faithful. The poor people perceive something at the bottom of their hearts which warns them of their disaster." In December, La Mettrie, who was a young and robust man, died suddenly from eating, at the close of a good dinner, a pie supposed to be of pheasant, but in reality composed, by way of a neat practical joke, of eagle with the wholesome addition of pork hashed with ginger. La Mettrie gallantly finished this too-seductive dish, and died the next day; and Voltaire, after recording the catastrophe (which does not seem to have caused him very lively regret), observes, "I should have liked to put to La Mettrie, in the article of death, fresh inquiries about the orange-skin. That fine soul, on the point of quitting the world, would not have dared to lie. There is great reason to suppose that he spoke the truth."
There were other things, hard to bear, about which he could have no consolatory doubts, that tended to lessen the charm of his intercourse with the king. It was well known that Frederick was fond of indulging one of the ugliest and most impolitic propensities which can afflict a monarch, or, indeed, anybody—namely, that of saying things with the intention to wound. This is a propensity which despotism especially tends to develop, as may be seen in many a petty household tyrant, endowed, for mysterious ends, with the terrible combination of a bad temper and a sharp tongue, whose defenceless wife (or husband), children, and dependants suffer hourly laceration from carefully-concocted sarcasms. The allusion to Frederick in a part of Voltaire's panegyric on Louis XIV. cannot be mistaken: "Louis was so far from saying disagreeable things, which are deadly arrows in the hands of a prince, that he did not even permit himself the most
