“Examine,” says the _Citizen of the World_, “the history of any country remarkable for opulence and wisdom, you will find that they would never have been wise had they not been first luxurious: you will find poets, philosophers, and even patriots, marching in luxury’s train. The reason is obvious. _We then only are curious in knowledge, when we find it connected with sensual happiness._ The senses ever point out the way, and reflection comments upon the discovery. Inform a native of the desert of Kobi of the exact measure of the parallax of the moon, he finds no satisfaction at all in the information; he wonders how any could take such pains, and lay out such treasures, in order to solve so useless a difficulty; but connect it with his happiness by showing that it improves navigation—that by such an investigation he may have a warmer coat, a better gun, or a finer knife, and he is instantly in raptures at so great an improvement. In short, we only desire to know when we desire to possess; and, whatever we may talk against it, luxury adds the spur to curiosity, and gives us a desire of becoming more wise.”—Letter XI. Not true, Dr Goldsmith!—only a mere fragment of the truth; and your astronomical illustration singularly unfortunate. For the science of astronomy has been all along a labour of love—from the time when Chaldæan shepherds, quite heedless of navigation, watched the stars, and marked out the planet (the _wanderer_) amongst the fixed and stationary lights, to these our own days, when the profound _mathematician_, calculating, in the midst of revolutionary Paris, his disturbances on the remote boundaries of our planetary system, writes to the skilful _observer_, and bids him direct his great tube to a certain spot in the heavens, and he will find a new _wanderer_ there, as yet unseen and unsuspected. The observer points his telescope as he is told, and discovers it that very night, in that very spot. Still less will his reasoning hold together, or prove “refutation-tight,” when, as in the _Deserted Village_, he finds that the wealth of our merchants has occasioned the desertion of the country, and the depopulation of the land. “In regretting,” he says, in the preface to that poem, “the depopulation of the land, I inveigh against the increase of our luxuries.” Happily no one, in reading that poem, thinks of the political economy of the _Deserted Village_. Happily, also, there is often a greater truth in the poet’s general enunciations, than he himself is able to explain, or accurately to develop. The reader may adopt his language, and apply it to a more correct conception than was present to the author’s mind. The very paragraph which might be quoted for its manifest blunder in the rudiments of political science, opens with these admirable lines, which every one, in a sense of his own, will readily adopt:—