While the Jesuits, rather dreaded than supported by the greater part of the clergy, animated against themselves the parliaments, and alienated the persons of the court who had most credit, they also found the secret to indispose greatly a set of men, less powerful in appearance, but more formidable than is imagined, that of the men of letters. Their declamations, at court and in the city, against the _Encyclopedie_ had irritated against them all those who wished well to that work, and who were very numerous: their invectives against the author of the _Henriade_, their old pupil, and for a long time their friend, had provoked that celebrated writer, who made them sensibly feel the folly which they had been guilty of in attacking him. Whatever be our strength, or whatever we imagine it to be, we ought never to make ourselves enemies of those who, enjoying the advantage of being read from one end of Europe to the other, are able, with one stroke of their pen, to inflict a signal and lasting vengeance. This is a maxim which favour and power itself ought never to make either individuals, or societies, lose sight of, but which the Jesuits of our times seem to have forgot to their great misfortune. The lion pretends to sleep, suffers the wasp to buz around his ears; but grows tired at last of hearing it, rouses himself, and kills it. For six years and upwards, the Journalists de Trevoux, and the light troops which low literature maintained in their pay, abused the celebrated person above mentioned, who seemed not to know it, and suffered them to go on. At length tired of seeing himself harrassed by so many insects, he tucked up the maroders, and silenced their chiefs; and what is of importance in France to the gaining of a cause, exposed both the one and the other to publick laughter. While he rendered the Jesuits ridiculous, they rendered themselves odious to all the sensible men of the nation, by the spirit of persecution which they preached up in the same Journal de Trevoux, and the fanaticism which they published in it. The philosophers, as they are called, whom they sought to maltreat, forgot, on their side, no opportunity of avenging themselves in their works; and this they did in a manner the most mortifying to the Jesuits, without too much engaging and exposing themselves. They did not say to them as the Jansenists did, “You are ambitious, intriguing, and knaves:” this accusation would not have humbled the society: they said to them, “You are blockheads; you have not among you a single man of learning, whose name is famous in Europe, and worthy of being so: you boast of your credit; but that credit exists more in opinion than in reality; it is only a house of cards, which will be overturned the moment one blows upon it.” They said true, and the event has proved it. To complete their misfortune, the Jesuits, overwhelmed with the blows which they had imprudently drawn upon themselves, had not one