It is the nature of all these conversations, to make transitions from one subject to another. All these objects of curiosity, of science, and of taste, soon vanished, to give way to the great scene which the Empress of Russia, and the King of Poland, were giving to the world. They had been just raising up and restoring the rights of oppressed humanity, and establishing liberty of conscience in a part of the globe of a much greater extent than the old Roman Empire. This service done to human kind, this example given to so many courts, was mentioned with the applause it deserved. Healths were drank to the philosophical empress, to the royal philosopher, and to the philosophical primate, with the wish of their having many imitators. Even the doctors of Sorbonne admired them; for there are some persons of good sense in that body, as there were formerly some men of wit among the Bœotians.
The Russian secretary astonished us with a recital of the great establishments they were forming in Russia. It was asked, why people were in general more fond of reading the history of Charles the XIIth, who passed his life in destroying, than that of Peter the Great, who consumed his in creating? On this we concluded, that weakness and a frivolous turn of mind are the causes of this preference; that Charles the XIIth was the Don Quixote, and Peter the Solon of the North; that superficial understandings prefer a wild extravagant heroism, to the great views of a legislator: that the particulars of the foundation of a town are less pleasing to them, than the rashness of a man, who, at the head of only his domestics, braves an army of ten thousand Turks; and that, in short, most readers love amusement better than instruction. Thence it is, that a hundred women read The Thousand and One Arabian Nights, for one that reads two chapters of Locke.
What was not talked of at this supper? of which I shall long retain the remembrance. It was also in course to say a word of the actors and actresses, that eternal subject of the table-talk of Versailles and of Paris. It was agreed, that a good declaimer was as rare as a good poet. For my part, I must own that Plato's banquet could not have given me more pleasure than that of Monsieur and Madame Andrew.
Our very pretty gentlemen, and our very fine ladies, would, doubtless, have found it dull, and been tired with it. They pretend to be the only good company: but neither Mr. Andrew nor I ever willingly sup with that kind of good company.
[1] See Gibbon's History of Christianity, page 777, for an account of the monks of Mount Athos, who adored the divine light, as above stated.—E.
