of the _Letters to Eugenia_, and in his
time there were only three in Paris; it may have been from design,
_propter metum Judaeorum_;[1] it may have been there were actually no
more known.

[1] _On account of fear of the Jews_, or, in other words, the
intolerant clergy of the despotic government.

It is not till within five or six years that MSS. of these letters
have become more common; and there is reason to believe that they are
now considerably multiplied, since the copy from which this edition is
printed has been revised and corrected by collation with six others,
that have been collected without any great difficulty. Unhappily, all
these copies swarm with faults, which corrupt the sense, and
comprehend many variations, but which also, to use the language of the
Biblical critics, have served sometimes to discover and to fix the
true reading! More often, however, they have rendered it more
uncertain than it was before what one ought to be followed--a new
proof of the multiplicity of copies, because the more numerous are the
manuscripts of a work, the more they differ from each other, as any
one may be fully convinced by consulting those of the _Letter of
Thrasybulus to Leucippus_, and the various readings of the New
Testament collected by the learned Mill, and which amount to more than
thirty thousand.

However this may be, we have spared no pains to reestablish the text
in all its purity; and we venture to say, that, with the exception of
four or five passages, which we found corrupted in all the manuscripts
that we had an opportunity to collate, and which we have amended to
the best of our ability, the edition of these letters that we now
offer to the reader will probably conform almost exactly with the
original manuscript of the author.

With regard to the author's name and quality we can offer nothing but
conjectures. The only particulars of his life upon which there is a
general agreement are, that he lived upon terms of great intimacy with
the Marquis de la Fare, the Abbe de Chaulieu, the Abbe Terrasson,
Fontenelle, M. de Lassere, &c. The late MM. Du Marsais and Falconnet
have often been heard to declare that these letters were composed by
some one belonging to the school of Seaux. All that we can pronounce
with certainty is the fact, that it is only necessary to read the
work to be entirely convinced the author was a man of extensive
knowledge, and one who had meditated profoundly concerning the matters