le taste for classical learning, for he quotes the Latin
writers curiously, not elegantly; and there is reason to suspect that
he had entirely neglected the Greek. Even the erudition of antiquity
usually reached him by the ready medium of some German commentator. His
multifarious reading was chiefly confined to the writers of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With such deficiencies in his
literary character, Bayle could not reasonably expect to obtain
pre-eminence in any single pursuit. Hitherto his writings had not
extricated him from the secondary ranks of literature, where he found a
rival at every step; and without his great work, the name of Bayle at
this moment had been buried among his controversialists, the rabid
Jurieu, the cloudy Jacquelot, and the envious Le Clerc; to these,
indeed, he sacrificed too many of his valuable days, and was still
answering them at the hour of his death. Such was the cloudy horizon of
that bright fame which was to rise over Europe! Bayle, intent on
escaping from all beaten tracks, while the very materials he used
promised no novelty, for all his knowledge was drawn from old books,
opened an eccentric route, where at least he could encounter no
parallel; Bayle felt that if he could not stand alone, he would only
have been an equal by the side of another. Experience had more than once
taught this mortifying lesson; but he was blest with the genius which
could stamp an inimitable originality on a folio.

This originality seems to have been obtained in this manner. The
exhausted topics of classical literature he resigned as a province not
adapted to an ambitious genius; sciences he rarely touched on, and
hardly ever without betraying superficial knowledge, and involving
himself in absurdity: but in the history of men, in penetrating the
motives of their conduct, in clearing up obscure circumstances, in
detecting the strong and the weak parts of him whom he was trying, and
in the cross-examination of the numerous witnesses he summoned, he
assumed at once the judge and the advocate! Books are for him pictures
of men's inventions, and the histories of their thoughts; any book,
whatever be its quality, must be considered as an experiment of the
human mind.

In controversies, in which he was so ambidextrous--in the progress of
the human mind, in which he was so philosophical--furnished, too, by his
hoarding curiosity with an immense accumulation, of details,--skilful in
the art of d