CHAP. v.J TRAVELS.

thirty years after this was written, and when the writer had
been fifteen years in his grave, the crash of the falling •ZEt
Bastille resounded over Europe.

Before Goldsmith quitted Paris, he is said Iby his bio-
graphers 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 ? SIB, 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 enoiigh." Bo&wett, iii. 202-8. 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. Boohe, who had talked with Gibbon in Switzerland and narrowly
missed having talked with Montesquieu ; who refers to his friend Vergniaud and
details Bis 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 Eobespierre,—has made
much, in a book of publishedanectlotes, 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 VoUavre. I learn this from a notice in the Globe news-
paper 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.Garden-Court . . 426