In his letters from Paris, written in the years 1765, 1766, 1767 and 1771, it will be seen, that so far from being infinitely more occupied with “the fashions and gossip of Versailles and Marli than with a great moral revolution which was taking place in his sight,” he was truly aware of the state of the public mind, and foresaw all that was coming on.

Of Rousseau he has proved that he knew more, and that he judged him more accurately, than Mr. Hume, and many others who were then duped by his mad pride and disturbed understanding.

Voltaire had convicted himself of the basest of vain lies in the intercourse he sought with Mr. Walpole.  The details of this transaction, and the letters which passed at the time, are already printed in the quarto edition of his works.  In the short notes of his life left by himself, and from which all the dates in this notice are taken, it is thus mentioned: 

“Although Voltaire, with whom I had never had the least acquaintance, had voluntarily written to me first, and asked for my book, he wrote a letter to the Duchesse de Choiseul, in which, without saying a syllable of his having written to me first, he told her I had officiously sent him my works, and declared war with him in defence ‘de ce bouffon de Shakspeare,’ whom in his reply to me he pretended so much to admire.  The Duchesse sent me Voltaire’s letter; which gave me such a contempt for his disingenuity, that I dropped all correspondence with him.”

When he spoke with contempt of d’Alembert, it was not of his abilities; of which he never pretended to judge.  Professor Saunderson had long before, when he was a lad at Cambridge, assured him, that it would be robbing him to pretend teaching him mathematics, of which his mind was perfectly incapable, so that any comparison of the intellectual powers of the two men” would indeed be as “exquisitely ridiculous” as the critic declares it.  But lord Orford, speaking of d’Alembert, complains of the overweening importance which he, and all the men of letters of those days in France, attributed to their squabbles and disputes.  The idleness to which an absolute government necessarily condemns nine-tenths of its subjects, sufficiently accounts for the exaggerated importance given to and assumed by the French writers, even before they had become, in the language of the Reviewer, “the interpreters between England and mankind:”  he asserts, “that all the great discoveries in physics, in metaphysics, in political science, are ours but no foreign nation, except France, has received them from us by direct communication:  isolated in our situation, isolated by our manners, we found truth, but did not impart it.” (9) It may surely be asked, whether France will subscribe to this assertion of superiority, in the whole range of science!  If she does, her character has undergone an even greater change, than any she has yet experienced in the course of all her revolutions.