And another thing:  Mr. Smillie and his friends may want a revolution, but Hodge and his most certainly do not.  They want to earn their livelihood, pay their way, and dig their plots of ground.  No more warfare for them.  I dare say I shall be sorry for Mr. Smillie when the time comes; but I may have to be still more sorry for my country first.  I can’t help hoping, however, when it comes to the point that his feet will be a little colder than his head seems to be just now.

LA PETITE PERSONNE

No letter-writer’s stage can at any time be called empty, because upon it you necessarily have at all times two persons at least:  the mover of the figures and the audience, the puppeteer and the puppetee, the letter-writer and the letter-reader.  The play presented is, therefore, a play within a play:  like the Mousetrap in Hamlet, like Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like the romantic drama of Gayferos and Melisandra which Don Quixote witnessed with a select company of acquaintance at an inn.  The temperament of this presented spectator, himself or herself a person of the scene, is always reflected in the entertainment when the letter-writer is a sensitive artist.  So Horace Walpole’s comedy varies according as it goes before Sir Horace Mann in Florence or Lady Upper-Ossory at Ampthill; so, more delicately, does Madame de Sevigne’s.  There are blacker strokes in the dialogue when Bussy is to see the play; there is always idolatry implied, and sometimes anxiety, if the spoilt child of Provence is the audience.  It is this chere bonne, this Madame de Grignan, nine times out of ten, who is queen of the entertainment.  You have to reckon with her upon her throne of degrees, set up there like Hippolita, Duchess of Athens, to be propitiated and, if possible, diverted.  For her sake, not for ours, her incomparable mother beckons from the wings character after character, and gives each his cue, having set the scene with her exquisite art.  In a few cases her anxiety to please spoils the effects.  As we should say, she “laboured” the Cardinal de Retz.  The sour-faced beauty would have none of him.  But that is a rare case, one in which predilection betrayed her.  Madame de Sevigne had a weakness for the Cardinal.  It is very seldom that the lightest hand in the world fails her at a portrait.  Her great successes are her thumb-nail sketches:  she will be remembered by Picard in the hayfield so long as the world knows how to laugh.  One of her best, because one of her tenderest, is the petite personne.

The name is Charles de Sevigne’s, but his mother takes it up after him, and makes better play with it.  Charles writes from Les Rochers in December, 1675—­Madame being really ill for once in her life with “a nice little rheumatism,” and Charles her amanuensis—­“in the room of la Plessis,” that striving lady, too, was ill, or thought she was—­“we have had lately a very pretty young party (une petite