he tells us that Naseby is in Yorkshire; nor did he correct this
mistake when the book was reprinted. He was very nearly hoaxed
into putting into the "History of Greece" an account of the
battle between Alexander the Great and Montezuma. In his
"Animated Nature" he relates, with faith and with perfect
gravity, all the most absurd lies which he could find in books of
travels about gigantic Patagonians, monkeys that preach sermons,
nightingales that repeat long conversations. "If he can tell a
horse from a cow," said Johnson, "that is the extent of his
knowledge of zoology." How little Goldsmith was qualified to
write about the physical sciences is sufficiently proved by two
anecdotes. He on one occasion denied that the sun is longer in
the northern than in the southern signs. It was vain to cite the
authority of Maupertuis. "Maupertuis!" he cried, "I understand
those matters better than Maupertuis." On another occasion he,
in defiance of the evidence of his own senses, maintained
obstinately, and even angrily, that he chewed his dinner by
moving his upper jaw.

Yet, ignorant as Goldsmith was, few writers have done more to
make the first steps in the laborious road to knowledge easy and
pleasant. His compilations are widely distinguished from the
compilations of ordinary book-makers. He was a great, perhaps an
unequalled, master of the arts of selection and condensation. In
these respects his histories of Rome and of England, and still
more his own abridgements of these histories, well deserve to be
studied. In general nothing is less attractive than an epitome:
but the epitomes of Goldsmith, even when most concise, are always
amusing; and to read them is considered by intelligent children,
not as a task, but as a pleasure.