58 ENGLISH OPINION but all Europe. Here were cherished those academical philosophers, wits, and political economists, who first sounded the alarm for the simultaneous extinction of thrones and altars; who first exhibited the portentous remedies for curing despotism by anarchy, and superstition by atheism ; who sowed the first prolific seeds of those .revolutionary horrors which so rapidly sprung up into the poisonous tree of liberty, and who hurled their arrows at the God of heaven, and erected on the meditated ruins of his kingdom, the tem- ple of the goddess of reason. Previously to some of Madame du Deffand's numerous intrigues, she had been separated from her husband, on the ground which, it is presumed, the laws of England would not recognise as a lawful impediment - that " he was a weak and tiresome companion !" She was extra- ordinarily acute, but her acuteness, though it was frequently just, was always malicious. It is difficult to say whether she was more completely deficient in
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