Note 277 — Chapter VIII · The London Salon

Life of Mrs. Delany 5. 307. Gibbon wrote of Raynal (Letters 2. 75; 30 September 1783): ‘His conversation which might be very agreeable, is intolerably loud, peremptory, and insolent; and you could imagine that he alone was the Monarch and legislator of the World.’ Walpole, who met him at Baron d’Holbach’s, was so bored by his questions that he pretended to be deaf. ‘After dinner he found I was not, and never forgave me.’ Three years later, however, he dined with Walpole at Strawberry Hill: ‘The Abbé Raynal not only looked at nothing himself, but kept talking to the Ambassador the whole time, and would not let him see anything neither. There never was such an impertinent and tiresome old gossip. He said to one of the Frenchmen, we ought to come abroad to make us love our own country. This was before Mr. Churchill, who replied very properly, “Yes we had some Esquimaux here lately, and they liked nothing because they could get no train-oil for breakfast.”’ Letters 9. 92; 12 November 1774, and 10. 62; 15 June 1777.