il a un certain tatillonage." If one could conceive a dead body hung in
chains, always wanting to be hung somewhere else, one should have a
comparative idea of him.

[Footnote 1: M. de Grignan son-in-law to Mme. de Sévigné, the greater
part of whose letters are to his wife.]

[Footnote 2: The Maréchal de Belleisle and his younger brother, the
Comte de Belleisle, were the grandsons of Fouquet, the Finance Minister
treated with such cruelty and injustice by Louis XIV. The Parisians
nicknamed the two brothers "Imagination" and "Common Sense." The Marshal
was joined with the Marshal de Broglie in the disastrous expedition
against Prague in the winter of 1742; when, though they succeeded in
taking and occupying the city for a time, they were afterwards forced to
evacuate it; and though Belleisle conducted the retreat with great
courage and skill, the army, which had numbered fifty thousand men when
it crossed the Rhine, scarcely exceeded twelve thousand when it regained
the French territory. (See the Editor's "History of France under the
Bourbons," c. xxv.)]

For my own part, I comfort myself with the humane reflection of the
Irishman in the ship that was on fire--I am but a passenger! If I were
not so indolent, I think I should rather put in practice the late
Duchess of Bolton's geographical resolution of going to China, when
Whiston told her the world would be burnt in three years. Have you any
philosophy? Tell me what you think. It is quite the fashion to talk of
the French coming here. Nobody sees it in any other light but as a thing
to be talked of, not to be precautioned against. Don't you remember a
report of the plague being in the City, and everybody went to the house
where it was to see it? You see I laugh about it, for I would not for