Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

Goldsmith warns that popular fiction can idealize life beyond what nature and ordinary experience provide. By “painting beauty” in heightened colors and depicting an unattainable “consummate bliss,” romances and novels may cultivate unrealistic expectations about love, pleasure, and fulfillment. The result is not merely harmless escapism: such images can be “deceptive and destructive,” leaving readers dissatisfied with real relationships and everyday joys, or prompting them to chase fantasies that reality cannot sustain. The passage reflects an eighteenth-century moral concern about the psychological and social effects of sentimental literature—its power to shape desire, judgment, and contentment.