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me not only a lodging, but subsistence for the next day. I once 66 or twice attempted to play for people of fashion; but they "always thought my performance odious, and never rewarded me even with a trifle. In plain words, he begged, as Holberg had done; supported by his cheerful spirit, and the thought that Holberg's better fate might also yet be his. Not, we may be sure, the dull round of professional labour, but intellectual distinction, popular fame, the applause and wonder of his old Irish associates, were now within the sphere of Goldsmith's vision; and what these will enable a man joyfully to endure, he afterwards bore witness to. "The perspective of life brightens upon us when terminated "by objects so charming. Every intermediate image of want, "banishment, or sorrow, receives a lustre from their distant "influence. With these in view, the patriot, philosopher, and "poet, have looked with calmness on disgrace and famine, and "rested on their straw with cheerful serenity." Straw, doubtless, was his own peasant-lodging often; but from it the wanderer arose, refreshed and hopeful, and bade the melody and sport resume, and played with a new delight to the music of enchanting verse already dancing in his brain,

Gay sprightly land of mirth and social ease,

Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please,
How often have I led thy sportive choir,
With tuneless pipe, beside the murmuring Loire,
Where shading elms along the margin grew,
And, freshen'd from the wave, the zephyr flew !
And haply, though my harsh touch, faltering still,
But mock'd all tune, and marr'd the dancer's skill,
Yet would the village praise my wondrous power,
And dance, forgetful of the noon-tide hour.
Alike all ages: dames of ancient days

Have led their children through the mirthful maze;
And the gay grandsire, skill'd in gestic lore,
Has frisk'd beneath the burden of threescore.
So bless'd a life these thoughtless realms display;
Thus idly busy rolls their world away.

Theirs are those arts that mind to mind endear,
For honour forms the social temper here:
Honour, that praise which real merit gains,
Or e'en imaginary worth obtains,

Here passes current-paid from hand to hand,
It shifts, in splendid traffic, round the land;
From courts to camps, to cottages it strays,
And all are taught an avarice of praise :
They please, are pleas'd, they give to get esteem,

Till, seeming bless'd, they grow to what they seem.

Arrived in Paris, he rested some brief space, and, for the time,

a sensible improvement is to be observed in his resources.

This is

not easily explained; for, as will appear a little later in our history, many applications to Ireland of this date remained altogether without answer, and a sad fate had fallen suddenly on his best friend. But in subsequent communication with his brother-in-law Hodson, he remarked, with that strange indifference to what was implied in such obligations which is not the agreeable side of his character, that there was hardly a kingdom in Europe in which he was not a debtor; and in Paris, if anywhere, he would find many hearts made liberal by the love of learning. His early memoir-writers assert with confidence, that in at least some small portion of these travels he acted as companion to a young man of large fortune (nephew to a pawnbroker, and articled-clerk to an attorney); and there are passages in the philosophic vagabond's adventures, which, if they did not themselves suggest the assertion (as they certainly supply the language) of those first biographers, would tend to bear it out. "I was to be the young "gentleman's governor, with a proviso that he should always be "permitted to govern himself. He was heir to a fortune of two "hundred thousand pounds, left him by an uncle in the West “Indies; and all his questions on the road were, how much 'money could be saved. Such curiosities as could be seen for "nothing, he was ready enough to look at; but if the sight of "them was to be paid for, he usually asserted that he had been “told they were not worth seeing; and he never paid a bill that "he would not observe how amazingly expensive travelling

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Poor Goldsmith could not have profited much by so thrifty a young gentleman, but he certainly seems to have been present, whether as a student or a mere visitor, at the fashionable chemical lectures of the day ("I have seen as bright a circle of "beauty at the chemical lectures of Rouelle as gracing the court "at Versailles"); to have seen and admired the celebrated actress Mademoiselle Clairon (of whom he speaks in an essay at the close of the second number of the Bee); and to have had leisure to look quietly around him, and form certain grave and settled conclusions on the political and social state of France. He says, in his Animated Nature, that he never walked about the environs of Paris that he did not look upon the immense quantity of game running almost tame on every side of him, as a badge of the slavery of the people. What they wished him to observe as an object of triumph, he added, he regarded with a secret dread and compassion. Nor was it the badge of slavery that had alone arrested his attention. If on every side he saw this, he saw liberty at but a little distance beyond; and in the fifty-sixth letter of the Citizen of the World, more than ten years before the Animated

Nature was written, he predicted, in words that are really very remarkable, the issue which was so terrible and yet so glorious. This remark alone would reveal to us the kind of advantage derived by Goldsmith from the rude, strange, wandering life to which his nature for a time impelled him. It was the education thus picked up from personal experience, and by actual collision with many varieties of men, which not only placed him greatly in advance on several social questions, but occasionally gave him much the advantage over the more educated and learned of his contemporaries, and made him a Citizen of the World. "As "the Swedes are making concealed approaches to despotism, the "French, on the other hand, are imperceptibly vindicating them"selves into freedom. When I consider that those parliaments "(the members of which are all created by the court, the presi"dents of which can only act by immediate direction) presume 66 even to mention privileges and freedom, who, till of late, re"ceived directions from the throne with implicit humility; when "this is considered, I cannot help fancying that the genius of "freedom has entered that kingdom in disguise. If they have "but three weak monarchs more successively on the throne, the "mask will be laid aside, and the country will certainly once more be free." Some thirty years after this was written, and when the writer had been fifteen years in his grave, the crash of the falling Bastille resounded over Europe.

