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Life Of Oliver Goldsmith, The (BCL1-PR English Literature)
Life Of Oliver Goldsmith The - BCL1-PR English Literature Author:John Forster Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HUME AND SMOLLET 73 Review he noticed the collection into four small volumes of the Connoisseur and the appearance in its three-shilling pamphlet of A Philoso... more »phical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, The Connoisseur he honoured with the tide of friend of society, wherein reference was possibly intended to the defective side of that lectureship of society to which the serious and resolute author of the Rambler had been lately self-appointed perpetual professor. " He rather converses," said Goldsmith, " with the ease of a cheerful companion, than dictates, as other writers in this class have done, with the affected superiority of an author. He is the first writer since Bickerstaff who has been perfectly satirical yet perfectly good-natured ; and who never, for the sake of declamation, represents simple folly as absolutely criminal. He has solidity to please the grave, and humour and wit to allure the gay." Our author by compulsion seemed here to anticipate his authorship by choice, and with indistinct yet hopeful glance beyond his Dunciad and its deities, perhaps turned with better faith to Burke's essay on the Beautiful. His criticism was elaborate and well-studied ; he objected to many parts of the theory, and especially to the materialism on which it founded the connection of objects of pleasure with a necessary relaxation of the nerves ; but these objections, discreet and well-considered, gave strength and relish to its praise, and Burke spoke to many of his friends of the pleasure it had given him. And now appeared, in three large quarto volumes, followed within six months by a fourth, the Complete History of England, deduced from the Descent of Julius Carsar to the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle in 1748. Containing the Transactions of One Thous...« less