[290] There are some who hold that the "English" differentia, whether shown in letters or in life, whether south or north of Tweed, east or west of St. George's Channel is always Anglo-Norman.
[291] The "Marian" and Roman comparison of Anne Boleyn's position to Rosamond's is interesting.
[292] It is a sort of brief lift and drop of the curtain which still concealed the true historical novel; it has even got a further literary interest as giving the seamy side of the texture of Macaulay's admirable Jacobite's Epitaph. The account would be rather out of place here, but may be found translated at length (pp. 44-46) in the volume of Essays on French Novelists more than once referred to.
[293] The most unexpected bathos of these last three words is of course intentional, and is Hamilton all over.
[294] The nymph is lying on a couch, and her companion (who has been recalcitrant even to this politeness) is sitting beside her.
[295] This is as impudent as the other passages below are imbecile—of course in each case (as before) with a calculated impudence and imbecility. The miserable 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 Zénéyde and Les Quatre Facardins, by the Duke de Lévis, 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.