476 D'ALEMBERT. 



Patriarch." The tenor of their correspondence was one 

 of uninterrupted confidence and mutual esteem. That 

 D'Alembert occasionally sacrificed somewhat of his 

 wonted independence to his profound admiration of his 

 friend, is certain. A mathematician like him should 

 never have given to Voltaire's ignorant and ridiculous 

 assertion that Leibnitz and Descartes were two charlatans 

 ('Corr. Vol.' (Euv., XVI. 77) so tame a reply as merely 

 to say, that he had not read the collection of Leibnitz' 

 works, but readily believed it to be " un fatras ou il y a 

 bien peu de choses a apprendre" (Ib., 80). Though Vol- 

 taire may only have spoken of that great man's universality, 

 an objection which it little becomes either himself or his 

 correspondent to make, yet the first geometrician of the 

 age ought never to have left the subject without a pro- 

 test in favour of the founder of modern Analysis. There 

 is, however, something very touching in the ease with 

 which D'Alembert bowed before the errors and the 

 ignorance of genius, contrasted with the sturdiness of his 

 resistance to all the attempts of mere station or private 

 friendship to influence his opinion. Mdme. du Defiand, 

 then the patroness of his mistress and his own, in vain 

 besought him to slide in a word on behalf of her friend 

 the President Henault when the 'Discours' was preparing. 

 D'Alembert peremptorily refused to say one syllable of 

 that feeble and correct chronologer in the ' Discours/ and 

 would only, under the head of " Chronology," go so far as 

 to say he had written one of the three chronological 

 abridgments which were useful, but not the best of them 

 ('(Euv./ XIV., 322. 343). 



The correspondence with Frederick II. was continued 

 for thirty years, during three-and-twenty of which it was 



