Note 163 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY

George Keate was a man of miscellaneous talent. His best-known literary works are his serio-comic poem “The Distressed Poet” (1787), and his “Account of the Pelew Islands from the Journal of Captain Henry Wilson.” He enjoyed the friendship of Voltaire at Geneva, and was careful that the world should know it. In her Early Diary, Miss Burney gives a good portrait of Keate as she met him “at the house of six old maids, all sisters, and all above sixty.” She found him a “sluggish” conversationalist who aimed continually at making himself the subject of discussion, “while he listened with the greatest nonchalance, reclining his person upon the back of his chair and kicking his foot now over, and now under, a gold-headed cane.”