in Westminster Abbey, or to pay a call on Congreve, or to attend a Quaker’s Meeting.  One would like to know in which street it was that he found himself surrounded by an insulting crowd, whose jeers at the ‘French dog’ he turned to enthusiasm by jumping upon a milestone, and delivering a harangue beginning—­’Brave Englishmen!  Am I not sufficiently unhappy in not having been born among you?’ Then there are one or two stories of him in the great country houses—­at Bubb Dodington’s where he met Dr. Young and disputed with him upon the episode of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost with such vigour that at last Young burst out with the couplet: 

    You are so witty, profligate, and thin,
    At once we think you Milton, Death, and Sin;

and at Blenheim, where the old Duchess of Marlborough hoped to lure him into helping her with her decocted memoirs, until she found that he had scruples, when in a fury she snatched the papers out of his hands.  ’I thought,’ she cried, ’the man had sense; but I find him at bottom either a fool or a philosopher.’

It is peculiarly tantalising that our knowledge should be almost at its scantiest in the very direction in which we should like to know most, and in which there was most reason to hope that our curiosity might have been gratified.  Of Voltaire’s relations with the circle of Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke only the most meagre details have reached us.  His correspondence with Bolingbroke, whom he had known in France and whose presence in London was one of his principal inducements in coming to England—­a correspondence which must have been considerable—­has completely disappeared.  Nor, in the numerous published letters which passed about between the members of that distinguished group, is there any reference to Voltaire’s name.  Now and then some chance remark raises our expectations, only to make our disappointment more acute.  Many years later, for instance, in 1765, a certain Major Broome paid a visit to Ferney, and made the following entry in his diary: 

Dined with Mons. Voltaire, who behaved very politely.  He is very old, was dressed in a robe-de-chambre of blue sattan and gold spots 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!