on it, with a sort of blue sattan cap and tassle of gold. He spoke
all the time in English.... His house is not very fine, but
genteel, and stands upon a mount close to the mountains. He is tall
and very thin, has a very piercing eye, and a look singularly
vivacious. He told me of his acquaintance with Pope, Swift (with
whom he lived for three months at Lord Peterborough's) and Gay, who
first showed him the _Beggar's Opera_ before it was acted. He says
he admires Swift, and loved Gay vastly. He said that Swift had a
great deal of the ridiculum acre.

And then Major Broome goes on to describe the 'handsome new church' at
Ferney, and the 'very neat water-works' at Geneva. But what a vision has
he opened out for us, and, in that very moment, shut away for ever from
our gaze in that brief parenthesis--'with whom he lived for three months
at Lord Peterborough's'! What would we not give now for no more than one
or two of the bright intoxicating drops from that noble river of talk
which flowed then with such a careless abundance!--that prodigal stream,
swirling away, so swiftly and so happily, into the empty spaces of
forgetfulness and the long night of Time!

So complete, indeed, is the lack of precise and well-authenticated
information upon this, by far the most obviously interesting side of
Voltaire's life in England, that some writers have been led to adopt a
very different theory from that which is usually accepted, and to
suppose that his relations with Pope's circle were in reality of a
purely superficial, or even of an actually disreputable, kind. Voltaire
himself, no doubt, was anxious to appear as the intimate friend of the
great writers of England; but what reason is there to believe that he
was not embroidering upon the facts, and that his true position was not
that of a mere literary hanger-on, eager simply for money and _réclame_,