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INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 25

warn us off by-paths in this matter. " It certainly was
a comfortable time, If there was discontent, it was in
the individual, not in the air; sporadic, not epidemic.
Responsibility for the Universe had not yet been
invented. A few solitary persons saw a swarm of
ominous question-marks wherever they turned their
eyes; but sensible people pronounced them the mere
muscae wlitantes of indigestion which an honest dose
of rhubarb would disperse. Men read Rousseau for
amusement, and never dreamed that those flowers of
rhetoric were ripening the seed of the guillotine."

Gray read Rousseau; sometimes, as he confesses,
'heavily, heavily/ seeking that is, amusement, and
finding it not; but for the signs of the times he
consulted the weathercock. The last part of the
letter to Wharton from which I quoted just now, is
a weather and garden chronicle into which he slides
from the statement that it is " a very critical time, an
action being hourly expected between the two great
Fleets, but no news as yet." It is as if we had Pepys
and White of Selborne on the same page. But he
has begun with a feeling account of the last illness
of his friend Lady Cobham, and then has gone on to
talk about house decoration in a very practical as
well as aesthetic manner for the benefit of Wharton.
Combine only this with a previous letter to the same
correspondent in which he passes from Froissart to
current political gossip, and we have abundant evi-



	INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 25 warn us off by-paths in this matter. " It certainly was a comfortable time, If there was discontent, it was in the individual, not in the air; sporadic, not epidemic. Responsibility for the Universe had not yet been invented. A few solitary persons saw a swarm of ominous question-marks wherever they turned their eyes; but sensible people pronounced them the mere muscae wlitantes of indigestion which an honest dose of rhubarb would disperse. Men read Rousseau for amusement, and never dreamed that those flowers of rhetoric were ripening the seed of the guillotine." Gray read Rousseau; sometimes, as he confesses, 'heavily, heavily/ seeking that is, amusement, and finding it not; but for the signs of the times he consulted the weathercock. The last part of the letter to Wharton from which I quoted just now, is a weather and garden chronicle into which he slides from the statement that it is " a very critical time, an action being hourly expected between the two great Fleets, but no news as yet." It is as if we had Pepys and White of Selborne on the same page. But he has begun with a feeling account of the last illness of his friend Lady Cobham, and then has gone on to talk about house decoration in a very practical as well as aesthetic manner for the benefit of Wharton. Combine only this with a previous letter to the same correspondent in which he passes from Froissart to current political gossip, and we have abundant evi-