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 have been employed chiefly in the preventive service, and in 1824 commanded the Nimble revenue cutter on the coast of Cornwall. On 8 April, landing near the headland called Trereen Castle in search of some smuggled goods, he went up to look at the Logan Rock, a rocking stone which weighs about eighty tons; and being told that ‘it was not in the power of man to remove it,’ he took it into his head to try. Accordingly, when his boat had finished dragging for the suspected goods, he called his men up and tried to move the stone with three handspikes. These were of no avail; they were therefore laid aside, and the nine men, taking hold of the rock by the edge, without great difficulty set it in a rocking motion, which became so great that to try to stop it seemed dangerous, lest it should fall back on the men. So it presently rocked itself off its pivot, falling away about thirty-nine inches, and lying inclined on the adjacent rocks. According to Goldsmith's positive statement, in a letter to his mother written a few days afterwards (Household Words, 1852, vi. 234), he had no intention or thought of doing mischief. He did not know of the value placed on the rock by the neighbourhood, and was thunderstruck when he found the uproar that his deed occasioned. As soon, however, as he realised the way in which his exploit was regarded, he determined to do what he could to replace the stone. The admiralty lent him tackles, sheers, capstans, and men. The work began on 29 Oct., and on Tuesday, 2 Nov., the stone was again in its place, rocking as before, though whether better or worse is disputed. Lithographed views of the process of replacing the stone were published at Penzance in 1824. Many common statements about the matter are authoritatively denied. Goldsmith was never promoted, and as lieutenant commanding the Megæra died at sea off St. Thomas in the West Indies on 8 Oct. 1841.

[Gent. Mag. 1824, vol. xciv. pt. i. pp. 363, 430; Boase and Courtney's Bibl. Cornub. i. 184; Household Words, vi. 234; Stockdale's Excursion (small edition), p. 184; The Golden Chersonese, or the Logan Rock Restored, by an Officer of the Royal Navy (Penzance, 1824, 12mo), is a detailed and somewhat technical account of the restoration.] 

GOLDSMITH, LEWIS (1763?–1846), political writer and journalist, was of Portuguese-Jewish extraction, and was probably born at Richmond, Surrey. He is said to have been educated at Merchant Taylors' School. Though trained for the legal profession in a solicitor's office in London, he never practised in England. An ardent sympathiser with the French revolution, and a freemason initiated into the mysteries of the Illuminati, he was in Germany in 1792, witnessed the recapture of Frankfort by the Hessians, and was denounced, as he says, by the British ambassador for arrest, but, having received timely warning, repaired to Hamburg, and thence to Poland. He was a spectator of the struggle of 1793, was commissioned by Kosciusko to write to Lord Stanhope and to a Mr. S. (Sheridan?) soliciting British intervention, and on the suppression of the Polish rising went to Holland. He is said to have been connected with the ‘Albion,’ a newspaper friendly to France, started in 1799, but his name does not appear in it. In 1801 he published ‘The Crimes of Cabinets, or a Review of the Plans and Aggressions for Annihilating the Liberties of France, and the Dismemberment of her Territories.’ Apprehensive of a prosecution for this attack upon the war with France, he went to Paris in the summer of 1802, intending to start an English magazine, and returned to London to confer with booksellers, but was asked by Otto, with whom he was on intimate terms, to go back to Paris and dissuade the government from demanding the muzzling of the English press. Talleyrand there introduced him to Napoleon, by arrangement with whom he established ‘The Argus, or London reviewed in Paris.’ The title was evidently borrowed from his friend Sampson Perry's ‘Argus,’ which Perry, on retiring to France in 1792, contemplated continuing at Paris. It appeared three times a week, and aimed at circulation in England. Goldsmith states that in February 1803, on refusing to insert articles vilifying the English royal family and government, he was arrested, was incarcerated for forty-eight hours in a loathsome cell, was then taken to Dieppe in the hope that Peltier would be given up in exchange for him, and had just cleared the harbour when counter orders arrived, whereupon he was taken back to Paris, and was invited to resume the editorship. This he declined, but he accepted a mission to bribe German statesmen, and to obtain from the future Louis XVIII a renunciation of claims on France in return for the throne of Poland. On Louis's refusal, Goldsmith says he received fresh instructions to kidnap him, and to kill him if he resisted, which instructions he disobeyed, but remained some months at Warsaw, and conveyed a warning to Louis that his life was not safe, whereupon the prince quitted the town. Goldsmith, though reproached by Napoleon for not executing this ‘mission of blood,’ was still employed by him, was once entrusted with two million