proper to fulfil the bequest.]

[Footnote 25: Lord Mahon, now Earl of Stanhope, if not the most
eloquent, one of the most honest historians of our time.]

[Footnote 26: Two years' wages were left to the servants.]

THE ABBE SCARRON.

An Eastern Allegory.--Who comes Here?--A Mad Freak and its
Consequences.--Making an Abbe of him.--The May-Fair of
Paris.--Scarron's Lament to Pellisson.--The Office of the
Queen's Patient.--'Give me a Simple Benefice.'--Scarron's
Description of Himself.--Improvidence and Servility.--The
Society at Scarron's.--The Witty Conversation.--Francoise
D'Aubigne's Debut.--The Sad Story of La Belle
Indienne.--Matrimonial Considerations.--'Scarron's Wife will
live for ever.'--Petits Soupers.--Scarron's last Moments.--A
Lesson for Gay and Grave.

There is an Indian or Chinese legend, I forget which, from which Mrs.
Shelley may have taken her hideous idea of Frankenstein. We are told in
this allegory that, after fashioning some thousands of men after the
most approved model, endowing them with all that is noble, generous,
admirable, and loveable in man or woman, the eastern Prometheus grew
weary in his work, stretched his hand for the beer-can, and draining it
too deeply, lapsed presently into a state of what Germans call
'other-man-ness.'--There is a simpler Anglo-Saxon term for this
condition, but I spare you. The eastern Prometheus went on seriously
with his work, and still produced the same perfect models, faultless
alike in brain and leg. But when it came to the delicate finish, when
the last touches were to be made, his hand shook a little, and the more
delicate members went awry. It was thus that instead of the power of
seeing every colour properly, one man came out with a pair of optics
which turned everything to green, and this verdancy probably transmitted
itself to the intelligence. Another, to continue the allegory, whose
tympanum had slipped a little under the unsteady fingers of the
man-maker, heard everything in a wrong sense, and his life was
miserable, because, if you sang his praises, he believed you were
ridiculing him, and if you heaped abuse upon him, he thought you were
telling lies of him.

But as Prometheus Orientalis grew more jovial, it seems to have come
into his head to make mistakes on purpose. 'I'll have a friend to laugh
with,' quoth he; and when warned by an attendant Yaksha, or demon, that
men w