Author: Richard Ashe King

Publisher:

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9781330520864

Excerpt from Oliver Goldsmith My chief and perhaps sole qualification for undertaking this sketch of Goldsmith's life is that of an Irishman who, through long residence in England, has come to understand how the "Poor Poll" and "Inspired Idiot" idea of the poet became current in his own day and survives still to-day. There is no triter quotation from Boswell than that of Goldsmith's retort to the ridicule by Johnson of his contention that "It was difficult to make little fishes in a fable talk in character." When Johnson roared his ridicule, Goldsmith was nettled into the retort: "Why, Mr Johnson, this is not so easy as you seem to think; for if you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like Whales." Now, there is the complementary difficulty of getting whales to understand the prattle of little fishes, which explains much of the social contempt of Goldsmith's English contemporaries and biographers. No Irishman can live long in England without an occasional, if not continual, sense of his own colloquial frivolity. The well-balanced and well-ballasted British intellect cannot always follow that cock-boat dancing on every wave to every wind which an Irishman is pleased to call his mind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.