easure, who lived and died
according to the laws of his Court-marshal, persisting in enacting
through life the part of Hero; and, divested of poetry, this was but a
little wrinkled old man, pock-marked, and with a great periwig and red
heels to make him look tall--a hero for a book if you like, or for a
brass statue or a painted ceiling, a god in a Roman shape, but what
more than a man for Madame Maintenon, or the barber who shaved him, or
Monsieur Fagon, his surgeon? I wonder shall History ever pull off her
periwig and cease to be court-ridden? Shall we see something of France
and England besides Versailles and Windsor? I saw Queen Anne at the
latter place tearing down the Park slopes, after her stag-hounds, and
driving her one-horse chaise--a hot, red-faced woman, not in the least
resembling that statue of her which turns its stone back upon St.
Paul's, and faces the coaches struggling up Ludgate Hill. She was
neither better bred nor wiser than you and me, though we knelt to hand
her a letter or a wash-hand basin. Why shall History go on kneeling to
the end of time? I am for having her rise up off her knees, and take a
natural posture: not to be for ever performing cringes and congees
like a court-chamberlain, and shuffling backwards out of doors in the
presence of the sovereign. In a word, I would have History familiar
rather than heroic: and think that Mr. Hogarth and Mr. Fielding will
give our children a much better idea of the manners of the present
age in England, than the Court Gazette and the newspapers which we get
thence.

There was a German officer of Webb's, with whom we used to joke, and of
whom a story (whereof I myself was the author) was got to be believed in
the army, that he was eldest son of the hereditary Grand Bootjack of the
Empire, and the heir to that honor of which his ancestors had been very
proud, having been kicked for twenty generations by one imperial foot,
as they drew the boot from the other. I have heard that the old
Lord Castlewood, of part of whose family these present volumes are a
chronicle, though he came of quite as good blood as the Stuarts whom
he served (and who as regards mere lineage are no better than a dozen
English and Scottish houses I could name), was prouder of his post about
the Court than of his ancestral honors, and valued his dignity (as Lord
of the Butteries and Groom of the King's Posset) so highly, that he
cheerfully ruined himself for the thankless and thriftles