His soul is set upon a hot beefsteak, and he thinks
strong ale. He wouldn't give twopence for all the poets in England, and
still less for their wives. But the Sieur Grimod is made of different
metal. Less lead, but a great deal more brass--more polished, but less
useful--a pinchbeck imitation of the lords and ladies who were waltzing,
flirting, acting proverbs, and writing pasquinades, at the very moment
when the first great throes of the "portentous doom" were beginning to
shake France to her foundations, and the cloud was gathering that was to
fall down in the blood and horror of the Revolution. A sub-collector of
taxes! in his country-house--with his friends' wives about him, in
addition to his own--giving parties of the most gorgeous
magnificence--splendid masques in honour of a birthday, like _Comus_ at
Ludlow Castle--bird-huntings, where ladies, with attendant squires,
sallied forth in fanciful array, armed with silken nets to catch the
prey, after having wiled them from the trees by blinding them with
polished mirrors--horns sounding, and music stationed in woody
dells--and all carried on with a grandeur like the cavalcades of the
duke and duchess in _Don Quixote_. A sub-collector of taxes, we say,
doing all this, shows very clearly that some change or other was
needed; and we will only say, that the moment we see similar proceedings
going on in the same rank of life in England, we shall emigrate to some
happy island--not Tahiti--where poets and poetesses, and sub-collectors
of taxes, are utterly unknown. We shall extract from the
_memoire_--which, we again remind the reader, is a strictly legal
document, though rather different from the dull concerns our Solons in
Lincoln's Inn are the authors of--at some length; for we shall gain a
very tolerable idea of the interior arrangements of a _maison de
campagne_, on a fete-day in 1768.

The day of St Denis was usually chosen by the Dame Lebrun for a charming
party, to which she lent all the charms of her muse. In that which she
gave on the eve of St Denis, at the house of the Sieur Grimod, she had
introduced all the deities of Olympus to pay compliments to her husband.
First appeared Love and the Graces; then Flora, then Diana--who all sang
songs in character. Apollo followed, who presented his lyre to the Sieur
Lebrun, and said--

"The suffrages of all you claim,
The gods themselves your talents prize;
Through endless ages may your name
Partak