PREFACE 



IN delivering to the world a Second Volume of the 

 ' Lives of Philosophers/ I am bound to acknowledge, 

 with much thankfulness, the favour with which the 

 former was received ; but I must, at the same time, 

 take leave to state, that the French critics especially 

 appear to have greatly misapprehended the object of 

 my labours. Some of them have asked what occa- 

 sion there was to write lives of Voltaire and Rousseau, 

 when there was no new information conveyed respect- 

 ing those celebrated persons, and no new judgment 

 pronounced upon their works. They seem to have 

 been misled by the accidental circumstance of the 

 French publication only containing these two pieces, 

 which, however, formed part of a series compre- 

 hending all the men of science and letters who 

 flourished in the time of George III. Surely, my 

 French friends and neighbours would have been the 

 first to complain had Voltaire and Rousseau been 

 left out of the list. In the most severe of the 

 criticisms which have appeared of these two Lives, 

 I have to acknowledge the very courteous and even 

 friendly style of the learned and ingenious author. 



