OLIVER GOLDSMITH S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK in.

1766. self on every celebrity, and ridiculed by all. * There,
mis. finally, was Horace Walpole, twinged with the gout and
smarting from political slight, revenging himself with
laughter at everybody around him. and beyond him: now
with aspiring Geoffrin and the philosophers, now with blind
Du Deffand and the wits t (" women who violated all the
" duties of life and gave very pretty suppers "); lumping
up in the same contempt, Wilkes and Foote, Boswell and
Sterne;! proclaiming as impostors in their various ways,
alike the Jesuits, the methodists, the philosophers, the
politicians, the encyclopedists, the hypocrite Rousseau, the
scoffer Voltaire, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles,
the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history
Mr. Pitt; and counting a ploughman who sows, reads his
almanack, and believes the stars but so many farthing
candles created to prevent his falling into a ditch as he goes
home at night, a wiser and more rational, and certainly an
honester being than any of them.§ .Such was the winter

* "He is,a strange being," •writes Walpole of Boswell, "and, like Cambridge,
"has a rage of knowing anybody that ever was talked of. He forced himself upon
"me at Paris in spite of my teeth and my doors." Coll, Lett. v. 192.

f Coll. Lett. v. 1234. I must give the reader a peep (from a letter in the
Selmjn Correspondence) at one of the leading members of this distinguished society.
" Madame de Deffancl has filled up her vacancies, and given me enough now
"French. With one of them you would be delighted, a Madame de Marehais.
"She is not perfectly young, has a face like a Jew pedlar, her person is about
" four feet, her head about six, and her coiffure about ten. Hor forehead, chin,
" and neck, are whiter than a miller's; and she wears more festoons of natural
"flowers than all the figurantes at the Opera. Her eloquence is still more
"abundant, her attentions exuberant. She talks volumes, writes folios—I moan
"in lillets; presides over the Academic, inspires passions, and has not time
" enough to heal a quarter of the wounds she gives. She has a house in a nut-
" shell, that is fuller of .invention than a fairy tale; her bed stands in the middle
'' of the room, because there is no other space that would hold it; it is surrounded
" by such a perspective of looking-glasses, that you may see all that passes in it
" from the first ante-chamber." :J: Coll. Lett. v. 91, 113.

§ Coll. Lett. v. 96, 101. Nor can I help quoting from the same volume (110),
Walpole's shrewd anticipation as to Hume and his new friend. "Mr. Hume
" carries this letter and Rousseau to England. I wish the former may not repentfon's book all that he can say." Bosicell, iv. 247. He never speaks of Voltaire