POLITICS AND HOME LIFE (1781-92) 343 



the author of a series of conventional idylls which had an amazing 

 success in their day. Archdeacon Coxe, who visited him, rashly 

 prophesied, ' His writings will be admired by future ages as long as 

 there remains a relish for true pictorial simplicity or taste for 

 original composition.' It is almost impossible to us to believe that 

 our ancestors can have found pleasure in these sham eclogues 

 insipid tales of ideal peasants with classical names. Yet they 

 were translated into most European languages, and the translator 

 and publisher of an English edition (1775) congratulated himself 

 on presenting readers with a work ' he thinks equal in the beauty 

 of composition (allowance made for the difference of language) to 

 the idylls of Theocritus or Virgil, and far superior in benevolent 

 and pathetic sentiments.' He adds, ' The historical plates and 

 vignettes with which this work is embellished were all designed 

 and drawn by Gesner himself.' De Saussure thus describes the 

 bookseller-poet-painter : 



* He is small and ugly, but his face has a great deal of character. 

 He speaks French with difficulty ; is very modest about his work. He 

 showed us his pictures with much politeness, and seemed to value them 

 more than his verses. He told us that he had entirely given up paint- 

 ing ; that all his thoughts, all his aims, were centred on poetry.' 



His pictures, judging from the illustrations, were worthy of his 

 poetry. Each age throws off a quantity of such stuff for the 

 rubbish-heap, and the contemporaries of Cubism and Vorticism 

 are not perhaps in a position to cast the first stone . 



Later in the same summer de Saussure made a twelve days' 

 trip to Chamonix, meeting at Servoz Exchaquet, at that date em- 

 ployed as Inspector of the mines of Faucigny, and at Le Prieure 

 making the acquaintance of Dr. Paccard. It is further recorded 

 that he took tea with the Blairs. Mr. Blair, then a resident at 

 Geneva, has been already mentioned as the Englishman who built 

 and gave his name to the first cabin at the Montenvers. 



About this date de Saussure found matter for passing irritation 

 in a reference made to him by a German professor from Gottingen, 

 named Meiners, in a description of a tour in Switzerland in 1782. 

 The passage ran as follows : 



' Among the busiest of the Negatives one must give the first place 

 to M. de Saussure, who had recently on several occasions declined 



