His good nature and justice did farther appear in his manner of recompensing his domestics, and by his liberality to the poor. He gave by his will 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 piété sincere, une foi vive et une charité si grande, qu'elle ne lui a presque fait reconnoitre d'autres héritiers que les pauvres." The Lettres of Mad. la Comtesse de la Riviere, and those of de Sevigné, 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: "Despréaux est encore merveilleuse; personne ne'crit avec plus de pureté; ses pensées 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 highest degree;" and to the lately deceased Sir U. Price, who must also have passed through France, to view (with the eagerness with which he did view) the rich and magnificently decorated gardens of Italy, "aided with the splendour and magnificence of art," their ballustrades, their fountains, basons, vases and statues, and