as London." He enters into a
very interesting and minute narrative of the public libraries of
Paris.[79] He then also suggested the purchase of ten thousand
manuscripts of the Earl of Oxford, which the nation now possess in the
Harleian collection.

Though Carte failed to persuade our opulent citizens to purchase this
costly honour, it is probably to his suggestion that the nation owes
the British Museum. The ideas of the literary man are never thrown
away, however vain at the moment, or however profitless to himself.
Time preserves without injuring the image of his mind, and a following
age often performs what the preceding failed to comprehend.

It was in 1743 that this work was projected, in 1747 the first volume
appeared. One single act of indiscretion, an unlucky accident rather
than a premeditated design, overturned in a moment this monument of
history;--for it proved that our Carte, however enlarged were his
views of what history ought to consist, and however experienced in
collecting its most authentic materials, and accurate in their
statement, was infected by a superstitious jacobitism, which seemed
likely to spread itself through his extensive history. Carte indeed
was no philosopher, but a very faithful historian.

Having unhappily occasion to discuss whether the King of England had,
from the time of Edward the Confessor, the power of healing inherent
in him before his unction, or whether the gift was conveyed by
ecclesiastical hands, to show the efficacy of the royal touch, he
added an idle story, which had come under his own observation, of a
person who appeared to have been so healed. Carte said of this unlucky
personage, so unworthily introduced five hundred years before he was
born, that he had been sent to Paris to be touched by "the eldest
lineal descendant of a race of kings who had indeed for a long
succession of ages cured that distemper by the royal touch." The
insinuation was unquestionably in favour of the Pretender, although
the name of the prince was not avowed, and was a sort of promulgation
of the right divine to the English throne.

The first news our author heard of his elaborate history was the
discovery of this unforeseen calamity; the public indignation was
roused, and subscribers, public and private, hastened to withdraw
their names. The historian was left forlorn and abandoned amid his
extensive collections, and Truth, which was about to be drawn out of
her well by this robust l