fe again. It
disappeared utterly. Nor can it be said that it deserved a kinder fate.
Its only interest now is for those who care to know the humour of men's
minds in those prae-revolutionary days, when they could devour a long
political and commercial history as if it had been a novel or a play,
and when the turn of men's interests made of such a book "the Bible of
two worlds for nearly twenty years."

Raynal is no commanding figure. Born in 1711, he came to Paris from
southern France, and joined the troop of needy priests who swarmed in
the great city, hopefully looking out for the prizes of the Church.
Raynal is the hero of an anecdote which is told of more than one abbe of
the time; whether literally true or not, it is probably a correct
illustration of the evil pass to which ecclesiastical manners had come.
He had, it was said, nothing to live upon save the product of a few
masses. The Abbe Prevost received twenty sous for saying a mass; he paid
the Abbe Laporte fifteen sous to be his deputy; the Abbe Laporte paid
eight sous to Raynal to say it in his stead. But the adventurer was not
destined to remain in this abject case, parasite humbly feeding on
parasite. He turned bookmaker, and wrote a history of the
Stadtholderate, a volume about the English Parliament, and, of all
curious subjects for a man of letters of that date, an account of the
divorce of King Henry the Eighth of England. He visited this country
more than once, and had the honour in 1754 of being chosen a fellow of
the Royal Society of London.[157] We have some difficulty in
understanding how he came by such fame, just as we cannot tell how the
man who had been glad to earn a few pence by saying masses, came shortly
to be rich and independent. He is believed to have engaged in some
colonial ventures, and to have had good luck. His enemies spread the
dark report that he had made money in the slave trade, but in those days
of incensed party spirit there was no limit to virulent invention. It is
at least undeniable that Raynal put his money to generous uses. Among
other things, he had the current fancy of the time, that the world could
be made better by the copious writing of essays, and he delighted in
founding prizes for them at the provincial academies. It was at Lyons
that he proposed the famous thesis, not unworthy of consideration even
at this day: _Has the discovery of America been useful or injurious to
the human race?_

[157] The _Biographi