whose heart's gates were flung as wide open as the doors of his modest home. We know him in his home, in the village street, by the bedside of departing life, and in the church, where

"Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway." By the glowing light of his fireside we discern now the form of an aged beggar, anon the wreck

and "no" almost in the same breath. "All Goldsmith's phantasies," he says first, "are phantasies of what may be called reminiscence. Less than even Smollett, did Goldsmith invent. . . . He drew on recollections of his own life, on the history of his own family, on the characters of his relatives, on whimsical incidents that had happened to him in his Irish youth." But Professor Masson soon forgets his own statements, and then adds that "we are in England and not in Ireland when we read "The Deserted Village." This is rather bewildering, but happily Mr. William Black dispels the criticisms of Lord Macaulay and Professor Masson by the penetrating remark that they overlook one of the radical facts of human nature, that is, the magnifying delight of the mind in what is long remembered and remote. "What was it," Mr. Black asks, "that the imagination of Goldsmith, in his life-long banishment, could not see when he looked back to the home of his childhood, and his early friends, and the sports and occupations of his youth? Lishoy was no doubt a poor enough Irish village; and perhaps the farms were not too well cultivated; and perhaps the village preacher, who was so dear to all the country round, had to administer many a thrashing to a certain graceless son of his; and

born.

by in which Thackeray makes Goldsmith to be Of course he was wrong in naming Lishoy as Goldsmith's natal place, for that honour belongs to Pallas in county Longford; but as Lishoy was the home of his boyhood it possesses quite equal interest for the literary pilgrim.

While Oliver Goldsmith was creating his picture of "The Deserted Village,” had he any model before him? Lord Macaulay answers emphatically in the negative, and affirms that there never was any such hamlet as Auburn in Ireland. On the other hand Professor Masson replies "yes"

smith spent in Athlone at that "school of repute❞ kept by the Rev. Mr. Campbell. No one knows the fate of that school; its locality in the town and its history subsequent to the pupilage of its most famous scholar are as shrouded in mystery as the place of his burial in the Temple graveyard. Thwarted, then, of the pleasure of paying homage at that shrine, it only remains for the lover of Goldsmith to diffuse his adoration among those aspects of the town upon which the eye of his hero must have fallen. There are, of course, many houses in the principal street which have survived the ravages of a century and a half, including one three-storied building, once occupied by some of Goldsmith's family; but probably the hand of time has rested with the most ineffective touch upon the sturdy walls of Athlone Castle. Some seven centuries have come and gone since those walls first saw their own outlines reflected in the placid waters of the Shannon, and between then and now the castle has played no inconspicuous part in Irish history.

But Athlone" the ford of the moon," from Ath Luain, a name given because there was a ford here used in pagan times by worshippers of the moon is of primary interest just now as the starting-point for a visit to that village hard