e Universelle_, followed by the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, tells a story of Raynal visiting the House of Commons;
the Speaker, says the writer, learning that he was in the gallery,
"suspended the discussion until a distinguished place had been found
for the French philosopher." This must be set down as a myth. The
journals have been searched, and there is no official confirmation
of the statement, improbable enough on the face of it.

Raynal was one of the most assiduous of the guests at the philosophic
meals of Baron Holbach and Helvetius; he was very good-humoured, easy to
live with, and free from that irritable self-consciousness and self-love
which is too commonly the curse of the successful writer, as of other
successful persons. He did not go into company merely to make the hours
fly. With him, as with Helvetius, society was a workshop. He pressed
every one with questions as to all matters, great or small, with which
the interlocutor was likely to be familiar.[158] Horace Walpole met him
at "dull Holbach's," and the abbe at once began to tease him across the
table as to the English colonies. Walpole knew as little about them as
he knew about Coptic, so he made signs to his tormentor that he was
deaf. On another occasion Raynal dined at Strawberry Hill, and mortified
the vanity of his host by looking at none of its wonders himself, and
keeping up such a fire of talk and cross-examination as to prevent
anybody else from looking at them. "There never was such an impertinent
and tiresome old gossip," cried our own gossip.[159]

[158] Morellet, i. 221.

[159] _Walpole's Corresp._, vi. 147 and 445.

Raynal failed to give better men than Horace Walpole the sense of power.
When his greatest work took the public by storm, nobody would believe
that he had written it. Just as in the case of the _System of Nature_,
so people set down the _History of the Indies_ to Diderot, and even the
most moderate critics insisted that he had at any rate written not less
than one-third of it. Many less conspicuous scribes were believed to
have been Raynal's drudges. We can have no difficulty in supposing that
so bulky a work engaged many hands. There is no unity of composition, no
equal scale, no regularity of proportion; on the contrary, rhapsody and
sober description, history and moral disquisition, commerce, law,
physics, and metaphysics are all poured in, almost as if by hazard. We
seem to watch half a