Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, is only the first of a series which includes _The School for Scandal, The Importance of being Earnest_, and _You Never can Tell_.

And his essays--particularly those of the _Citizen of the World_ with its Chinese vision of England and English life--are the first fruit of that Irish detachment, that ability to see "normally" English habits and institutions and foibles which in our own day has given us the prefaces of Mr.Shaw.As a writer Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate ease which belongs rather to the school of the earlier eighteenth century than to his own day; the enthusiasm of Addison for French literature which he retained gave him a more graceful model than the "Johnsonian" school, to which he professed himself to belong, could afford.
(3) The eighteenth century novel demands separate treatment, and of the other prose authors the most eminent, Edward Gibbon, belongs to historical rather than to literary studies.

It is time to turn to poetry.
There orthodox classicism still held sway; the manner and metre of Pope or Thomson ruled the roost of singing fowl.

In the main it had done its work, and the bulk of fresh things conceived in it were dull and imitative, even though occasionally, as in the poems of Johnson himself and of Goldsmith, an author arose who was able to infuse sincerity and emotion into a now moribund convention.

The classic manner--now more that of Thomson than of Pope--persisted till it overlapped romanticism; Cowper and Crabbe each owe a doubtful allegiance, leaning by their formal metre and level monotony of thought to the one and by their realism to the other.