OLITEB. GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK n.
1758. school of Ashford in Kent,* and having the consequence and%
mlo. pretension of a so-called learned man, we are not going, said
Goldsmith, "to permit an ostentation of learning pass for
" merit, nor to give a pedant quarter on the score of his
" industry alone, even though he took refuge hehind Arabic,
" or powdered his head with Hieroglyphics." f
In the garret of Griffiths, he would hardly have conceded
so much; and since then, the world had not been teaching
him. literary charity. These Ovid translations had not
unnaturally turned his thoughts upon the master of the art;
on him. who was the father of authorship by profession; and
the melancholy image which arose to a mind so strongly
disposed to entertain it then, of great "Dryden ever poor," J
and obliged by his miseries to suffer fleeting performances
to be "quartered on the lasting merit of his name," did
not the more entitle to any mercy which truth could not
challenge for them, these gentlemen of a more thriving
profession who had thrust themselves uninvited and
unqualified on the barren land of authorship. "But let
" not the reader imagine," he said, " we can find pleasure
" in thus exposing absurdities which are too ludicrous for
" serious reproof. While we, censure as critics, we feel as
* The second title of his translation runs thus : "Being part of a poetical or
" oratorical lecture, read in the grammar-school of Ashford, in the county of
" Kent; and calculated to initiate youth in the first rudiments of taste."
f Critical Review, vii. 38, January 1759.
J I am glad to record that, amid many heresies that forbid me to claim the merit
of a sound or deep critical faculty for Goldsmith, he had a •well-grounded and
steady admiration for Dryden, which he often justified in language "worthy of it.
" The English tongue," he said, in the eighth number of the See, " is greatly his
"debtor. It was his pen that formed the Congreves, the Priors, and the
" Addisons, who succeeded him ; and had it not been for Dryden, -we never
" should have known a Pope, at least in the meridian lustre he now displays.
" But Dryden's excellencies, as a writer, were not confined to poetry alone. There
"is, in his prose writings, an ease and elegance that have never yet been so well
" united in works of taste or criticism."