as sufficient to withhold him from court, or
to call him away abruptly from the most illustrious assemblies; nor
was there any hope of enjoying his company, without inviting some
professor to keep him in temper, and engage him in discourse; nor was
it possible, without this expedient, to prevail upon him to sit for
his picture.

Ibid. _At Halle he continued his studies._

Mr. Barretier returned, on the 28th of April, 1735, to Halle, where he
continued the remaining part of his life, of which it may not be
improper to give a more particular account.

At his settlement in the university, he determined to exert his
privileges as master of arts, and to read publick lectures to the
students; a design from which his father could not dissuade him,
though he did not approve it; so certainly do honours or preferments,
too soon conferred, infatuate the greatest capacities. He published an
invitation to three lectures; one critical on the book of Job, another
on astronomy, and a third upon ancient ecclesiastical history. But of
this employment he was soon made weary by the petulance of his
auditors, the fatigue which it occasioned, and the interruption of his
studies which it produced, and, therefore, in a fortnight, he desisted
wholly from his lectures, and never afterwards resumed them.

He then applied himself to the study of the law, almost against his
own inclination, which, however, he conquered so far as to become a
regular attendant on the lectures on that science, but spent all his
other time upon different studies.

The first year of his residence at Halle was spent upon natural
philosophy and mathematicks; and scarcely any author, ancient or
modern, that has treated on those parts of learning was neglected by
him, nor was he satisfied with the knowledge of what had been
discovered by others, but made new observations, and drew up immense
calculations for his own use.

He then returned to ecclesiastical history, and began to retouch his
Account of Heresies, which he had begun at Schwabach: on this occasion
he read the primitive writers with great accuracy, and formed a
project of regulating the chronology of those ages; which produced a
Chrono-logical Dissertation on the succession of the Bishops of Rome,
from St. Peter to Victor, printed in Latin at Utrecht, 1740.

He afterwards was wholly absorbed in application to polite literature,
and read not only a multitude of writers in the Greek and Latin, but
in the G