o idea
that he was about effecting a revolution in our libraries, and founding
a new province in the dominion of human knowledge; creative genius
often is itself the creature of its own age: it is but that reaction of
public opinion, which is generally the forerunner of some critical
change, or which calls forth some want which sooner or later will be
supplied. The predisposition for the various but neglected literature,
and the curious but the scattered knowledge of the moderns, which had
long been increasing, with the speculative turn of inquiry, prevailed in
Europe when Bayle took his pen to give the thing itself a name and an
existence. But the great authors of modern Europe were not consecrated
beings, like the ancients, and their volumes were not read from the
chairs of universities; yet the new interests which had arisen in
society, the new modes of human life, the new spread of knowledge, the
curiosity after even the little things which concern us, the revelations
of secret history, and the state-papers which have sometimes escaped
from national archives, the philosophical spirit which was hastening its
steps and raising up new systems of thinking; all alike required
research and criticism, inquiry and discussion. Bayle had first studied
his own age before he gave the public his great work.

"If Bayle," says Gibbon, "wrote his Dictionary to empty the various
collections he had made, without any particular design, he could not
have chosen a better plan. It permitted him everything, and obliged him
to nothing. By the double freedom of a dictionary and of notes, he could
pitch on what articles he pleased, and say what he pleased in those
articles."

"_Jacta est alea!_" exclaimed Bayle, on the publication of his
Dictionary, as yet dubious of the extraordinary enterprise; perhaps,
while going on with the work, he knew not at times whither he was
directing his course; but we must think that in his own mind he counted
on something which might have been difficult even for Bayle himself to
have developed. The author of the "Critical Dictionary" had produced a
voluminous labour, which, to all appearance, could only rank him among
compilers and reviewers, for his work is formed of such materials as
they might use. He had never studied any science; he confessed that he
could never demonstrate the first problem in Euclid, and to his last day
ridiculed that sort of evidence called mathematical demonstration. He
had but litt