BOULANGER, NICHOLAS ANTHONY, a very singular Frenchman, was born at Paris in 1722, and died there in 1759, aged only 37. During his education, he is said to have come out of the college of Beauvats almost as ignorant as he entered into it; but struggling hard against his unaptness to learn, he at length overcame it. At seventeen, he began to study mathematics and architecture; and in three or four years made such a progress, as to be useful to the baron of Thiers, whom he accompanied to the army in quality of engineer. Afterwards he had the supervision of the highways and bridges; and he executed several public works in Champagne, Burgundy, and Lorraine. The author of his life, in the Dictionnaire des Hommes célèbres, writes, that in this province a terrible spirit discovered itself in him, which he himself did not suspect before; and this was, it seems, the spirit of "thinking philosophically." In cutting through mountains, directing and changing the courses of rivers, and in breaking up and turning over the strata of the earth he saw a multitude of different substances, which (he thought) evinced the great antiquity of it, and a long series of revolutions which it must have undergone. From the revolutions in the globe, he passed to the changes that must have happened in the manners of men, in societies, in governments, in religion; and he formed many conjectures upon all these. To be farther satisfied, he wanted to know what, in the history of ages, had been said upon these particulars; and that
Boulanger that he might be informed from the fountain-head, he learned first Latin and then Greek. Not yet content, he plunged into Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldaic, and Arabic; and acquired so immense an erudition, that, if he had lived, he would have been one of the most learned men in Europe: but death, as we have observed, prematurely took him off. His works are, 1. Traité du Despotisme Oriental, 2 vols. 12mo; a very bold work; but not so bold and licentious, as, 2. L'Antiquité dévoilée, 3 vols. 12mo. This was posthumous. 3. He furnished to the Encyclopédie the articles Deluge, Corvée, and Société. 4. He left behind him in MS. a Dictionary, which may be regarded as a concordance in ancient and modern language. As a man, he is said to have been of a sweet, calm, and engaging temper; which, however, it is very difficult to reconcile with the dark, impetuous, ardent spirit, that appears to have actuated him as a writer.