Complete and unabridged, with 42 full-page plates by William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough and J. M. W. Turner. A country clergyman with a large family, a small fortune and an unshakable good opinion of himself loses the money in the first chapter, and things proceed downhill with perfect cheerfulness. Goldsmith failed at medicine, teaching and the church, wandered Europe playing the flute for meals, and — the story goes — sold this manuscript overnight to keep his landlady from having him arrested. Forty-two plates of the period's domestic and landscape painting, from Gainsborough to Chardin, give the clergyman's household and its rural world a visual setting.