She could not find a syllable to say to me, and the visit ended with her begging a lap-dog.  Thank the Lord! though this is the first month, it is the last week, of my reign; and I shall resign my crown with great satisfaction to a bouillie of chestnuts, which is just invented and whose annals will be illustrated by so many indigestions, that Paris will not want any thing else for three weeks.  I will enclose the fatal letter after I have finished this enormous one; to which I will only add, that nothing has interrupted my S`evign`e researches but the frost.  The Abb`e de Malherbes has given me full power to ransack I did not tell you, that by great accident, when I thought on nothing less, I stumbled on an original picture of the Comte de Grammont, Adieu!  You are generally in London in March:  I shall be there by the end of it.(941)

(928) To the above portrait of Madame du Deffand it may be useful to subjoin the able development of her character which appeared in the Quarterly Review for May 1811, in its critique on her Letters to Walpole:—­“This lady seems to have united the lightness of the French character with the solidity of the English.  She was easy and volatile, yet judicious and acute; sometimes profound and sometimes superficial.  She had a wit playful, abundant, and well-toned; an admirable conception of the ridiculous, and great skill in exposing it; a turn for satire, which she indulged, not always in the best-natured manner, yet with irresistible effect; powers of expression varied, appropriate, flowing from the source, and curious without research; a refined taste for letters, and a judgment both of men and books in a high degree:  enlightened and accurate.  As her parts had been happily thrown together by nature, they were no less happy in the circumstances which attended their progress and development.  They were refined, not by a course of solitary study, but by desultory reading, and chiefly by living intercourse with the brightest geniuses of her age.  Thus trained, they acquired a pliability of movement, which gave to all their exertions a bewitching air of freedom and negligence. and made even their last efforts seem only the exuberances or flowering-off of a mind capable of higher excellencies, but unambitious to attain them.  There was nothing to alarm or overpower.  On whatever topic she touched, trivial or severe, it was alike en badinant; but in the midst of this sportiveness, her genius poured itself forth in a thousand delightful fancies, and scattered new graces and ornaments on every object within its sphere.  In its wanderings from the trifles of the day to grave questions of morals or philosophy, it carelessly struck out, and as carelessly abandoned, the most profound truths; and while it sought only to amuse, suddenly astonished and electrified by rapid traits of illumination, which opened the depths of difficult subjects, and roused the researches of more systematic reasoners.  To these qualifications were added an independence in forming opinions, and a boldness in avowing them, which wore at least the semblance of honesty; a perfect knowledge of the world, and that facility of manners, which in the commerce of society supplies the place of benevolence."-E.