be Huet!"
answered Hamilton, with a mock air of respect.

"Pshaw!" cried Chaulieu, "I thought when we once gave the rein to satire
it would carry us _pele-mele_ against one another. But, in order to
sweeten that drop of lemon-juice for you, my dear Huet, let me turn to
Milord Bolingbroke, and ask him whether England can produce a scholar
equal to Peter Huet, who in twenty years wrote notes to sixty-two
volumes of Classics,* for the sake of a prince who never read a line in
one of them?"

* The Delphin Classics.

"We have some scholars," answered Bolingbroke; "but we certainly have no
Huet. It is strange enough, but learning seems to me like a circle:
it grows weaker the more it spreads. We now see many people capable of
reading commentaries, but very few indeed capable of writing them."

"True," answered Huet; and in his reply he introduced the celebrated
illustration which is at this day mentioned among his most felicitous
_bons mots_. "Scholarship, formerly the most difficult and unaided
enterprise of Genius, has now been made, by the very toils of the first
mariners, but an easy and commonplace voyage of leisure. But who would
compare the great men, whose very difficulties not only proved their
ardour, but brought them the patience and the courage which alone are
the parents of a genuine triumph, to the indolent loiterers of the
present day, who, having little of difficulty to conquer, have nothing
of glory to attain? For my part, there seems to me the same difference
between a scholar of our days and one of the past as there is between
Christopher Columbus and the master of a packet-boat from Calais to
Dover!"

"But," cried Anthony Hamilton, taking a pinch of snuff with the air of
a man about to utter a witty thing, "but what have we--we spirits of
the world, not imps of the closet," and he glanced at Huet--"to do with
scholarship? All the waters of Castaly, which we want to pour into our
brain, are such as will flow the readiest to our tongue."

"In short, then," said I, "you would assert that all a friend cares for
in one's head is the quantity of talk in it?"

"Precisely, my dear Count," said Hamilton, seriously; "and to that maxim
I will add another applicable to the opposite sex. All that a mistress
cares for in one's heart is the quantity of love in it."

"What! are generosity, courage, honour, to go for nothing with our
mistress, then?" cried Chaulieu.

"No: for she will believe, if you are a p