One of the first of our writers to study, perhaps the first to weigh and measure the importance of the _Encyclopædia_, was Adam Smith. He seems to have read it from the outset. In his letter to the _Edinburgh Review_ he called it the most complete work of the kind ever attempted in any language. He there noticed that D’Alembert’s preliminary discourse upon the genealogy and filiation of arts and sciences was nearly the same as that of Lord Bacon, that the separate articles were not dry abstracts of what is commonly known by a superficial student, but “a compleat, reasoned, and even critical examination of each subject.” Its pages bore testimony to the triumphant progress of English philosophy and science in France. The ideas of Bacon, Boyle, and Newton were explained with that order, perspicuity, and judgment which distinguished all the eminent writers of France. “As since the Union we are apt to regard ourselves in some measure as the countrymen of those great men, it flattered my vanity as a Briton to observe the superiority of the English philosophy thus acknowledged by their rival nation.” It seems, Smith added, “to be the peculiar talent of the French nation to arrange every subject in that natural and simple order which carries the attention without any effort along with it.” Smith was himself by nature and habit an Encyclopædist, not inferior even to Diderot in his grasp of the whole field of science. Wanting the laborious industry of the compiler, he was the equal perhaps of his French contemporaries in the power of correlating knowledge and combining truth. But he yielded to none in admiration of the _Encyclopædia_, and commended it to English readers by translating the magnificent eulogy bestowed on it by Voltaire in the conclusion of his account of the artists who lived in the time of Louis the Fourteenth:— “The last age has put the present in a condition to assemble into one body and to transmit to posterity, to be by them delivered down to remoter ages, the sacred repository of all the arts and all the sciences, all of them pushed as far as human industry can go. This is what a society of learned men, fraught with genius and knowledge, are now labouring upon, an immense and immortal work which accuses the shortness of human life.”