The compiler lacked the grasp necessary to realise this laudable purpose.  The book has, however, the merit of conciseness, and is a singular monument of literary industry, for it was entirely compiled by Chambers himself.  It had a great success, and though its price was high (four guineas), it ran through five editions in eighteen years.  On the whole, however, it is meagre, and more like a dictionary than an encyclopaedia, such as Alsted’s for instance.

Some fifteen years after the publication of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, an Englishman (Mills) and a German (Sellius) went to Le Breton with a project for its translation into French.  The bookseller obtained the requisite privilege from the government, but he obtained it for himself, and not for the projectors.  This trick led to a quarrel, and before it was settled the German died and the Englishman returned to his own country.  They left the translation behind them duly executed.[96] Le Breton then carried the undertaking to a certain abbe, Gua de Malves.  Gua de Malves (b. 1712) seems to have been a man of a busy and ingenious mind.  He was the translator of Berkeley’s Hylas and Philonous, of Anson’s Voyages, and of various English tracts on currency and political economy.  It is said that he first suggested the idea of a cyclopaedia on a fuller plan,[97] but we have no evidence of this.  In any case, the project made no advance in his hands.  The embarrassed bookseller next applied to Diderot, who was then much in need of work that should bring him bread.  His fertile and energetic intelligence transformed the scheme.  By an admirable intuition, he divined the opportunity which would be given by the encyclopaedic form, of gathering up into a whole all that new thought and modern knowledge, which existed as yet in unsystematic and uninterpreted fragments.  His enthusiasm fired Le Breton.  It was resolved to make Chambers’s work a mere starting-point for a new enterprise of far wider scope.

“The old and learned D’Aguesseau,” says Michelet, “notwithstanding the pitiable, the wretched sides of his character, had two lofty sides, his reform of the laws, and a personal passion, the taste and urgent need of universality, a certain encyclopaedic sense.  A young man came to him one day, a man of letters living by his pen, and somewhat under a cloud for one or two hazardous books that lack of bread had driven him to write.  Yet this stranger of dubious repute wrought a miracle.  With bewilderment the old sage listened to him unrolling the gigantic scheme of a book that should be all books.  On his lips, sciences were light and life.  It was more than speech, it was creation.  One would have said that he had made these sciences, and was still at work, adding, extending, fertilising, ever engendering.  The effect was incredible.  D’Aguesseau, a moment above himself, forgot the old man, received the infection of genius, and became great with the greatness of the other.  He had faith in the young man, and protected the Encyclopaedia."[98]