Montucla is an admirable historian when he is writing from his own direct knowledge: it is a sad pity that he did not tell us when he was depending on others. We are not to trust a quarter of his book, and we must read many other books to know which quarter. The fault is common enough, but Montucla's good three-quarters is so good that the fault is greater in him than in most others: I mean the fault of not acknowledging; for an historian cannot read everything. But it must be said that mankind give little encouragement to candor on this point. Hallam, in his {160} _History of Literature_, states with his own usual instinct of honesty every case in which he depends upon others: Montucla does not. And what is the consequence?--Montucla is trusted, and believed in, and cried up in the bulk; while the smallest talker can lament that Hallam should be so unequal and apt to depend on others, without remembering to mention that Hallam himself gives the information. As to a universal history of any great subject being written entirely upon primary knowledge, it is a thing of which the possibility is not yet proved by an example. Delambre attempted it with astronomy, and was removed by death before it was finished,[348] to say nothing of the gaps he left. Montucla was nothing of a bibliographer, and his descriptions of books in the first edition were insufficient. The Abbe Rive[349] fell foul of him, and as the phrase is, gave it him. Montucla took it with great good humor, tried to mend, and, in his second edition, wished his critic had lived to see the _vernis de bibliographe_ which he had given himself. I have seen Montucla set down as an _esprit fort_, more than once: wrongly, I think. When he mentions Barrow's[350] address to the Almighty, he adds, "On voit, au reste, par la, que Barrow etoit un pauvre philosophe; car il croyait en l'immortalite de l'ame, et en une Divinite autre que la nature {161} universelle."[351] This is irony, not an expression of opinion. In the book of mathematical recreations which Montucla constructed upon that of Ozanam,[352] and Ozanam upon that of Van Etten,[353] now best known in England by Hutton's similar treatment of Montucla, there is an amusing chapter on the quadrators. Montucla refers to his own anonymous book of 1754 as a curious book published by Jombert.[354] He seems to have been a little ashamed of writing about circle-squarers: what a slap on the face for an unborn Budgeteer!