aire's brilliant success brought poetry into fashion, and so
Helvetius wrote half a dozen long cantos on Happiness. Montesquieu
caught and held the ear of the town by _The Spirit of Laws_ (1748), and
Helvetius was acute enough to perceive that speculation upon society
would be the great durable interest of his time.[103] He at once set to
work, and this time he set to work without hurry. In 1751 he threw up
his place as farmer-general, and with it an income of between two or
three thousand pounds a year,[104] and he then devoted himself for the
next seven years to the concoction of a work that was designed to bring
him immortal glory. "Helvetius sweated a long time to write a single
chapter," if we may believe one of his intimates. He would compose and
recompose a passage a score of times. More facile writers looked at him
with amazement in his country-house, ruminating for whole mornings on a
single page, and pacing his room for hours to kindle his ideas, or to
strike out some curious form of expression.[105] The circle of his
friends in Paris amused themselves in watching his attempts to force the
conversation into the channel of the question that happened to occupy
him for the moment. They gave him the satisfaction of discussion, and
then they drew him to express his own views. "Then," says Marmontel, "he
threw himself into the subject with warmth--as simple, as natural, as
sincere as he is systematic and sophistic in his works. Nothing is less
like the ingenuousness of his character and ordinary life, than the
artificial and premeditated simplicity of his works. Helvetius was the
very opposite in his character of what he professes to believe; he was
liberal, generous, unostentatious, and benevolent."[106]

[102] See Jal's _Dict. Crit._, p. 676. There is a comparison in
_L'Esprit_, which we may assume to have been due to family
reminiscence: "Like those Physicians who, in their jealousy of the
discovery of the emetic, abused the credulity of a few prelates, to
excommunicate a remedy of which the service is so prompt and so
salutary," etc.--ii. 23.

[103] Hume, however, tells a story to the effect that Helvetius
tried to dissuade Montesquieu from publishing his great book, as
being altogether unworthy of his previous reputation.

[104] Barbier v. 57.

[105] Morellet, i. 71.

[106] Marmontel, ii, 116.

As it happens, there is a very different picture in one of Dider