Walpole wrote a similar letter to Bubb Dodington, Duke of Melcombe, the rich and highly placed patron of men of letters in whose house in Eastbury Voltaire lived for more than three months, and whom he always remembered with gratitude as a wealthy and active man, of keen intelligence and sound character. Voltaire at a later period introduced Thierot to him with the remark that he had once sent Dodington his “History of Charles XII” but that now he sent him something much better. In Eastbury, Voltaire made the acquaintance of Edward Young who, later, was to win repute as a devotional writer, and eventually became his friend. Young had not then become a clergyman and had not yet written his “Night Thoughts” which Voltaire later called a “confusing mixture of bombastical and obscure trivialities.” In Eastbury Voltaire met also James Thomson, the popular author of “The Seasons,” and the impression he left on him was that of a “great genius and great simplicity.” Very characteristic of Brandes’ style and analytical skill is the following: “From the very first Voltaire had access to the Minister Robert Walpole, the Duke of Newcastle, the Archduchess of Marlborough, and the two courts, that of the King and of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Some years before he had paid his respects, though only in a literary fashion, to King George I, when in 1718 he sent him his ‘Ædipe’ with flattering verses which have a humorous effect today. He termed the clumsy boarish Hanoveranian a man of wisdom and a hero, whereupon the King sent Lord Stair a watch as a gift to Voltaire. A letter from Voltaire to his Lordship requests that he send the watch to his father, for Voltaire evidently hoped to raise himself in his parent’s eyes when he saw that he had a son who received presents from an English monarch.” “What most impressed Voltaire,” Brandes continues, “who had come from a country where the gag was the sceptre, the chief instrument of the art of government, was the utter absence of such a thing in England. Here every writer, from Swift downward, could attack the policy of the cabinet with a derisive violence that in France would have put him behind the bars for life. Here no one touched a hair on his head. Most remarkable of all, he found this freedom of speech was perfectly consistent with peace and order. “Voltaire discovered that in England nobility did not stand for caste, but that the great merchant whose trade benefited England and the world was raised to the nobility while he gave the younger sons to civic enterprise and industry. It is unquestionably true that while Voltaire’s exile was meant as a punishment it brought the young writer knowledge and insight. It sharpened his sense for what was actual and his instinct for the possible. It gave to his inborn elasticity of mind that practical understanding without which there can be no great writer.” II.