One of the former happened to be the author of the _Voyage to St. Kilda_ and the _Account of the Western Isles_(7). We were good company on the road; and that day se’ennight came to Paris. I have since been taken up in viewing churches, convents, palaces, colleges, &c., which are very numerous and magnificent in this town. The splendour and riches of these things surpasses belief; but it were endless to descend to particulars. I was present at a disputation in the Sorbonne, which indeed had much of the French fire in it. I saw the Irish and the English Colleges. In the latter I saw, enclosed in a coffin, the body of the late King James.... To-morrow I intend to visit Father Malebranche, and discourse him on certain points.” The Abbé D’Aubigné, as he informs Percival, was to introduce him to Malebranche, then the chief philosopher of France, whose Vision of the world in God had some affinity with Berkeley’s own thought. Unfortunately we have no record of the intended interview with the French idealist, who fourteen years before had been visited by Addison, also on his way to Italy, when Malebranche expressed great regard for the English nation, and admiration for Newton; but he shook his head when Hobbes was mentioned, whom he ventured to disparage as a “poor silly creature.” Malebranche died nearly two years after Berkeley’s proposed interview; and according to a story countenanced by Dugald Stewart, Berkeley was the “occasional cause” of his death. He found the venerable Father, we are told, in a cell, cooking, in a pipkin, a medicine for a disorder with which he was troubled. The conversation naturally turned on Berkeley’s system, of which Malebranche had received some knowledge from a translation. The issue of the debate proved tragical to poor Malebranche. In the heat of disputation he raised his voice so high, and gave way so freely to the natural impetuosity of a man of genius and a Frenchman, that he brought on a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off a few days after(8). This romantic tale is, I suspect, mythical. The Percival correspondence shews that Berkeley was living in London in October, 1715, the month in which Malebranche died, and I find no trace of a short sudden visit to Paris at that time.