OF LENGLET DU FRESNOY. The "_Methode pour etudier l' Histoire_," by the Abbe Lenglet du Fresnoy, is a master-key to all the locked-up treasures of ancient and modern history, and to the more secret stores of the obscurer memorialists of every nation. The history of this work and its author are equally remarkable. The man was a sort of curiosity in human nature, as his works are in literature. Lenglet du Fresnoy is not a writer merely laborious; without genius, he still has a hardy originality in his manner of writing and of thinking; and his vast and restless curiosity fermenting his immense book-knowledge, with a freedom verging on cynical causticity, led to the pursuit of uncommon topics. Even the prefaces to the works which he edited are singularly curious, and he has usually added _bibliotheques_, or critical catalogues of authors, which we may still consult for notices on the writers of romances--of those on literary subjects--on alchymy, or the hermetic philosophy; of those who have written on apparitions, visions, &c.; an historical treatise on the secret of confession, &c.; besides those "Pieces Justificatives," which constitute some of the most extraordinary documents in the philosophy of history. His manner of writing secured him readers even among the unlearned; his mordacity, his sarcasm, his derision, his pregnant interjections, his unguarded frankness, and often his strange opinions, contribute to his reader's amusement more than comports with his graver tasks; but his peculiarities cannot alter the value of his knowledge, whatever they may sometimes detract from his opinions; and we may safely admire the ingenuity, without quarrelling with the sincerity of the writer, who having composed a work on _L'Usage des Romans_, in which he gaily impugned the authenticity of all history, to prove himself not to have been the author, ambidexterously published another of _L'Histoire justifiee contre les Romans_; and perhaps it was not his fault that the attack was spirited, and the justification dull. This "Methode" and his "Tablettes Chronologiques," of nearly forty other publications are the only ones which have outlived their writer; volumes, merely curious, are exiled to the shelf of the collector; the very name of an author merely curious--that shadow of a shade--is not always even preserved by a dictionary-compiler in the universal charity of his alphabetical mortuary.