cannot find it. He concludes it was some note of Vertue; but at the distance of so many years cannot be sure. All Vertue’s memorandums were indigested, and written down successively as he made them in forty volumes, often on loose scraps of paper, so it is next to impossible to find the note; nor, were it found, does it probably contain more than Mr. Walpole has copied into the Anecdotes.
The same correspondent in a morning’s conversation, gave him the following account of a celebrated quarrel:—
“Mr. Horace Walpole, who sat with me some time this morning (Jan. 28, 1786), gave a particular account of the origin of his letter to Rousseau in 1765, which in fact was the occasion of the quarrel between that madman and David Hume. He happened to be at the house of a French lady in Paris with Helvetius, who observed that Rousseau seemed to court persecution. Mr. Walpole said that if he would go to Berlin, the King of Prussia would persecute him as much as he pleased. On this thought, he afterwards sat down and wrote a French letter in the name of the King of Prussia to Rousseau. The lady was delighted with it; and copies, as is often the case in Paris, flew through the town rapidly. Mr. Walpole was invited everywhere, and the devotees particularly paid court to him as espousing the cause of religion against philosophy. He had even invitations from several Abbesses; but at last they made so much noise about a small matter, that he grew tired and thought it ridiculous. There were two faults in the French of his original letter, which the Duke do Nivernois and Helvetius pointed out to him, and they were corrected.
