as he was before enraged, desiring to know what our English clergy would object to this [text]. I said their general reply was, that Paul meant “not principally, or chiefly” : Voltaire observed, they might in the same way elude all the rest of the book.
« Some short time after, Voltaire being at the Earl Temple’s seat in Fulham, with Pope, and others such, in their conversation fell on the subject of water-baptism. — Voltaire assuming the part of the quaker — and at length [he] came to mention that assertion of Paul. They questioned there being any such assertion in ail his writings : on which was a large wager [laid] as near as I remember of £ 500 ; and Voltaire not retaining where it was, had one of the Earl’s horses, and came over the ferry from Fulham to Putney, and rode to Half-farthing ; and alighting in the yard, desired our man to lead his horse about, being warm. Coming to my master, he asked for his little usher as he called me. When I came, he desired me to give him in writing the place where Paul said, he was not sent to baptize. — Which I presently did. Then courteously taking his leave, he mounted and rode back — [and, of course, won his wager !]
« During his stay at the scarlet dyer in Wandsworth, I had to wait on him several times, and hear him read, in the Spectators chiefly. At other times he would translate the Epistle of Robert Barclay ; commending the same [Barclay wrote it in the Latin] so far as to acknowledge it to be the finest or purest Church Latin he knew. In his translating his Epistle to king Charles II, instead of using the word thou or thee [for tu ou te in the text], he would write you — which made it, to my ear, sound harsh.
« He seemed so taken with me, as to offer to buy out the remainder of my time. I told him, I expccted my master would be very exorbitant, in his demand. He said, Let his demand be what it might, he would give it on condition I would yield to be his companion, keeping the same company, and [I] should always in every respect fare as he fared, wearing my clothes like his and of equal value : telling me then plainly, he was a Deist ; adding, so were most of the noblemen in France and in England ; deriding the account given by the four
