ly among their "hommes illustres." Of his private history
nothing seems known. Having something important to communicate
respecting one of his friends, a far greater character, with whose fate
he stands connected, even Des Maizeaux becomes an object of our inquiry.

He was one of those French refugees whom political madness or despair of
intolerance had driven to our shores. The proscription of Louis XIV.,
which supplied us with our skilful workers in silk, also produced a race
of the unemployed, who proved not to be as exquisite in the handicraft
of book-making; such were _Motteux_, _La Coste_, _Ozell_, _Durand_, and
others. Our author had come over in that tender state of youth, just in
time to become half an Englishman: and he was so ambidextrous in the
languages of the two great literary nations of Europe, that whenever he
took up his pen, it is evident by his manuscripts, which I have
examined, that it was mere accident which determined him to write in
French or in English. Composing without genius, or even taste, without
vivacity or force, the simplicity and fluency of his style were
sufficient for the purposes of a ready dealer in all the _minutiae
literariae_; literary anecdotes, curious quotations, notices of obscure
books, and all that _supellex_ which must enter into the history of
literature, without forming a history. These little things, which did so
well of themselves, without any connexion with anything else, became
trivial when they assumed the form of voluminous minuteness; and Des
Maizeaux at length imagined that nothing but anecdotes were necessary to
compose the lives of men of genius! With this sort of talent he produced
a copious life of Bayle, in which he told everything he possibly could;
and nothing can be more tedious, and more curious: for though it be a
grievous fault to omit nothing, and marks the writer to be deficient in
the development of character, and that sympathy which throws inspiration
over the vivifying page of biography, yet, to admit everything, has this
merit--that we are sure to find what we want! Warburton poignantly
describes our Des Maizeaux, in one of those letters to Dr. Birch which
he wrote in the fervid age of study, and with the impatient vivacity of
his genius, "Almost all the life-writers we have had before Toland and
Des Maizeaux are indeed strange, insipid creatures; and yet I had rather
read the worst of them, than be obliged to go through with this of
Milton's, or