In its simplest form it is to be found in the stiff, circumstantial report of the seconds in the duel at Boulogne in _Denis Duval_; and in the missive in barbarous French of the Dowager Viscountess Castlewood[70]--a letter which only requires the sprawling, childish script to make it an exact facsimile of one of the epistolary efforts of that "baby-faced" Caroline beauty who was accustomed to sign herself "L duchesse de Portsmout." It is better still in the letter from Walpole to General Conway in chap. xl. of _The Virginians_, which is perfect, even to the indifferent pun of sleepy (and overrated) George Selwyn. But the crown and top of these _pastiches_ is certainly the delightful paper, which pretends to be No. 341 of the _Spectator_ for All Fools' Day, 1712, in which Colonel Esmond treats "Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix," to what, in the parlance of the time, was decidedly a "bite."[71] Here Thackeray has borrowed not only Steele's voice, but his very trick of speech. It is, however, a fresh instance of the "tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive," that although this pseudo-_Spectator_ is stated to have been printed "exactly as those famous journals were printed" for eighteenth-century breakfast-tables, it could hardly, owing to one microscopic detail, have deceived the contemporary elect. For Mr, Esmond, to his very apposite Latin epigraph, unluckily appended an English translation,--a concession to the country gentlemen from which both Addison and Steele deliberately abstained, holding that their distinctive mottoes were (in Addison's own phrase) "words to the wise," of no concern to unlearned persons.[72] Notes: [70] _Esmond_, Book ii, chap, ii. [71] _Ib_. Book iii, chap, iii. [72] _Spectator_, No. 221, November 13, 1711.