Page:Essays in idleness.djvu/210

 198 Horace's filial piety took the very exclusive form of undying enmity to all his father's political opponents. But when we have passed over and tried to forget all that is spiteful and caustic and coarse in these celebrated letters, there is a great deal left, a great deal that is not even the current gossip of the day. He goes to Paris in 1765, and finds that laughing is out of fashion in that once gay capital. "Good folks!" he cries, "they have no time to laugh. There are God and the king to be pulled down first, and men and women, one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition. They think me quite profane for having my belief left." A few years later, Walpole sees clearly that French politics must end in "despotism, a civil war, or assassination." The age is not, he says, as he once thought, an age of abortion; but rather "an age of seeds which are to produce strange crops hereafter." Surely, even Macaulay might allow that these are the words of a thinker, of a prophet, perhaps, standing unheeded in the market-place.

Granted, then, that the light-article letter, and the letter which gives us material with