Miss Chris. Hammond.

[387] They were even worse than Leigh Hunt's in the strictly English
counterpart torture-house for the victims of tyranny--consisting, for
instance, in the supply of so good a dinner, at His Most Christian
Majesty's expense, for the prisoner's servant, that the prisoner ate it
himself, and had afterwards, on the principles of rigid virtue and
distributive justice, to resign, to the minion who accompanied him, his
own still better one which came later, also supplied by the tyrant.

[388] One expects something of value from the part-contemporary,
part-successor of the novelists from Lesage to Rousseau. But where it is
not mere blether about virtue and vice, and _le coeur humain_ and so on,
it has some of the worst faults of eighteenth-century criticism. He
thinks it would have been more "moral" if Mme. de Cleves had actually
succumbed as a punishment for her self-reliance (certainly one of the
most remarkable topsyturvifications of morality ever crotcheted); is, of
course, infinitely shocked at being asked and induced to "interest
himself in a prostitute and a card-sharper" by _Manon Lescaut_; and,
equally of course, extols Richardson, though it is fair to say that he
speaks well of _Tom Jones_.

[389] See next chapter.

[390] I wonder whether any one else has noticed that Thackeray, in the
very agreeable illustration to one of not quite his greatest
"letterpress" things, _A New Naval Drama_ (Oxford Ed. vol. viii. p.
421), makes the press-gang weep ostentatiously in the picture, though
not in the text, where they only wave their cutlasses. It may be merely
a coincidence: but it may not.

[391] There are reasons for thinking that Marmontel was deliberately
"antidoting the _fanfreluches_" of the older tale-teller.

[392] In the original, suiting the rest of the setting, it is _rideaux_.

[393] "Explanations" is quite admirable, and, I think, neither borrowed
from, nor, which is more surprising, by others.

[394] She declares that she has never actually "stooped to folly"; but
admits that on more than one occasion it was only an accidental
interruption which "luckily" (_heureusement_) saved her.

[395] It is necessary to retain the French here: for our "likes" is
ambiguous.

[396] Cf. the stories, contradictory of each other, as to _our_
brown-coated philosopher's appearance in France. (Boswell, p. 322, Globe
ed.)

[397] Cf. again the bestowal of this title by Horace Walpole, in his
later