hand should be crooked, and squeezed with great force; and the same for the left.
We pass on to the Encyclopédie, commenced in 1751; the work which has, in many minds, connected the word encyclopædist with infidel. Readers of our day are surprised when they look into this work, and wonder what has become of all the irreligion. The truth is, that the work—though denounced ab ovo on account of the character of its supporters—was neither adapted, nor intended, to excite any particular remark on the subject: no work of which D'Alembert was co-editor would have been started on any such plan. For, first, he was a real sceptic: that is, doubtful, with a mind not made up. Next, he valued his quiet more than anything; and would as soon have gone to sleep over an hornet's nest as have contemplated a systematic attack upon either religion or government. As to Diderot—of whose varied career of thought it is difficult to fix the character of any one moment, but who is very frequently taken among us for a pure atheist—we will quote one sentence from the article 'Encyclopédie,' which he wrote himself:—'Dans le moral, il n'y a que Dieu qui doit servir de modèle à l'homme dans les arts, que la nature.'
A great many readers in our country have but a very hazy idea of the difference between the political Encyclopædia, as we may call it, and the Encyclopédie Méthodique, which we always take to be meant—whether rightly or not we cannot tell—when we hear of the 'great French Encyclopædia.' This work, which takes much from its predecessor, professing to correct it, was begun in 1792, and finished in 1832. There are 166 volumes of text, and 6,439 plates, which are sometimes incorporated with the text, sometimes make about 40 more volumes. This is still the monster production of the kind though probably the German Cyclopædia of Ersch and Gruber, which was begun in 1818, and is still in progress, will beat it in size. The great French work is a collection of dictionaries; it consists of Cyclopædias of all the separate branches of knowledge. It is not a work, but a collection of works, one or another department is to be bought from time to time; but we never heard of a complete set for sale in one lot. As ships grow longer and longer, the question arises what limit there is to the length. One answer is, that it will never do to try such a length that the stern will be rotten before the prow is finished. This wholesome rule has not been attended to in the matter before us; the earlier parts of the great French work were antiquated before the whole were completed: something of the kind will happen to that of Ersch and Gruber.
