A vain attempt.

The individual hound flies howling, abjectly petitioning and promising; but the rest bark all with new comfort, and even he starts again straightway.

It is bad travelling in those woods, with such Lions and such Dogs.

And then the sparsely scattered HUMAN Creatures (so we may call them in contrast, persons of Quality for most part) are not always what they should be.
The grand mansions you arrive at, in this waste-howling solitude, prove sometimes essentially Robber-towers;--and there may be Armida Palaces, and divine-looking Armidas, where your ultimate fate is still worse.
_'Que le monde est rempli d'enchanteurs, je ne dis rien d'enchanteresses!'_ To think of it, the solitary Ishmaelite journeying, never so well mounted, through such a wilderness: with lions, dogs, human robbers and Armidas all about him; himself lonely, friendless under the stars:--one could pity him withal, though that is not the feeling he solicits; nor gets hitherto, even at this impartial distance.
"One of the beautiful creatures of Quality,--we hope, not an Armida,--who came athwart Voltaire, in these times, was a Madame du Chatelet; distinguished from all the others by a love of mathematics and the pure sciences, were it nothing else.

She was still young, under thirty; the literary man still under forty.