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CHAPTER XXVI.
HIS LAST YEARS.
As years went on and found him still by the Lake, he became known as "the Patriarch of Ferney;" and as he kept himself incessantly before the public by his writings, and with constantly increasing fame, the tide of visitors continued to augment in numbers and importance. It became necessary for people with intellectual pretensions to make at least one pilgrimage to the modern Mecca, where they might have the advantage of hearing the prophet explain his own doctrines; and the learned and the great, men of all professions and beliefs, literary ladies and fashionable ladies, came to render their incessant homage, or to gratify their ardent curiosity. It must have been in the year 1764, or 1765, that he received a very remarkable visitor indeed; no less a person than Boswell, who had then undergone the anguish of separation from his revered friend, whom he had left "rolling his majestick frame in his usual manner" on the pier at Harwich, in order to make a tour on the Continent. He quite appreciated Voltaire's celebrity, if not his genius, and referred afterwards, in his conversations with Johnson, to "when I was at Ferney;" where
