[84]: In the "Liaisons dangereuses."
[85]: For one might make a man crazy by insisting that he was so. The friends of the younger Crebillon once agreed, on an evening of social gaiety, not to laugh at one of his jokes, but only to maintain a pitying silence, as if he had now lost all his wit and wits. And the thing was even made credible to him. Other writers again are still more vividly deluded by their friends into the opposite error of believing that they have wit. [A curious illustration of this is given in a story in Roscoe's "Italian Novelists."--Tr.]
[86]: Alloying gold with copper is called the red; with silver the white.
[87]: That is, merely in the conventional; for there is a certain better sort, by which not always that, but cultivated goodness of heart is always accompanied.
[88]: A settling of blood in some cavity of the body, especially in the thorax.--(Tr.)
[89]: As no readers understand sober earnest less than those who cannot take a joke. I remark in a note for that class that the fact stated above is really so, and that I (as an equally intemperate water and coffee drinker) have never found any other means of bracing the nerves against suspension of pulse and breath and other weaknesses, which made all inner effort painful, of so much efficiency as--hop-beer.
[90]: An instrument for measuring the blue of the atmosphere.
[91]: According to the ancients the rare springs gathered about them all wild beasts, and these meetings, like those in masquerades, gave occasion to still more extraordinary ones, and to the proverb, "Always something new from Africa," or to miscarriages.
[92]: His sermons, printed a year ago, will still be to the taste of every one who shares mine.
[93]: "Sweet hour, that wakes the wish and melt's the heart."--Byron. (Tr.)