0 of the copies remain unsold." What a sublime person is an
author! What a misery is authorship! The great philosopher who
creates systems that are to alter the face of his country,
must stand at the counter to count out 200 unsold copies!

[114] Des Maiseaux frees Toland from this calumny, and hints at his
own personal knowledge of the author--but he does not know
what a foreign writer authenticates, that this blasphemous
address to Bacchus is a parody of a prayer in the Roman
ritual, written two centuries before by a very proper society
of _Pantheists_, a club of drunkards!

[115] Warburton has well described Des Maiseaux: "All the Life-writers
we have had are, indeed, strange insipid creatures. The
verbose tasteless Frenchman seems to lay it down as a
principle that every life must be a book, and what is worse,
it proves a book without a life; for what do we know of
Boileau, after all his tedious stuff?"

[116] One of these philosophical conferences has been preserved by
Beausobre, who was indeed the party concerned. He inserted it
in the "Bibliotheque Germanique," a curious literary journal,
in 50 volumes, written by L'Enfant, Beausobre, and Formey. It
is very copious, and very curious, and is preserved in the
General Dictionary, art. Toland. The parties, after a warm
contest, were very wisely interrupted by the Queen, when she
discovered they had exhausted their learning, and were
beginning to rail at each other.

[117] A political society which obtained its name from the malt
liquors consumed at its meetings, and which was popularly
termed October from the month when it was usually brewed. This
club advocated the claims of the House of Hanover, and may
have originated the Mughouses noted in p. 32.--ED.

[118] I subjoin, for the gratification of the curious, the titles of a
few of these books. "Spanhemii Opera;" "Clerici Pentateuchus;"
"Constantini Lexicon Graeco-Latinum;" "Fabricii Codex
Apocryphus Vet. et Nov. Test.;" "Synesius de Regno;" "Historia
Imaginum Coelestium Gosselini," 16 volumes; "Caryophili
Dissertationes;" "Vonde Hardt Ephemerides Philologicae;"
"Trismegisti Opera;" "Recoldus, et alia Mahomedica;" all the
Works of Buxtorf; "Salviani