PIERRE LE, a useful French writer, who devoted the best part of his life to translations chiefly from the English, was born at Valognes in 1736. Having distinguished himself early in the College des Grassins at Coutances, he repaired to Paris in his thirty-second year, where he engaged in a series of translations of English and German authors, which occupied him till his death in 1788. After publishing a thin preliminary volume or two of quasi-original composition, he brought out his "amended edition" of Young's Night Thoughts in 1770, which was well received by the French public. This determined him to engage on a translation of Shakspeare's Works, with which he got assistance on the first two volumes, but completed the remaining eighteen himself in 1782. Until Hugo's late version, this translation of Shakspeare was considered the most correct in the French language. Meanwhile he had translated Hervey's Meditations, 1770; Johnson's Lives of Savage and Thomson; Macpherson's Ossian; Soame Jenyns' View of the Evidences of Christianity, in 1777. He likewise gave a French version of Clarissa Harlowe and of Pennant's Arctic Regions to the reading public of Paris and of France. Except Sparmann's Cape of Good Hope and the Memoirs of Baron Trench, Le Tourneur translated little from the German. For a correct outline of the leading incidents in the biography of this humble but industrious writer, the reader is referred to the Biographie Universelle.