OLIVEE GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK i.

1755. Clairon (of whom, he speaks in an essay); * and to have had
Mi. 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."t Some

* At the close of the second number of the Bee.

t Citizen of the World, Letter ivi. TMs passage did not fail to attract notice
•when the revolution broke out. It ran the round of the London magazines in 1792.
Mr. Pri or 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th»* vnjjabotulu "with it t*4r