Page:Voltaire (Hamley).djvu/49

 last year of George I.'s reign. Only one letter remains descriptive of his impressions of the country, in which he describes what may have been Greenwich fair—a multitude of gay boats on the Thames escorting the king and queen, and horse-races and sports near the town of Greenwich, of which he gives the most appreciative and pleased account. He was extremely vexed to be told afterwards that there had been much illusion for him in the scene—that all the pretty girls were servants or villagers, all the brilliant youths caracoling about the course students or apprentices on hired horses. The same evening he was presented to some Court ladies, whom he found reserved and cold, taking tea, making a great noise with their fans, and either saying nothing or crying out all together in disparagement of somebody present. He takes a humorously exaggerated view of the effect of the east wind in producing moroseness and even suicide among the English, and says a famous doctor told him that the wind was in that quarter when Charles I.'s head was cut off, and when James II. was dethroned. "'If you have any favour to ask at Court,' he whispered in my ear, 'never urge it except when the wind is in the west or south.'… Besides this contrariness, the English have those which spring from the animosity of parties; and nothing puts a stranger out so much as this. I have heard it said, literally, that my Lord Marlborough was the greatest poltroon in the world, and that Mr Pope was a fool. I came here full of the notion that a Wigh was a refined Republican, enemy of royalty, and a Tory the partisan of passive obedience. But I find that in Parliament nearly all the Wighs are for the Court, and the Torys against it."…