458 D'ALEMBERT. 



had a great love of these pursuits, and a remarkable 

 facility in following them; and the principal altera- 

 tion which took place in his studies was, that he no 

 longer confined himself to the mathematics, but under- 

 took those other works of which mention has already 

 been made. "When he was chosen to succeed Duclos, in 

 1772, as Secretary to the Academy, the further labour 

 devolved upon him of writing the Eloges of dead 

 members; and not content with this, he undertook to 

 give the Eloges of those who had died between 1700 and 

 1772, and had not been commemorated by his predeces- 

 sors. In three years he composed no fewer than seventy 

 such biographical sketches, which, with thirteen others of 

 his writing, fill six volumes of his works. Nor can we 

 avoid feeling great regret that he should have wasted so 

 much time and labour on a species of composition ex- 

 tremely little to be esteemed. For these Eloges are 

 almost always remarkable for omitting whatever truths 

 tell to the disadvantage of their subjects, so that they are 

 of little value as history; and they are so slight and 

 superficial as notices, that beyond giving dates and facts 

 they give nothing. D'Alembert's offer no exception to 

 this description; they do not record the history of the 

 learned men's works of whose lives they profess to be 

 sketches, and only general sketches. Many of them, 

 indeed, relate to exceedingly obscure individuals, and the 

 most distinguished are treated of in a manner quite 

 unsatisfactory. The most elaborate is that of Boileau, in 

 the notes of which we find a great number of literary 

 anecdotes. The best, perhaps, is that of a man with 

 no pretensions to literature, Lord Mareschall (Keith) 

 because it contains a number of racy and characteristic 



