creature had himself obliged her to "come out
of the water" by declining to join her there on the plea that he was
never good for an assignation when he was wet!

[296] If they are true, and if Madame de Grammont was the culprit, it is
a sad confirmation of the old gibe, "Skittish in youth, prudish in age."
It can only be pleaded in extenuation that some youth which was not
skittish, such as Sarah Marlborough's, matured or turned into something
worse than "devotion." And Elizabeth Hamilton was so very pretty!

[297] "Completions" of both _Zeneyde_ and _Les Quatre Facardins_, by the
Duke de Levis, are included in some editions, but they are, after the
fashions of such things, very little good.

[298] The name is not, like "Tarare," a direct burlesque; but it
suggests a burlesque intention when taken with "facond" and others
including, perhaps, even _faquin_.

[299] The Sultaness is almost _persona muta_--and indeed her tongue must
have required a rest.

[300] As Hamilton's satiric intention is as sleepless as poor Princess
Mousseline herself, it is not impossible that he remembered the incident
recorded by Pepys, or somebody, how King Charles the Second could not
get a sheet of letter paper to write on for all the Royal Households and
Stationery Offices and such-like things in the English world.

[301] _I.e._ colour-printed cotton from India--a novelty "fashionable"
and, therefore, satirisable in France.

[302] Or "distaffs and spindles"?

[303] She is indeed said to have "converted" both him and Grammont, the
latter perhaps the most remarkable achievement of its kind.

[304] Mr. Austin Dobson's charming translation of this was originally
intended to appear in the present writer's essay above mentioned.

[305] The chief region of bookselling. Cf. Corneille's early comedy, _La
Galerie du Palais_.

[306] For note on _Telemaque_ see end of chapter.

[307] Who is here herself an improved Doralise.

[308] To put it otherwise in technical French, there is a little
_grivoiserie_ in him, but absolutely no _polissonnerie_, still less any
_cochonnerie_. Or it may be put, best of all, in his own words when, in
a short French-Greek dialogue, called _La Volupte_, he makes Aspasia say
to Agathon, "Je vous crois fort voluptueux, sans vous croire debauche."

CHAPTER X

LESAGE, MARIVAUX, PREVOST, CREBILLON

The words which closed the last chapter should make it unnecessary to
prefix much of the same kind to th