Goldsmith´s attitude towards sentalism and towards "trade" are cases in point and can be studied in The Vicar of Wakefield. The plot of the Vicar is not complex: clouds gather more and more blackly over the poor Primroses; finally when their complete misery seems assured, the sun shines out, all woes vanish, and we leave the family living happily ever afterwards. Goldsmith loved to portray simplicity, but his love of idyllic simplicity was curiously modified by economic considerations. After the South Sea Bubble a conservative reaction towards a trust in the land as the source of ealth and well-being prepared the way for the idealized farmer-philosopher.
   Goldsmith lavishly uses "distress" as material; but his attitude towards distress demands acute attention. The distresses of the Sentinel are so gross as to be absurd: they are far from moving tears, and at the end of the essay one can see the logical conclusion: 'Thus saying, he limped off, leaving my friend and me ib admiration of his intrepidity and content; nor could we avoid aknowledging that an habitual acquaitance with misery is the truest school of fortitude and philosophy'. Similarly we are told in The Vicar that 'after a certain degree of pain, every new breach that death opens in the constitution, nature kindly covers with insensibility'. Submission, intrepidity, fortitude, these are the lessons Goldsmith wishes us to learn from the distresses of the virtuous. The tone of the novel is emotional and benevolist, but it must be noted that the good vicar himself is habitual caustic as to the absurdities of his socially ambitious females. The popularity of the book was and is doubtless due not to its overt moral purpose but to the author´s attitude towards his material. Like his vicar, he seems "by nature an admirer of happy human faces", preferably faces distinctly self-conscious in their happiness.

References:
Routledge & Kegan P. (1967). A Literary History of England, U.K.: Edited by Albert C. Baugh 2nd edition