pre-eminence in any single pursuit.  Hitherto his writings had not extricated him from the secondary ranks of literature, where he found a rival at every step; and without his great work, the name of Bayle at this moment had been buried among his controversialists, the rabid Jurieu, the cloudy Jacquelot, and the envious Le Clerc; to these, indeed, he sacrificed too many of his valuable days, and was still answering them at the hour of his death.  Such was the cloudy horizon of that bright fame which was to rise over Europe!  Bayle, intent on escaping from all beaten tracks, while the very materials he used promised no novelty, for all his knowledge was drawn from old books, opened an eccentric route, where at least he could encounter no parallel; Bayle felt that if he could not stand alone, he would only have been an equal by the side of another.  Experience had more than once taught this mortifying lesson; but he was blest with the genius which could stamp an inimitable originality on a folio.

This originality seems to have been obtained in this manner.  The exhausted topics of classical literature he resigned as a province not adapted to an ambitious genius; sciences he rarely touched on, and hardly ever without betraying superficial knowledge, and involving himself in absurdity:  but in the history of men, in penetrating the motives of their conduct, in clearing up obscure circumstances, in detecting the strong and the weak parts of him whom he was trying, and in the cross-examination of the numerous witnesses he summoned, he assumed at once the judge and the advocate!  Books are for him pictures of men’s inventions, and the histories of their thoughts; any book, whatever be its quality, must be considered as an experiment of the human mind.

In controversies, in which he was so ambidextrous—­in the progress of the human mind, in which he was so philosophical—­furnished, too, by his hoarding curiosity with an immense accumulation, of details,—­skilful in the art of detecting falsehoods amidst truths, and weighing probability against uncertainty—­holding together the chain of argument from its first principles to its remotest consequence—­Bayle stands among those masters of the human intellect who taught us to think, and also to unthink!  All, indeed, is a collection of researches and of reasonings:  he had the art of melting down his curious quotations with his own subtile ideas.  He collects everything; if truths, they enter into his history; if fictions, into discussions; he places the secret by the side of the public story; opinion is balanced against opinion:  if his arguments grow tedious, a lucky anecdote or an enlivening tale relieves the folio page; and knowing the infirmity of our nature, he picks up trivial things to amuse us, while he is grasping the most abstract and ponderous.  Human nature in her shifting scenery, and the human mind in its eccentric directions, open on his view; so that an unknown person, or a worthless