e one claim to
memory is, that the riding man so often angrily sprang down, and tried
horsewhipping them into silence. A vain attempt. The individual hound
flies howling, abjectly petitioning and promising; but the rest bark
all with new comfort, and even he starts again straightway. It is bad
travelling in those woods, with such Lions and such Dogs. And then the
sparsely scattered HUMAN Creatures (so we may call them in contrast,
persons of Quality for most part) are not always what they should be.
The grand mansions you arrive at, in this waste-howling solitude, prove
sometimes essentially Robber-towers;--and there may be Armida Palaces,
and divine-looking Armidas, where your ultimate fate is still worse.

_'Que le monde est rempli d'enchanteurs, je ne dis rien
d'enchanteresses!'_

To think of it, the solitary Ishmaelite journeying, never so well
mounted, through such a wilderness: with lions, dogs, human robbers and
Armidas all about him; himself lonely, friendless under the stars:--one
could pity him withal, though that is not the feeling he solicits; nor
gets hitherto, even at this impartial distance.

"One of the beautiful creatures of Quality,--we hope, not an
Armida,--who came athwart Voltaire, in these times, was a Madame du
Chatelet; distinguished from all the others by a love of mathematics
and the pure sciences, were it nothing else. She was still young, under
thirty; the literary man still under forty. With her Husband, to whom
she had brought a child, or couple of children, there was no formal
quarrel; but they were living apart, neither much heeding the other,
as was by no means a case without example at that time; Monsieur
soldiering, and philandering about, in garrison or elsewhere; Madame, in
a like humor, doing the best for herself in the high circles of society,
to which he and she belonged. Most wearisome barren circles to a person
of thought, as both she and M. de Voltaire emphatically admitted to one
another, on first making acquaintance. But is there no help?

"Madame had tried the pure sciences and philosophies, in Books: but
how much more charming, when they come to you as a Human Philosopher;
handsome, magnanimous, and the wittiest man in the world! Young
Madame was not regularly beautiful; but she was very piquant, radiant,
adventurous; understood other things than the pure sciences, and could
be abundantly coquettish and engaging. I have known her scuttle off, on
an evening, with a coupl