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' 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.

Poor Goldsmith could not have profited much by so thrifty a young gentleman, but he certainly seems to have attended the fashionable chemical lectures of the day (I 'have witnessed as bright a circle of beauty at the lectures ' of Rouelle as gracing the court of Versailles'); to have seen and admired the celebrated actress Mademoiselle Clairon (of whom he speaks in an essay); 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 alone arrested his attention. on every side he saw this, he saw liberty at but a little distance beyond, and predicted, in words that are really very remarkable, the issue which was so terrible and yet

If

glorious. As the Swedes are making concealed ap'proaches to despotism, the French, on the other hand, ' are imperceptibly vindicating themselves into freedom.

H

'When I consider that these parliaments, the members of 'which are all created by the court and 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.' 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.

Before Goldsmith quitted Paris, he is said by Mr. Prior to have seen and become known to Voltaire. But at Paris this could not have been. The great wit was then selfexiled from the capital, which he had not seen from the luckless hour in which he accepted the invitation of Frederick of Prussia. Mr. Prior speaks, 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 newly-purchased house of Les Delices. He is, in a certain sort, admitted President of the European Intellectual Republic. He is, from his president's chair, 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, '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, and its fame, and its aweinspiring professors; would not be near Les Delices without finding easy passage to its illustrious owner. By whatever chance or design, there at any rate he seems 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,

'every muscle in it had meaning, and his eye beamed 'with unusual brightness.' As among the persons 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

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 never was so much 'charmed,' he added; nor did I ever remember so ' absolute a victory as he gained in this dispute.'

A worshipper at the footstool was Goldsmith here, 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 Delices, 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 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,