Philadelphia's best-known physician Benjamin Rush, 30, is now busy prescribing to the health of all Americans. A delegate to the Pennsylvania Provincial Conference, he has been an outspoken Patriot since 1773, when he protested the British tea tax by publishing a newspaper article claiming that tea caused nervous disorders. But he has not cut off all ties to his ancestral Britain, and he talks of one sport that he feels should be imported to America. "There is a large common in which there are several little holes," Rush explained to friends recently. "The game is played with little leather balls stuffed with feathers, and sticks made somewhat in the form of a bandy-wicket, and he who puts a ball into a given number of holes with the fewest strokes gets the game." One puzzled fellow delegate asked what the game was good for. A man who played golf, replied Rush, "would live ten years the longer."

Tall, fair and kin to the Bourbons, he seemed every mother's dream. So when Donation Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, married in 1763 Renee de Montreuil, daughter of the honorary president of the Paris Taxation Court, her mother was overjoyed. No sooner had the young couple settled down in his Provengal chateau than Sade was revealed as an orgiast, among other things. In 1772, police ordered his arrest for trying to poison four prostitutes with the aphrodisiac Spanish fly. Thereupon Sade fled to Italy--not with his wife but with her younger sister, Anne Prospere. The aghast Montreuils now have a warrant out for Sade's arrest, but they cannot catch him. As for Anne Prospere, who is back home again, wailed Mme. de Montreuil: "No one will marry her now!"

Anything Messenger Paul Revere can do, Deborah Champion Gilbert, 23, can do better. She has disclosed that she served last year as a secret courier for her father, Colonel Henry Champion, 53. Caught short without an aide, Champion asked Deborah to ride the 100-plus miles from their New London home through enemy lines to General George Washington's Cambridge headquarters. She was carrying the Army's payroll and dispatches. Unlike Revere, who was caught after his ride between Charlestown and Lexington with the news of crucial British troop movements, Deborah got through to Washington himself. She had some anxious moments, however. Stopped at the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, the wind-blown and mud-spattered girl was reportedly dismissed by a redcoat who said, "Well, you're only an old woman anyway." Now married to Connecticut Judge Samuel Gilbert, 42, Deborah is expecting her first child.

In his coonskin cap and buckskin breeches, Daniel Boone has to remain constantly on the alert against the Shawnee and Cherokee Indians who are threatening the little settlement he is helping to develop along the Kentucky River. (Two white men were murdered last December, and more than half of the 500 original settlers have returned home.) When no hostile Indians are in sight, Boone forages for food, but friends claim that he is too softhearted to shoot small animals. Instead, he prefers a trick called "barking off squirrels." Says one Kentucky taleteller: "The whiplike report resounded through the woods. Judge of my surprise when I perceived that the ball had hit the piece of bark immediately beneath the squirrel and shivered it into splinters. The concussion killed the animal and sent it whirling through the air."

Who is this Frenchman who rates an alexandrine above iambic pentameter and dares insult the memory of William Shakespeare? Self-exiled on the shores of Lake Geneva, Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, the author of the satire Candide, is preparing a missive on that matter for the Academic null He plans to ridicule his countrymen's Anglophilia, specifically a recent translation of Shakespeare that praises the English playwright as a "creative divinity." Ironically, it was Voltaire, now 82, who promoted the craze when in 1734 he made the first translations of Shakespeare into French. Now he is alarmed that he may have subverted la gloire de France by recognizing "sparks of genius" in someone "so barbarous, so low, so unbridled and so absurd" as William Shakespeare. Voltaire has decreed that the scenes of debauch at the Danish court in Hamlet could only have been written by "a drunken savage."

"The enemy gave out I was crazy and wholly unmanned, but my vitals held sound." It seems that Ethan Allen, 38, the argumentative hero of Fort Ticonderoga, is giving almost as much trouble to the British as he did when he was commander of the Green Mountain Boys. Seized last year after launching a premature and ill-considered attack on Montreal, Allen was shipped to a castle near Falmouth, England. He was not hanged, apparently because the British feared reprisals. He is now on a British frigate sailing along the American coast --a possible exchange for some captured English officer. Word of Allen's fate came from a fellow prisoner who jumped overboard from a ship in the convoy and swam to the North Carolina shore. He also reported that when the convoy stopped at Cork in February, Allen was greeted ecstatically by sympathetic Irishmen, who showered on Allen such luxuries as wool cloth for suits, a couple of beaver hats, several turkeys, sugar loaves and pickled beef.

Germany's most promising young writer has apparently put aside literature in favor of public service. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 26, playwright (Clavigo) and novelist (The Sorrows of Young Werther), has moved to Weimar, where the new duke, Karl August, 19, has just made him a court adviser and member of the Privy Council. Says Goethe of his new life: ' Tis better than the inactive existence at home where, though I had the desire to do much, nothing ever got done. Here I have a couple of duchies ... The girls here are good-looking and well behaved and I am on good terms with them all." Goethe's latest literary efforts, which he keeps in paper bags, include a melancholy love story in verse about the legendary sorcerer Johann Faust and a country girl named Margarete. He occasionally gives readings from this draft but says that he has no idea when it will ever be finished.

Patrick Henry, 40, elected Governor of Virginia at the end of last month, has apparently been suffering a tragedy in secret. As one of his friends says in confirming the rumors, Henry's "soul was bowed down and bleeding under the heaviest sorrows and personal distress." Reason: his wife Sarah, who died last year, had been insane for the three years previous. Mrs. Henry married the Patriot leader in 1754 when she was barely 16; she lost her reason shortly after the birth of their sixth child. Although Virginia's first insane asylum opened in 1773 in Williamsburg, Henry was unwilling to confine his wife there, and so she remained tied up in a straitdress in the basement of their house in Scotchtown. Henry visited her there several times a day whenever he was home, feeding her bowls of gruel and conversing with her, although she understood almost nothing.

The French are still suffering from the failure of last year's harvest, but Queen Marie Antoinette, 20, is not. The strawberry-blonde Austrian, who came to the throne just two years ago, has been dazzling Parisians with her passion for parties, gambling, jewels --and Charles, Comte d'Artois, 18, younger brother of her husband Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette and Charles are frequently seen together at the new Paris horse-racing course, cheering on their favorites. The Queen's mother, Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, is disturbed about "Toinette," particularly her continued childlessness after six years of marriage. Commenting on her daughter's extravagance, she said: "I hope I shall not live to see the disaster that is likely to ensue." Unrepentant, Marie Antoinette, who is beginning to be called "Mme. Deficit," says, "I ami frightened of boredom."

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