Bernard Le Bovier de, author of the Eloges, Dialogues des Morts, &c., was born at Rouen, Feb. 11, 1657; died at Paris Jan. 9, 1757, having very nearly attained the age of 100 years. His father was an advocate settled in Rouen; his mother was a sister of the great Corneille. He was educated at the college of the Jesuits in his native city, and distinguished himself by the extraordinary precocity as well as the amazing versatility of his talents. His teachers, who readily appreciated his abilities, were anxious to allure him into their order, but his father designed him for the bar, and he became an advocate. He lost the first cause which was entrusted to him to plead, and immediately after abandoned law for the more congenial pursuits of literature. In 1674 Fontenelle visited Paris for the first time, and began his literary career as a poet. He competed for three of the prizes offered by the French Academy for the best poems on certain prescribed subjects, but without success, despite the powerful influence brought to bear on his behalf. He had the additional misfortune to see his tragedy of Aspar damned, though, for the purpose of annoying Racine, his uncle Thomas Corneille had already sounded forth his praises in the Mercure as the most gifted of the rising dramatists of France. Fontenelle afterwards acknowledged the justice of this sentence by burning his unfortunate drama, of which nothing but the name now survives. Still undaunted by his failures, he persisted in the belief that poetry was his true vocation, and produced a number of operas and comedies, the mediocrity of which, considering the author's real talent, is positively astonishing. His opera of Thétis et Péle, though highly praised by Voltaire, is little superior to the others. Of all his dramatic works, seventeen in number, not one has kept the stage. His Poésies Pastorales, with equally small claim to permanent repute, are striking from their novelty and the extravagant conceits in which they abound. They exhibit neither sentiment nor nature; the shepherds are all bergers de salons. His Hylases and Sylvanders speak like the wits of the Hôtel Rambouillet. The utmost that can be said for his poetry in general is that it displays much of the lima labor, great purity of diction, and occasional elegance and elevation of sentiment. The Dialogues des Morts, Fontenelle's first real title to literary renown, was published in 1683. This was a remarkable work for the era in which it appeared, and contains much fine and ingenious thinking, along with much that is wire-drawn and paradoxical. Three years later (1686) appeared his Entretiens sur la pluralité des Mondes, which, in the words of D'Alembert in the general preface to the Encyclopédie, was the first work "qui ait appris aux savants à secouer le Fontenelle, joug du pédantisme." Voltaire pronounced it "le premier exemple de l'art délicat de répandre les graces jusque sur la philosophie," and, in the verses which he afterwards wrote on its author, characterized its happy combination of science and wit in the line—

"D'ignorant l'entendit, le savant l'admira."

It was precisely such a work as Fontenelle was capable of executing well, both from the natural bent of his intellect, and the course of his previous studies. His object was to popularize among his countrymen the astronomical theories of Descartes, and it is to be doubted if that philosopher ever ranked a more ingenious expounder among the number of his disciples. The pointed and happy illustrations with which Fontenelle has interspersed this essay are as amusing as they are instructive to the reader, and though some of the ideas advocated in it are rather startling, and sometimes quite opposed to received opinion, they are so plausibly stated, and set in so obvious a light, that they are at once adopted as old and familiar truths. In 1687 Fontenelle published his Histoire des Oracles, a book which made a considerable noise in the theological as well as the philosophical world. It was not so much an original work as a redaction from the Latin of Van Daale, and consisted of two essays, the first of which was designed to prove that oracles were not given by the supernatural agency of demons; and the second, that they did not cease with the birth of Christ. The clearness and precision of the style, and the naturalness and regularly progressive flow of the reasoning in this treatise, have been always much admired. It excited the suspicion of the church, however, and a Jesuit, by name Baltus, published a ponderous refutation of it; but the peace-loving disposition of its author impelled him to leave his opponent unanswered.

In 1691 Fontenelle was received into the French Academy in spite of the efforts of Racine and Boileau, who on four previous occasions had secured his rejection. In 1708 appeared the first edition of his Eloges historiques des Académiciens, the work by which he is best known to posterity. In these Eloges, which are at once biographical and critical, the author has so happily blended history and encomium that the formal character of the composition is quite lost sight of, and the eulogy is managed with such delicate tact that it is greatest where it seems least intended.

The only other works of Fontenelle that remain to be mentioned are his Géométrie de l'Infiniti, and his Apologie des Tourbillons, treatises which display rather a calm spirit of philosophy than strong scientific powers.

Fontenelle is likely to be remembered by posterity as much from his splendid social qualities, and the brilliancy and variety of his acquirements, as from the enduring value of his works. He combined in a singularly happy degree the philosopher and the man of fashion. As a writer, he strikes at first sight by his universality. Voltaire pronounced him the only universal man of the seventeenth century. He was in his own era very much what that writer was in the subsequent one. Without the restless energy and martyr spirit that distinguished Voltaire, Fontenelle nevertheless achieved noiselessly a great result. The vast extent of his reading gave him a thorough command of happy and pertinent illustration; and the perfect clearness and definiteness of his views on every department of science, joined to his high literary powers, enabled him to throw open to the multitude the gates of science, which till his day none but the scholarly few had possessed the secret of unlocking. This result was attained in a manner so simple and so noiseless that it did not appear to be the work of any individual agency so much as the natural growth of circumstances. Though Fontenelle cannot claim the merit of having made any great discovery, or contributed to the general store of positive knowledge, yet he sowed the seeds of that spirit of