Goldsmith was certainly apt to blunder. But it was when in the simple frankness of his nature he thought he was among friends and good fellows in such moods and moments. He put his trust in those whose conventionalities he would offend, and who must have felt the inferiority of their own powers when in contact with his. Disraeli, the elder, has made some just remarks on the wrong to which such men expose themselves very often in society. He says: “One peculiar trait in the conversation of men of genius which has often injured them when listeners are not acquainted with the men—are certain sports of a vacant mind; a sudden impulse to throw out opinions and take views of things in some humor of the moment. Extravagant paradoxes and false opinions are caught up by the humblest prosers: and the Philistines are thus enabled to triumph over the strong and gifted man, because in an hour of confidence and the abandonment of his mind, he laid his head in their lap and taught them how he might be shorn of his strength.” All this is extremely applicable to the case of Oliver Goldsmith. Almost all the stories told of him to show his absurdity or jealousy are palpably false and must be looked on as failures. Northcote very gravely set down how the doctor was offended, when on his route to Paris, accompanied by Mrs. Horneck and her daughters, to find the young ladies receive more notice and admiration than he himself at a French hotel. This was a stupid misconception, to say the least of it—as Miss Horneck afterward stated, wondering at the same time how such could ever have arisen from the fact. Goldsmith, who was always ready to laugh at himself, for the pleasantry of the thing, in any of his playful moods, seeing his companions pleased by the admiration they excited, and wishing to amuse them, said, with an affectation of wounded self-love, that doubtless produced the effect he intended—“Very well, ladies; you may find somebody else in vogue, very shortly, as well as yourselves.” Such sallies furnish a key to most of those things cited to the ridicule of Goldsmith. Another story is told by Col. O’Moore. Burke and O’Moore going to the club to dine, saw Oliver among others looking at some foreign women in a balcony in Leicester Square. Arrived at the club, Burke affected to be offended with Goldsmith and being questioned, said he could hardly think of being friendly with a man who could say what the doctor had just uttered in the public street. Goldsmith eagerly asking to know what it was, was told he expressed surprise that the crowd should look at these women, while he, a man of genius, was passing by! “Surely, I did not say so,” says Oliver. “How should I know it then?” replies Burke. “True,” admits Goldsmith, “I thought, indeed, something of the kind; but I did not think I uttered it.”