"voice; I now turned what was once my amusement into 66 66 66 1755. "a present means of subsistence. I passed among the Et. 27. "harmless peasants of Flanders, and among such of the "French as were poor enough to be very merry; for I ever "found them sprightly in proportion to their wants. When"ever I approached a peasant's house towards night-fall, I played one of my most merry tunes, and that procured me "not only a lodging, but subsistence for the next day. I once 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 one day yet be his. Not, we may be sure, the dull round of professional labour, but intellectual distinction, popular fame, 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 inter"mediate 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. 66 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, 1755. Æt. 27. Where shading elms along the margin grew, Have led their children through the mirthful maze ; Theirs are those arts that mind to mind endear, Till, seeming bless'd, they grow to what they seem. resources. Arrived in Paris, he rested some brief space, and, for the time, a sensible improvement is to be observed in his 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 See post, Book II. Chap. ii. 66 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 was." 66 66 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 66 * Annual Register, xvii. 30. Percy Memoir, 35, 36. I may here remark that, some thirty years after Goldsmith's death, the Annual Register printed what purported to be "a letter of the late Doctor Goldsmith, when about twenty-five "years old, to a young gentleman, whom he had for a short time instructed in "different branches of learning," which is so manifestly not genuine that I should not have thought it even worth this mention, if Mr. Mitford had not strangely given it some authority by inserting it at the close of his sketch of Goldsmith's life, prefixed to the Aldine edition of the Poems. + Polite Learning, chap. vii. 1755. Et. 27. F 1755. Clairon (of whom he speaks in an essay);* and to have had Æt. 27. 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 more than ten years before the Animated Nature was written, he had predicted, in words that are really very remarkable, the issue which was so terrible and yet so glorious: "As the Swedes are making "concealed approaches to despotism, the French, on the "other hand, are imperceptibly vindicating themselves into "freedom. When I consider that those parliaments (the "members of which are all created by the court, the 'presidents of which can only act by immediate direction) presume even to mention privileges and freedom, who, till "of late, received 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." 66 At the close of the second number of the Bee. Some + Citizen of the World, Letter LVI. This passage did not fail to attract notice when the revolution broke out. It ran the round of the London magazines in 1792. Mr. Prior seems to think that he first discovered it. In the remark itself one perceives one of the many advantages which Goldsmith derived from travel. The education he thus picked up from personal experience, and by actual collision with many thirty years after this was written, and when the writer had 1755. been fifteen years in his grave, the crash of the falling t. 27. Bastille resounded over Europe. Before Goldsmith quitted Paris, he is said by his biographers to have been 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 varieties of men, not only placed him in advance of his contemporaries on several social questions, but occasionally gave him very much the advantage over greatly more learned, and, so to speak, educated men. Thus it was, in short, he became a Citizen of the World; and the passage in the text may be taken for proof that he never could have used the shallow argument maintained by Johnson in his dispute with Sir Adam Ferguson: "Sir, I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of "government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an "individual. Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man. "What Frenchman is prevented from passing his life as he pleases? SIR ADAM : "But, Sir, in the British constitution it is surely of importance to keep up a spirit "in the people, so as to preserve a balance against the crown. JOHNSON: Sir, I "perceive you are a vile whig. Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the "crown? The crown has not power enough." Boswell, iii. 202-3. This was in 1772; and in 1789 the Bastille came down. * Prior, i. 181. Since my first edition was published, an octogenarian of Cork, the late Mr. Roche, who had talked with Gibbon in Switzerland and narrowly missed having talked with Montesquieu; who refers to his friend Vergniaud and details his impression of Mirabeau's speech on national bankruptcy, who paid once for his dinner at a Paris chop-house 14000 francs (in assignats), and in company with Malesherbes had the honour to be put into prison by Robespierre,-has made much, in a book of published anecdotes, of his supposed detection of this error; Mr. Irving having repeated it in the interval, and Lord Brougham having also given currency to it in a Life of Voltaire. I learn this from a notice in the Globe newspaper of a few months back. "Take for instance," says the writer, enlarging on the cleverness of his octogenarian friend, "Brougham, Washington Irving, Mr. Prior, "and Oliver Goldsmith, all of whom are convicted of a gross conspiracy to circulate "a fraud of which honest Noll was the original fabricator, the others having "only endorsed the forgery. Goldsmith could not by chance have conversed with "Voltaire in Paris during the year 1754, as he impudently says he did, for the "simple reason that Voltaire quitted Paris in 1750, and never set foot in the capital "till eighteen years afterwards, in 1778. The two lives by Irving and Prior still "hold this falsehood, but"--and the writer goes on to say that I appear not only to have entertained some suspicion of it, but to have doubted the veracity of my hero, and that in consequence I omit the anecdote altogether. My text in this passage, nevertheless, stands now precisely as it did four years ago. |