are those exalted in the literature of sentimentalism, as, for example,
in his contemporary, Langhorne's _Country Justice_. _The Deserted
Village_ was in point of fact an imaginative idyll,--the supreme idyll of
English poetry; but Goldsmith insisted that it was a realistic record
of actual conditions. Yet he could never have observed such an English
village, either in its depopulated and decayed state (as Macaulay has
remarked), or in its rosy prosperity and unsullied virtue; his economic
history and theory were misleading. Like Macpherson, but through
self-delusion rather than intent, he was engaged in an effort to deceive
by giving sentimental doctrines a basis of apparent actuality. But the
world has forgotten or forgiven his pious fraud in its gratitude for the
loveliness of his art.