D'ALEMBERT. 425 



avouons sans peine que sareponse eut moins de succes." 

 (' Hist. Ac.' 1783, p. 102.) The attack on the Ency- 

 clopedists was not confined to their literary adversaries 

 or rivals, terms far too frequently synonymous, to the 

 disgrace of letters. The circles of fashion, which at 

 Paris always had their factious divisions, and always 

 connected themselves both with literature and the 

 theatre, took their share in the controversy. The clergy, 

 of course, were not slow to join; and the Government 

 became influenced against the great work and its con- 

 ductors. D'Alembert now first knew what it was to 

 have the hitherto unruffled calm of a -geometrician's 

 life broken and agitated by the tempests of controversy 

 and of faction. Though he had never lived retired 

 from the world, yet he had not been so mixed up in 

 its affairs as to have acquired the callousness by which 

 practical men soon become protected against the buf- 

 fetings of the world. He could not easily reconcile 

 himself to the bitterness that assailed him, and the in- 

 justice to which it led. When the Government refused 

 in 1758 to let the 'Encyclopedic' be any longer pub- 

 lished in France, and its seat was transferred to Neuf- 

 chatel, he retired from all share in the direction, 

 (which Diderot alone continued to exercise,) and only 

 contributed articles on mathematical and metaphysical 

 subjects. 



During the stormy years which now passed over 

 his head he published his ' Melanges de Philosophic, 

 d'Histoire, et de Litterature,' his 4 Memoirs of Queen 

 Christina of Sweden,' his ' History of the Fall of the 

 Jesuits,' and his ' Essay on the Intercourse of Literary 

 Men with the Great,' a work in which he reads to his 

 brethren lessons of independence, fully as distasteful 

 as wholesome. His serious, rational, and dignified 

 remonstrances are known to have at least had the salu- 

 tary effect of terminating the degrading practice of 

 authors dedicating their works, both of fancy and of 

 science, to the great, in addresses which savoured rather 



