It was the day of Anglomania, and, as he says, "every Englishman was supposed to be a patriot and a philosopher." "I had rather be," said Mdlle.

de Lespinasse to Lord Shelburne, "the least member of the House of Commons than even the King of Prussia." Similar things must have been said to Gibbon, but he has not recorded them; and generally it may be said that he is disappointingly dull and indifferent to Paris, though he liked it well enough when there.

He never caught the Paris fever as Hume did, and Sterne, or even as Walpole did, for all the hard things he says of the underbred and overbearing manners of the philosophers.

Gibbon had ready access to the well-known houses of Madame Geoffrin, Madame Helvetius and the Baron d'Holbach; and his perfect mastery of the language must have removed every obstacle in the way of complete social intercourse.

But no word in his Memoirs or Letters shows that he really saw with the eyes of the mind the singularities of that strange epoch.