by the
assumption that what Helvetius really saw in our free land was the
persecution that his book had drawn upon him in France.[110] Horace
Walpole, in one of his letters, announced to Sir Horace Mann that
Helvetius was coming to England, bringing two Miss Helvetiuses with
fifty thousand pounds a-piece, to bestow on two immaculate members of
our most august and incorruptible senate, if he could find two in this
virtuous age who would condescend to accept his money. "Well," he adds,
in a spirit of sensible protest against these unprofitable international
comparisons, "we may be dupes to French follies, but they are ten times
greater fools to be the dupes of our virtues."[111] Gibbon met Helvetius
(1763), and found him a sensible man, an agreeable companion, and the
worthiest creature in the world, besides the merits of having a pretty
wife and a hundred thousand livres a year. Warburton was invited to dine
with him at Lord Mansfield's, but he could not bring himself to
countenance a professed patron of atheism, a rascal, and a
scoundrel.[112]

[110] _Oeuv._, xix. 187.

[111] _Corresp._, iv. 119.

[112] Walpole's _Corresp._, iv. 217.

Let us turn to the book which had the honour of bringing all this
censure upon its author. Whether vanity was or was not Helvetius's
motive, the vanity of an author has never accounted for the interest of
his public, and we may be sure that neither those who approved, nor
those who abhorred, would have been so deeply and so universally
stirred, unless they had felt that he touched great questions at the
very quick. And, first, let a word be said as to the form of his book.

Grimm was certainly right in saying that a man must be without taste or
sense to find either the morality or the colouring of Diderot in
_L'Esprit_. It is tolerably clear that Helvetius had the example of
Fontenelle before his eyes--Fontenelle, who had taught astronomical
systems in the forms of elegant literature, and of whom it was said that
_il nous enjole a la verite_, he coaxes us to the truth. _L'Esprit_ is
perhaps the most readable book upon morals that ever was written, for
persons who do not care that what they read shall be scientifically
true. Hume, who, by the way, had been invited by Helvetius to translate
the book into English, wrote to Adam Smith that it was worth reading,
not for its philosophy, which he did not highly value, but for its
agreeable composition.[113] Helvetius intended th