"Although Voltaire, with whom I had never had the least
acquaintance, had voluntarily written to me first, and asked
for my book, he wrote a letter to the Duchesse de Choiseul, in
which, without saying a syllable
of his having written to me first, he told her I had
officiously sent him my works, and declared war with him in
defence 'de ce bouffon de Shakspeare,' whom in his reply to
me he pretended so much to admire. The Duchesse sent me
Voltaire's letter; which gave me such a contempt for his
disingenuity, that I dropped all correspondence with him."

When he spoke with contempt of d'Alembert, it was not of his
abilities; of which he never pretended to judge. Professor
Saunderson had long before, when he was a lad at Cambridge,
assured him, that it would be robbing him to pretend teaching
him mathematics, of which his mind was perfectly incapable, so
that any comparison of the intellectual powers of the two men"
would indeed be as "exquisitely ridiculous" as the critic
declares it. But lord Orford, speaking of d'Alembert,
complains of the overweening importance which he, and all the
men of letters of those days in France, attributed to their
squabbles and disputes. The idleness to which an absolute
government necessarily condemns nine-tenths of its subjects,
sufficiently accounts for the exaggerated importance given to
and assumed by the French writers, even before they had
become, in the language of the Reviewer, "the interpreters
between England and mankind:" he asserts, "that all the great
discoveries in physics, in metaphysics, in political science,
are ours but no foreign nation, except France, has received
them from us by direct communication: isolated in our