to terminate a literary quarrel.  “You are angry with me,” said De l’Etang, “and I think you have reason; but this is a season of mercy, and I now ask your pardon.”—­“In the manner,” replied the abbe, “which you have chosen, I can no longer defend myself.  Go, sir!  I pardon you.”  Some days after, the abbe again meeting De l’Etang, reproached him with duping him out of a pardon, which he had no desire to have bestowed on him.  The last reply of the critic was caustic:  “Do not be so difficult; when one stands in need of a general pardon, one ought surely to grant a particular one.”  De Marolles was subject to encounter critics who were never so kind as to kneel by him on an Easter Sunday.  Besides these fifty translations, of which the notes are often curious, and even the sense may be useful to consult, his love of writing produced many odd works.  His volumes were richly bound, and freely distributed, but they found no readers!  In a “Discours pour servir de Preface sur les Poetes, traduits par Michel de Marolles,” he has given an imposing list of “illustrious persons and contemporary authors who were his friends,” and has preserved many singular facts concerning them.  He was indeed for so long a time convinced that he had struck off the true spirit of his fine originals, that I find he at several times printed some critical treatise to back his last, or usher in his new version; giving the world reasons why the versions which had been given of that particular author, “soit en prose, soit en vers, ont ete si pen approuvees jusqu’ici.”  Among these numerous translations he was the first who ventured on the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus, which still bears an excessive price.  He entitles his work, “Les quinze Livres de Deipnosophists d’Athenee, Ouvrage delicieux, agreablement diversifie et rempli de Narrations, scavantes sur toutes Sortes de Matieres et de Sujets.”  He has prefixed various preliminary dissertations; yet, not satisfied with having performed this great labour, it was followed by a small quarto of forty pages, which might now be considered curious; “Analyse, en Description succincte des Choses contenues dans les quinzes Livres de Deipnosophistes.”  He wrote, “Quatrains sur les Personnes de la Cour et les Gens de Lettres,” which the curious would now be glad to find.  After having plundered the classical geniuses of antiquity by his barbarous style, when he had nothing more left to do, he committed sacrilege in translating the Bible; but, in the midst of printing, he was suddenly stopped by authority, for having inserted in his notes the reveries of the Pre-Adamite Isaac Peyrere.  He had already revelled on the New Testament, to his version of which he had prefixed so sensible an introduction, that it was afterwards translated into Latin.  Translation was the mania of the Abbe de Marolles.  I doubt whether he ever fairly awoke out of the heavy dream of the felicity of his translations; for late in life I find him observing, “I have employed much