“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 passionate lover, that you have all those virtues; and if not, she will never believe that you have one.”
“Ah! it was a pretty court of love in which the friend and biographer of Count Grammont learned the art!” said Bolingbroke.