the squire has not declared himself, and she is on the point of keeping
her word to Williams by marrying him, the Vicar creates a situation out
of it all that takes the reader roundly by surprise: "I frequently
applauded her resolution in preferring happiness to ostentation." The
good Goldsmith! Here is Olivia perfectly frank with her father as to her
exceedingly sincere preference for ostentation, and as to her stratagem
to try to obtain it at the expense of honour and of neighbour Williams;
her mind is as well known to her father as her father's mind is known to
Oliver Goldsmith, and as Oliver Goldsmith's, Dr. Primrose's, and Olivia's
minds are known to the reader. And in spite of all, your Goldsmith and
your Vicar turn you this phrase to your very face. You hardly know which
way to look; it is so disconcerting.

Seeing that Olivia (with her chance-recovered virtue) and Sophia may both
be expected to grow into the kind of matronhood represented by their
mother, it needs all the conditions of fiction to surround the close of
their love-affairs with the least semblance of dignity. Nor, in fact,
can it be said that the final winning of Sophia is an incident that errs
by too much dignity. The scene is that in which Burchell, revealed as
Sir William Thornhill, feigns to offer her in marriage to the
good-natured rogue, Jenkinson, fellow prisoner with her father, in order
that, on her indignant and distressed refusal, he may surprise her
agreeably by crying, "What? Not have him? If that be the case, I think
I must have you myself." Even for an avowedly eccentric master of whims,
this is playing with forbidden ironies. True, he catches her to his
breast with ardour, and calls her "sensible." "Such sense and such
heavenly beauty," finally exclaims the happy man. Let us make him a
present of the heavenly beauty. It is the only thing not disproved, not
dispraised, not disgraced, by a candid study of the Ladies of the Idyll.