456 D'ALEMBERT. 



Of the style in which all his writings are composed, 

 the great merit must at once be admitted. It has the 

 good quality of perfect clearness and of undeviating 

 simplicity. The taste which it displays is very far 

 superior to what could have been expected from so 

 warm an admirer of Tacitus. It seems as if his other 

 passion, that which devoted him to Voltaire, together 

 with his keen sense of ridicule, had effectually saved 

 him from the rock upon which the admirers of Tacitus 

 have so generally made shipwreck, and had purged his 

 diction of those false ornaments in which men of science 

 are so very apt to indulge when they quit their proper 

 haunts and descend into the low but perilous sphere of 

 fine writing. Would that our physical, ay, and even 

 our geometrical writers would always keep the great 

 example of D'Alembert before their eyes not only 

 when they deviate from their proper orbit into general 

 speculation, but even when they are confined to their 

 own subjects ! How much vile figure and inaccurate 

 trope ; how many jumbled metaphors, disjointed de- 

 clamations, and misplaced quotations, should we then 

 be spared ! His own character of his style is not at all 

 too favourable, exemplifying what it describes : " Son 

 style serre, clair et precis, ordinairement facile, sans 

 pretension quoique chatie, quelquefois un peu sec, 

 mais jamais de mauvais gout, a plus d'energie que de 

 chaleur, plus de justesse que d'im agination, plus de 

 noblesse que de grace."* 



We have now surveyed this illustrious life in its 

 various phases, and observed its merits reduced to their 

 real, but still magnificent dimensions. The events by 

 which it was diversified were necessarily few. The 

 kind of existence which D'Alembert enjoyed in his 

 study and the society of Paris has been described. 

 From those habits he seldom deviated, unless in so far 

 as his whole literary occupations may be considered 



* Portrait de lui-meme. (CEuv. i. xlv.) 



