Bayle, at Rotterdam, was appointed to a professorship of philosophy and history; the salary was a competence to his frugal life, and enabled him to publish his celebrated Review, which he dedicates “to the glory of the city,” for illa nobis haec otia fecit.

After this grateful acknowledgment, he was unexpectedly deprived of the professorship.  The secret history is curious.  After a tedious war, some one amused the world by a chimerical “Project of Peace,” which was much against the wishes and the designs of our William the Third.  Jurieu, the head of the Reformed party in Holland, a man of heated fancies, persuaded William’s party that this book was a part of a secret cabal in Europe, raised by Louis the Fourteenth against William the Third; and accused Bayle as the author and promoter of this political confederacy.  The magistrates, who were the creatures of William, dismissed Bayle without alleging any reason.  To an ordinary philosopher it would have seemed hard to lose his salary because his antagonist was one

    Whose sword is sharper than his pen.

Bayle only rejoiced at this emancipation, and quietly returned to his Dictionary.  His feelings on this occasion he has himself perpetuated.

“The sweetness and repose I find in the studies in which I have engaged myself, and which are my delight, will induce me to remain in this city, if I am allowed to continue in it, at least till the printing of my Dictionary is finished; for my presence is absolutely necessary in the place where it is printed.  I am no lover of money, nor of honours, and would not accept of any invitation should it be made to me; nor am I fond of the disputes, and cabals, and professorial snarlings which reign in all our academies:  Canam mihi et Musis.”  He was indeed so charmed by quiet and independence, that he was continually refusing the most magnificent offers of patronage, from Count Guiscard, the French ambassador; but particularly from our English nobility.  The Earls of Shaftesbury, of Albemarle, and of Huntingdon tried every solicitation to win him over to reside with them as their friend; and too nice a sense of honour induced Bayle to refuse the Duke of Shrewsbury’s gift of two hundred guineas for the dedication of his Dictionary.  “I have so often ridiculed dedications that I must not risk any,” was the reply of our philosopher.

The only complaint which escaped from Bayle was the want of books; an evil particularly felt during his writing the “Critical Dictionary;” a work which should have been composed not distant from the shelves of a public library.  Men of classical attainments, who are studying about twenty authors, and chiefly for their style, can form no conception of the state of famine to which an “helluo librorum” is too often reduced in the new sort of study which Bayle founded.  Taste when once obtained may be said to be no acquiring faculty, and must remain stationary; but knowledge is of perpetual growth, and has infinite