Sir Timothy, however, suffers for his injustice and wickedness, for
"great part of the land lay untilled for some years, which was deemed
a just reward for such diabolical proceedings."

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

Miss Charlotte Yonge, to whom I shall refer again, lays upon this: "If
the conjecture be true which attributes this tale to Oliver Goldsmith,
we have seen the same spirit which prompted his poem of 'The Deserted
Village,' namely, indignation and dismay at the discouragement of
small holdings in the early part of the eighteenth century."[C]
Indeed, it may well be that we have in this preface even a more true
picture of Lissoy than that given in the poem, which, as Mr William
Black says in his monograph on Goldsmith, "is there seen through the
softening and beautifying mist of years."

Much more might be said of the characteristics of this little book,
which contains so much that reminds us not only of the style but the
matter of many of Goldsmith's writings. Miss Yonge says: "There is a
certain dry humour in some passages and a tenderness in others that
incline us much to the belief that it could come from no one else but
the writer of 'The Vicar of Wakefield' and 'The Deserted Village.'
Indeed, we could almost imagine that Dr Primrose himself had described
the panic at the supposed ghost in the church in the same tone as the
ride to church, the family portrait, or the gross of green
spectacles.'[D] We find in "Goody Two Shoes" every one of those
distinctive qualities of Goldsmith's writings which Mr William Black
so well summarizes in the book already referred to--"his genuine and