Of all the books which our modern æra have produced on the subject of foreign discovery, he principally avowed his admiration of Turner’s Embassy to the court of the Dalai Lama, at Thibet, concerning which we had previously very little, and indeed no satisfactory information. He considered this work as highly valuable and important, and as filling up an interesting desideratum in the philosophical history of man. The extraordinary peculiarities of religious superstition, which prevail in that country, the extreme singularity of manners, particularly those relating to marriage, where it often happens that one woman is wife to six or seven brothers in a family, had so much occupied his mind, that it is more than probable, that his ideas on these subjects must have been communicated to paper, and remain among his manuscripts. Hospitable, kind, and generous, he had one marvellous weakness, which often produced the most unpleasing consequences, namely, a childish irritability of temper. The wrong label accidentally put upon a decanter, on one occasion so exasperated him against the offending servant, that much temporary inconvenience was occasioned to a large and elegant party, who were at dinner. These squalls, however, were short and transitory;—and perhaps more tolerable than the grimace and adulatory obsequiousness of “the Traveller,” whose name next succeeds. Opera haud fui parcus meâ. Nimis homo Nihili est, qui piger est, nimisque id genus odi ego male, Vigilare decet hominem qui volt sua tempori conficere officia. CHAPTER XIX. Louis has written his own life, restrained by no very strong considerations of delicacy, nor at all abashed by the circumstantiality of what he has disclosed. His parentage, his education, his early and his late amours, the variety of his efforts to get on in the world, his obsequiousness to his superiors, and his final arrival at wealth and independence, are all communicated without the smallest reserve, as if his object, aim, principle, first and last determination, was “_Quærenda Pecunia_.” He does not seem much to have cared about the opinions of mankind, and to have exclaimed with Horace, “_Populus me sibilet_,” &c. “_ad cœlum jusseris ibo_.” Our Sexagenarian, as appears from his notes, was very frequently in his society, and though he expresses himself as greatly pleased and amused with his vivacity, his inexhaustible fund of anecdotes, his knowledge of the world, and it must be said of books also, indeed he knew something of every thing, yet he evidently felt no strong disposition to give him his esteem.