him a fierce and savage air, and has the sound of virtue always in his mouth.”

It is indeed a most remarkable thing in history that the attempt should ever be made to introduce atheism among a whole people under the name of virtue. The word liberty was incessantly in the mouths of these people who crouched at the feet of the great, and who, not satisfied with the contempt of the first court in the kingdom, chose to swallow large draughts of it from a second. They were fanatics crying out against fanaticism; men triply wicked, for they combined with the vices of the atheist, the intolerance of the sectary, and the self-conceit of the author. .

-M. Gilbert was so much the more courageous in his attacks upon philosophism, because not sparing any party, he painted with energy the vices of the great, and of the clergy, which served as an excuse to the innovation, and which they alleged in justification of their principles

See where with steps enervated by sloth,

The great ones of the land scarce know to drag
Along their feeble limbs.

Could we escape a fearful destruction.-From the days of the regency, to the end of the reign of Louis XV, intrigue every day made and unmade statesmen. Thence that continual change of systems, of projects, of views. These ephemeral ministers were followed by a crowd of flatterers, of clerks, of actors, of mistresses; all, beings of a moment, were eager to suck the blood of the miserable, and were soon trampled on by another generation of favourites as fugitive and as voracious as the former. Thus, while the imbecility and folly of the government irritated the minds of the people, the moral disorders of the country reached their utmost height. The man

who no longer found happiness in the bosom of his family, accustomed himself to seek his happiness in ways that were independent of others. Repelled by the manners of the age from the bosom of nature, he wrapped himself up in a harsh and cold egotism, which withered all virtue in its very bud.

To complete our misfortunes, these sophists, in destroying happiness upon the earth, sought also to deprive man of the hopes of a better life. In this position, alone in the midst of the universe, having nothing to feed on. but the chagrins of a vacant and solitary heart, which never felt another heart beat in unison with it, was it very: astonishing that so many Frenchmen were ready to seize the first phantom which presented a new world to their: imaginations. For the rest, was M. Gilbert the only person who saw through the innovators of his age? was he to be singled out as a mark against which all their cries of atrocity were to be directed because he had given so faithful a picture of them in his verses. If some severe strokes were aimed against that passion of thinking and that geometrical rage which had seized all France, did he go farther than Frederick II, whose words may well be quoted here as a commentary upon, and an excuse for our poet.

In a dialogue of the dead, where this royal author brings together Prince Eugene, General Lichtenstein, and the Duke of Marlborough, he draws this picture of the Encyclopædists. "These people," he says, " are a sect which have arisen in our days assuming themselves to be philosophers. To the effrontery of Cynics they add the noble impudence of putting forth all the paradoxes that come into their heads: they pride themselves upon their geometry, and maintain that those who have not studied this science cannot have correct ideas, consequently that they themselves alone have the faculty of reasoning. If

any one dates to attack them, he is soon drowned in a dë luge of ink and abuse; the crime of treason against philosophy is wholly unpardonable. They deary all seienees except their own calculations; poetry is a frivolity, the fictions of which ought to be banished the world: a poet ought not to think any thing worthy of his rhymes but algebraic equations. As to history, that they would have studied in the reverse, beginning at our own times, and mounting upwards to the deluge. They would fain res form all governments, making France a democratic state, with a geometrician as its legislator, to be governed entirely by geometricians who shall subject all the operations of the new government to infinitesimal calculations. This republic would maintain a constant peace, and would be supported without an army."

Posthumous Works of Frederick II, vol. VÍ.

It was above all things a primary object among the literati of that time, to depreciate the great men of the seventeenth century; to diminish the weight of their example and authority. Let us again hear the King of Prussia on this subject. Thus does he speak in his examination of the System of Nature.

"It is a great error to believe that perfection is to be found in any thing human; the imagination may form such chimeras to itself, but they will never be realized. In the number of centuries that the world has now endured, different nations have made experiments on all sorts of governments, but not one has been found that was not subject to some inconveniences. Of all the paradoxes which the would-be philosophers of our days maintain with so much self-complacency, that of decrying the great men of the last century appears to be what they have thể most at heart. How can their reputations be increased

by exaggerating the faults of a king, all whose faults were effaced by his splendour and greatness. The foibles of Louis XIV, are well known, these philosophers have not even the petty merit of having been the first to discover them. A prince who should reign only a week would doubtless be guilty of some errors, how many must be expected from a monarch who passed nearly sixty years of his life upon the throne."

This passage is followed by a magnificent eulogium of Louis XIV, and Frederick often recurs to the same subject in his correspondence with M. d'Alembert. “Our poor century," he says, "is no less lamentably barren of great men, than of good works. Of the age of Louis XIV, which does honour to the human mind, nothing remains to us but the dregs, and soon not even that will be left." The eulogium of Louis the Great, from the pen of the Great Frederick,a King of Prussia defend ing French glory against French literati, is one of those precious strokes at which a writer ought to catch very eagerly.

I have already remarked, that if M. Gilbert had only attacked the sophists, he might have been suspected of partiality; but he equally raised his voice against every vicious character, whatever might be his rank and power, Without any idea or apprehension of doing injury to religion, he abandoned to contempt those ecclesiasties who are the eternal shame of their order.

Religion, matron driven to despair,

By her own children mangled and defaced :--
Weeping their ways, in her deserted temples,
In vain with words of pardon does she stretch
Her arms toward them, still reviled, derided,
Her precepts are forgot, her laws profaned,
See there, amid a circle of gay nymphs,
That youthful Abbe;-saintly in his garb,
In mind a sophist he directs his wit
Against that God, by serving whom he lives.

I do not think that a more despicable character :exists, than that of a priest who, considering christianity as an abuse, yet consents to feed on the bread of the altar, and lies at once to God and to man. But we would fain. enjoy the honours of philosophy without losing the riches of religion; the first being necessary to our self-love, the second to our manners.

Such was the deplorable success which infidelity had obtained, that it was not uncommon to hear a sermon in which the name of Jesus Christ was avoided by the preacher as a rock on which he feared to split. And what was so ridiculous and so fatal in this name to a christian orator ?-Did Bossuet find that this name detracted from his eloquence ?-You preach before the poor, and you dare not name Jesus Christ!-before the unfor tunate, and the name of their father must not pass your lips!-before children, and you cannot instruct them that it was he who blessed their innocence. You talk of morality, and you blush to name the author of that which is preached in the gospel! never can the affecting precepts of religion be supplied by the common-place maxims of philosophy. Religion is a sentiment, philosophy an essay of reason, and even supposing that both led to practising the same virtues it would always be safest to take the first. But a still stronger consideration is, that all the virtues of philosophy are accessible to religion, while many of the religious virtues are not accessible to philosophy. Was it philosophy that established itself on the summit of the Alps to rescue the traveller? -It is philosophy that succours the slave afflicted with the plague in the bagnios of Constantinople, or that exiles itself in the deserts of the New World, to instruct and civilize the savages. Philosophy may carry its sacrifices so far as to afford assistance to the sick, but in applying the remedy it turns away its eyes; the heart and the