urite old writers, whose
_naivete_ seemed to sport with the grossness which it touched, and
neither in France nor at home had the age then attained to our moral
delicacy: Bayle himself was a man without passions! His trivial matters
were an author's compliance with his bookseller's taste, which is always
that of the public. His scepticism is said to have thrown everything
into disorder. Is it a more positive evil to doubt than to dogmatise?
Even Aristotle often pauses with a qualified _perhaps_, and the egotist
Cicero with a modest _it seems to me_. Bayle's scepticism has been
useful in history, and has often shown how facts universally believed
are doubtful, and sometimes must be false. Bayle, it is said, is
perpetually contradicting himself; but a sceptic must doubt his doubts;
he places the antidote close to the poison, and lays the sheath by the
sword. Bayle has himself described one of those self-tormenting and
many-headed sceptics by a very noble figure, "He was a hydra who was
perpetually tearing himself."

The time has now come when Bayle may instruct without danger. We have
passed the ordeals he had to go through; we must now consider him as the
historian of our thoughts as well as of our actions; he dispenses the
literary stores of the moderns, in that vast repository of their wisdom
and their follies, which, by its originality of design, has made him an
author common to all Europe. Nowhere shall we find a rival for Bayle!
and hardly even an imitator! He compared himself, for his power of
raising up, or dispelling objections and doubts, to "the
cloud-compelling Jove." The great Leibnitz, who was himself a lover of
his _varia eruditio_, applied a line of Virgil to Bayle, characterising
his luminous and elevated genius:--

Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.
Beneath his feet he views the clouds and stars!

CHARACTERISTICS OF BAYLE.

To know Bayle as a man, we must not study him in the folio Life of Des
Maizeaux, whose laborious pencil, without colour and without expression,
loses, in its indistinctness, the individualising strokes of the
portrait. Look for Bayle in his "Letters," those true chronicles of a
literary man, when they record his own pursuits.

The personal character of Bayle was unblemished even by calumny; his
executor, Basnage, never could mention him without tears! With
simplicity which approached to an infantine nature, but with the
fortitude of a stoic, our litera