he pages of the Encyclopaedia a career that
was brilliant with good promise and high hopes, and ended in the grim
hall of the Convention and a nobly tragic death amid the red storm of
the Terror.

Among the lesser stars in the encyclopaedic firmament are some whose
names ought not to be wholly omitted. Forbonnais, one of the most
instructive economic writers of the century, contributed articles to the
early volumes, which were afterwards republished in his Elements of
Commerce.[113] The light-hearted Marmontel wrote cheerful articles on
Comedy, Eloges, Eclogues, Glory, and other matters of literature and
taste. Quesnai, the eminent founder of the economic sect, dealt with two
agricultural subjects, and reproduced both his theoretical paradoxes,
and his admirable practical maxims, on the material prosperity of
nations. Holbach, not yet author of the memorable System of Nature,
compiled a vast number of the articles on chemistry and mineralogy,
chiefly and avowedly from German sources, he being the only writer of
the band with a mastery of a language which was at that moment hardly
more essential to culture than Russian is now. The name of Duclos should
not be passed over, in the list of the foremost men who helped to raise
the encyclopaedic monument. He was one of the shrewdest and most vigorous
intelligences of the time, being in the front rank of men of the second
order. His quality was coarse, but this was only the effect of a
thoroughly penetrating and masculine understanding. His articles in the
Encyclopaedia (_Declamation des Anciens_, _Etiquette_, etc.) are not very
remarkable; but the reflections on conduct which he styled
_Considerations sur les Moeurs de ce Siecle_ (1750), though rather
hard in tone, abound in an acuteness, a breadth, a soundness of
perception that entitle the book to the rare distinction, among the
writings of moralists and social observers, of still being worth
reading. Morellet wrote upon some of the subjects of theology, and his
contributions are remarkable as being the chief examples in the record
of the encyclopaedic body of a distinctly and deliberately historic
treatment of religion. "I let people see," he wrote many years after,
"that in such a collection as the Encyclopaedia we ought to treat the
history and experience of the dogmas and discipline of the Christian,
exactly like those of the religion of Brahma or Mahomet."[114] This sage
and philosophic principle enabled him to write t