merely
imaginary and deceptive. He ridiculed the Order, and thought its
ceremonies mere child's play; and some of his sayings to that
effect have been preserved. It does not at all follow that he might
not at a later day have found it politic to put himself at the head
of an Order that had become a power....[416]

It is not without significance to find that in the year following the
official foundation of the _Stricte Observance_, that is to say in 1752,
Lord Holdernesse, in a letter to the British Ambassador in Paris, Lord
Albemarle, headed "Very secret," speaks of "the influence which the King
of Prussia has of late obtained over all the French Councils"; and a few
weeks later Lord Albemarle refers to "the great influence of the
Prussian Court over the French Councils by which they are so blinded as
not to be able to judge for themselves."[417]

But it is time to turn to another sphere of activity which Masonry
opened out to the ambitions of Frederick.

The making of the _Encyclopedie_, which even those writers the most
sceptical with regard to secret influences behind the revolutionary
movement admit to have contributed towards the final cataclysm, is a
question on which official history has thrown but little light.
According to the authorized version of the story--as related, for
example, in Lord Morley's work on the Encyclopaedists--the plan of
translating Ephraim Chambers's _Cyclopaedia_, which had appeared in 1728,
was suggested to Diderot "some fifteen years later" by a French
bookseller named Le Breton. Diderot's "fertile and energetic
intelligence transformed the scheme.... It was resolved to make
Chambers's work a mere starting-point for a new enterprise of far wider
scope." We then go on to read of the financial difficulties that now
beset the publisher, of the embarrassment of Diderot, who "felt himself
unequal to the task of arranging and supervising every department of a
new book that was to include the whole circle of the sciences," of the
fortunate enlisting of d'Alembert as a collaborator, and later of men
belonging to all kinds of professions, "all united in a work that was as
useful as it was laborious, without any view of interest ... without any
common understanding and agreement," further, of the cruel persecutions
encountered at the hands of the Jesuits, "who had expected at least to
have control of the articles on theology," and finally of the tyrannical
suppression o