excellent Mr. Burchell with the paltry Sophia; Olivia--but no, Olivia is
not so certainly happy ever after; she has a captured husband ready for
her in a state of ignominy, but she has also a forgotten farmer somewhere
in the background--the unhappy man whom, with her father's permission,
this sorry heroine had promised to marry in order that his wooing might
pluck forward the lagging suit of the squire.

Olivia, then, plays her common trick upon the harmless Williams, her
father conniving, with a provision that he urges with some demonstration
of virtue: she shall consent to make the farmer happy if the proposal of
the squire be not after all forthcoming. But it is so evident her author
knew no better, that this matter may pass. It involves a point of
honour, of which no one--neither the maker of the book nor anyone he
made--is aware. What is better worth considering is the fact that
Goldsmith was completely aware of the unredeemed vulgarity of the ladies
of the Idyll, and cheerfully took it for granted as the thing to be
expected from the mother-in-law of a country gentleman and the daughters
of a scholar. The education of women had sunk into a degradation never
reached before, inasmuch as it was degraded in relation to that of men.
It would matter little indeed that Mrs. Primrose "could read any English
book without much spelling" if her husband and son were as definitely
limited to journeyman's field-labour as she was to the pickling and the
gooseberry wine. Any of those industries is a better and more liberal
business than unselect reading, for instance, or than unselect writing.
Therefore let me not be misunderstood to complain too indiscriminately of
that century or of an unlettered state. What is really unhandsome is the
new, slovenly, and corrupt inequality whereinto the century had fallen.

That the mother of daughters and sons should be fatuous, a village
worldling, suspicious, ambitious, ill-bred, ignorant, gross, insolent,