fifty thousand livres to the
small parishes adjoining the church of Notre Dame; ten thousand livres
to his valet de chambre, and five thousand to an old woman who had
served him a long time. But he was not contented to bestow his
benevolence at his death, and when he was no longer in a condition of
enjoying his estate himself, he was, all his life long, studious in
seeking opportunities of doing good offices." Part of this is confirmed
by another biographer: "Une piete sincere, une foi vive et une charite
si grande, qu'elle ne lui a presque fait reconnoitre d'autres heritiers
que les pauvres." The Lettres of Mad. la Comtesse de la Riviere, and
those of de Sevigne, frequently mention the charm which attended the
visits of Boileau.[12] Rabutin du Bussy thus speaks of him, in a letter
to the Pere Rapin, after eulogizing Moliere: "Despreaux est encore
merveilleuse; personne ne'crit avec plus de purete; ses pensees sont
fortes, et ce qui m'en plait, toujours vraies."

The above is a very cursory and brief allusion to what might be gathered
respecting those superb gardens in France, whose costly and magnificent
decorations so charmed many of our English nobility and gentry, when
travelling there, during the periods of Charles II., James II., William,
Anne, and during subsequent reigns. One need recur only to a very few,
as to Rose, who was sent there by Lord Essex, to view Versailles; to
George London, who was commissioned to go there, not only by the same
Rose, but who afterwards accompanied the Earl of Portland, King
William's ambassador; but to Evelyn, Addison, Dr. Lister, Kent, when he
accompanied Lord Burlington through France to Italy; to the Earl of Cork
and Orrery (the translator of Pliny's Letters), whose gardens at
_Marston_, and at _Caledon_, and whose letters from Italy, all shew the
eagerness with which he must have viewed the gardens of France, when
passing through the provinces towards Florence; to Ray, Lady M. W.
Montague, Bolingbroke, Peterborough, Smollet, John Wilks, John Horne
(when he met Mr. Sterne, or designed to meet him, at _Toulouse_), to
Gray, Walpole, R. P. Knight, who must have passed through the rich
provinces of France, as, in his work on Taste, he speaks of "terraces
and borders intermixed with vines and flowers, (_as I have seen them in
Italian villas_, and in some old English gardens in the same style),
where the mixture of splendour, richness, and neatness, was beautiful
and pleasing in the