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Before Goldsmith quitted Paris, he is said by his biographers to have seen and become known to Voltaire. But at Paris this could not have been. The great wit was then self-exiled from the capital, which he had not seen from the luckless hour in which he accepted the invitation of Frederick of Prussia. The fact is alleged, it is quite true, on Goldsmith's own authority; but the passage is loosely written, does not appear in a work which bore the writer's name, and may either have been tampered with by others, or even mistakenly set down by himself in confusion of memory. The error does not vitiate the statement in an integral point, since it can hardly be doubted, I think, that the meeting actually took place. The time when Goldsmith passed through the Genevese territory, is the time when Voltaire had settled himself, in greater quiet than he had known for years, in his newlypurchased house of Les Délices, his first residence in Geneva. is, in a certain sort, admitted president of the European intellectual republic; and, from his president's chair, is laughing at his own follies, laughing heartily at the kings of his acquaintance, particularly and loudly laughing at Frederick and his "Euvres des "Poeshies." It is the time of all others when, according to his own letters, he is resolved to have, on every occasion and in every shape,

He

"the society of agreeable and clever people." Goldsmith, flute in hand, or Goldsmith, learned and poor companion to a rich young fool,—Goldsmith, in whatever character, yearning to literature, its fame, and its awe-inspiring professors,-would not find himself near Les Délices without finding also easy passage to its illustrious By whatever chance or design, there at any rate he seems

owner.

to have been. A large party was present, and conversation turned upon the English; of whom, as he afterwards observed in a letter to the Public Ledger, Goldsmith recollected Voltaire to have remarked, that at the battle of Dettingen they exhibited prodigies of valour, but lessened their well-bought conquest by lessening the merit of those they had conquered.

In a Life of Voltaire afterwards begun, but not finished, in one of the magazines of the day, he recalled this conversation in greater detail, to illustrate the general manner of the famous Frenchman. "When he was warmed in discourse, and had got over a hesitating manner which sometimes he was subject to, it was rapture to "hear him. His meagre visage seemed insensibly to gather beauty,

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every muscle in it had meaning, and his eye beamed with unusual brightness." Among the persons alleged to be present, though this might be open to question if anything of great strictness were involved, the names are used of the vivid and noble talker, Diderot, and of Fontenelle, then on the verge of the grave that waited for

him nigh a hundred years. The last, Goldsmith says, reviled the English in everything; the first, with unequal ability, defended them; and, to the surprise of all, Voltaire long continued silent. At last he was roused from his reverie; a new life pervaded his frame; he flung himself into an animated defence of England; strokes of the finest raillery fell thick and fast on his antagonist; and he spoke almost without intermission for three hours. "I

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66 never was so much charmed," he added, nor did I ever 66 remember so absolute a victory as he gained in this dispute." Here Goldsmith was a worshipper at the footstool, and Voltaire was on the throne; yet it is possible that when the great Frenchman heard in later years the name of the celebrated Englishman, he may have remembered this night at Les Délices, and the enthusiasm of his young admirer, he may have recalled, with a smile for its fervent zeal, the pale, somewhat sad face, with its two great wrinkles between the eyebrows, but redeemed from ugliness or contempt by its kind expression of simplicity, as his own was by its wonderful intellect and look of unutterable mockery. For though when they met, Voltaire was upwards of sixty-one, and Goldsmith not twenty-seven, it happened that when (in 1778) the Frenchman's popularity returned, and all the fashion and intellect of Paris were again at the feet of the philosopher of Ferney; the Johnsons, Burkes, Gibbons, Wartons, Sheridans, and Reynoldses of England were discussing the inscription for the marble tomb of the author of the Vicar of Wakefield.

:

The lecture rooms of Germany are so often referred to in his prose writings, that, as he passed to Switzerland, he must have taken them in his way. In the Polite Learning, one is painted admirably its Nego, Probo, and Distinguo, growing gradually loud till denial, approval, and distinction are altogether lost; till disputants grow warm, moderator is unheard, audience take part in the debate, and the whole hall buzzes with false philosophy, sophistry, and error. Passing into Switzerland, he saw Schaffhausen frozen quite across, and the water standing in columns where the cataract had formerly fallen. His Animated Nature, in which this is noticed, contains also masterly descriptions, from his own experience, of the wonders that present themselves to the traveller over lofty mountains; and he adds that "nothing can be finer or more exact than Mr. Pope's description of a traveller straining "up the Alps." Geneva was his resting-place in Switzerland: but he visited Basle and Berne; ate a 66 savoury" "dinner on the top of the Alps; flushed woodcocks on Mount Jura; wondered to see the sheep in the valleys, as he had read of them in the old pastoral poets, following the sound of the shepherd's pipe of reed; and, poet himself at last, sent off to his brother Henry the first sketch of what

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