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Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers

with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of

affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with

sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit

for their several callings, all lying horribly in pretending to

belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of

Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from

which anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the

score and the score. People not immediately connected with

Monseigneur or the State, yet equally unconnected with anything

that was real, or with lives passed in travelling by any straight

road to any true earthly end, were no less abundant. Doctors who

made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for imaginary

disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly patients

in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur.