that The Deserted Village (1770) is about depopulation occurring in the countryside, which is a social change he says that he observed in his country excursions . 2 Ronald S. Crane denotes that The Deserted Village is recognised as a counterpart to The revolution in low life published in a letter form to the Editor of Lloyd's Evening Post, 1416 June 1762. 3 As Friedman puts in the introduction to The Deserted Village, 4 Goldsmith must have rested upon the political issue of depopulation in the

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... ummer of 1761: I spent part of the last summer in a little village, distant about fifty miles from town, consisting of near an hundred houses. It lay entirely out of the road of commerce, and was inhabited by a race of men who followed the primeval profession of agriculture for several generation. 5 Masson extends the themes of The Deserted Village into depopulation, luxury, and landlordism . 6 These themes connote the social change, that is, the enclosed fields triggered the social change of the traditional agricultural system of old open fields. This social change is considered in association with the new rising landlord, such as nabob 7 whom Goldsmith condemns in his essay, 'The revolution in low life , that Foreign commerce, as it can be managed only by a few, tends proportionably to enrich only a few... 8 and that they take possession of the new property by use of wealth made through trade. In a similar line, six years before the publication of The Deserted Village, The Traveller or a Prospect of Society (1764) records the social change: − 2 − The wealth of climes, where savage nations roam, Pillag'd from slaves to purchase slaves at home; .... (ll. 3878) 9 Likewise, in The Deserted Village the sons of wealth are named the trade's unfeeling train (l. 63). Under the theme of depopulation, Goldsmith affirms that the open field system began to be eroded by the new economic force of commerce and to be changed into the landscape garden. By contrast, labourers of the open field are represented as the Rural Virtues as the generic name to the villagers who are swept away by the trade's unfeeling train in The Deserted Village. Goldsmith also declares in the same dedication that the poem is composed in the manner of a professed ancient , 10 which evidently stands on the traditional view of the established order of society that his predecessors uphold, specifically Alexander Pope. They are, however, considered at once outmoded values in his time and the Tories; in The Traveller, his view is clearly exemplified in the lines, Till half a patriot, half a coward frown,/ If I fly from petty tyrants to the throne (ll. 391392). 11 In a similar context as Masson, John Barrell rests upon the absence of the hall in the poem. 12 The hall which has been convention