rls of
Shaftesbury, of Albemarle, and of Huntingdon tried every solicitation to
win him over to reside with them as their friend; and too nice a sense
of honour induced Bayle to refuse the Duke of Shrewsbury's gift of two
hundred guineas for the dedication of his Dictionary. "I have so often
ridiculed dedications that I must not risk any," was the reply of our
philosopher.

The only complaint which escaped from Bayle was the want of books; an
evil particularly felt during his writing the "Critical Dictionary;" a
work which should have been composed not distant from the shelves of a
public library. Men of classical attainments, who are studying about
twenty authors, and chiefly for their style, can form no conception of
the state of famine to which an "helluo librorum" is too often reduced
in the new sort of study which Bayle founded. Taste when once obtained
may be said to be no acquiring faculty, and must remain stationary; but
knowledge is of perpetual growth, and has infinite demands. Taste, like
an artificial canal, winds through a beautiful country; but its borders
are confined, and its term is limited. Knowledge navigates the ocean,
and is perpetually on voyages of discovery. Bayle often grieves over the
scarcity, or the want of books, by which he was compelled to leave many
things uncertain, or to take them at second-hand; but he lived to
discover that trusting to the reports of others was too often suffering
the blind to lead the blind. It was this circumstance which induced
Bayle to declare, that some works cannot be written in the country, and
that the metropolis only can supply the wants of the literary man.
Plutarch has made a similar confession; and the elder Pliny, who had not
so many volumes to turn over as a modern, was sensible to the want of
books, for he acknowledges that there was no book so bad by which we
might not profit.

Bayle's peculiar vein of research and skill in discussion first
appeared in his "Pensees sur la Comete." In December, 1680, a comet had
appeared, and the public yet trembled at a portentous meteor, which they
still imagined was connected with some forthcoming and terrible event!
Persons as curious as they were terrified teased Bayle by their
inquiries, but resisted all his arguments. They found many things more
than arguments in his amusing volumes: "I am not one of the authors by
profession," says Bayle, in giving an account of the method he meant to
pursue, "who follow a ser