478 D'ALEMBEKT. 



and expressing "his great admiration of his Majesty." 

 But the wary King-partitioner had the sense to see what 

 might follow from hence, and told his correspondent that 

 the event was too recent to be the fit subject of an 

 historical work (XVII. 235, 6. 240). 



In the course of this correspondence D'Alembert went 

 twice to visit Frederick, once in 1755, when the latter 

 was at Wesel on the Rhine; and again in 1763, when 

 he passed two months with the king at Potsdam. The 

 impression left on the royal mind by both these visits 

 was highly favourable to D'Alembert, as might well be 

 expected from his modest, ingenuous nature, and excel- 

 lent social habits. 



Towards his sixty-fourth year his health which had 

 never been robust, though his life was eminently tem- 

 perate, and always with an entire abstinence from 

 fermented liquors began to decline. A feeble diges- 

 tion and constant difficulty of sleeping, had long been the 

 bane of his bodily comfort. To these ailments was now 

 added an affection of the bladder, which his medical 

 friends found to be beyond the reach of their art. He 

 suffered exceedingly for the last three years of his life, 

 and suffered with an exemplary calmness and even 

 cheerfulness ; at length, exhausted with pain, with irrita- 

 tion more than pain, with sleeplessness, with indigestion, 

 and its consequent weakness, he expired on the 29th of 

 October, 1783, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. 

 His most intimate friend, Diderot, died of dropsy nearly 

 about the same time. It is emphatically stated by 

 Grimm, whose intimacy with Diderot gave him means of 

 knowing the truth of the assertion, that D'Alembert 

 might have prolonged his life had he not refused submit- 



