nd notices respecting the Abbe--and has supplied me
with a brochure, by Chardon De La Rochette, which contains a notice of the
life and writings of the character in question. I am sure you will be
interested by the account, limited and partial as it must necessarily be:
especially as I have known those, to whose judgments I always defer with
pleasure and profit, assert, that, of all BIBLIOGRAPHERS, the Abbe Mercier
St. Leger was the FIRST, in eminence, which France possessed, I have said
so myself a hundred times, and I repeat the asseveration. Yet we must not
forget Niceron.

Mercier Saint Leger was born on the 1st of April, 1734. At fifteen years of
age, he began to consider what line of life he should follow. A love of
knowledge, and a violent passion for study and retirement, inclined him to
enter the congregation of the _Chanoines Reguliers_--distinguished for men
of literature; and, agreeably to form, he went through a course of rhetoric
and philosophy, before he passed into divinity, as a resident in the Abbey
_de Chatrices_ in the diocese of _Chalons sur Marne_. It was there that he
laid the foundation of his future celebrity as a literary bibliographer. He
met there the venerable CAULET, who had voluntarily resigned the bishopric
of Grenoble, to pass the remainder of his days in the abbey in question--of
which he was the titular head--in the midst of books, solitude, and
literary society. Mercier Saint Leger quickly caught the old man's eye, and
entwined himself round his heart. Approaching blindness induced the
ex-bishop to confide the care of his library to St. Leger--who was also
instructed by him in the elements of bibliography and literary history. He
taught him also that love of order and of method which are so
distinguishable in the productions of the pupil. Death, however, in a
little time separated the master from the scholar; and the latter scarcely
ever mentioned the name, or dwelt upon the virtues, of the former, without
emotions which knew of no relief but in a flood of tears. The heart of
Mercier St. Leger was yet more admirable than his head.

St. Leger, at twenty years of age, returned to Paris. The celebrated Pingre
was chief librarian of the Ste. GENEVIEVE COLLECTION; and St. Leger
attached himself with ardour and affection to the society and instructions
of his Principal. He became joint SECOND LIBRARIAN in 1759; when Pingre,
eminent for astronomy, departing for India to observe the transit of