All the great people, including King George the Third, received the persecuted philosopher with _empressement_. ‘Savants and politicians’ flocked to be introduced to him. Gibbon found him ‘a sensible man, an agreeable companion, and the worthiest creature in the world.’ Hume (remembering the compliments it contained and the many more it would have contained but for that wretched censor) naturally thought ‘On the Mind’ the most pleasing of writings, and had even entered into an agreement with its author to translate it into English, if he, on his part, would translate Hume’s philosophical works into French. (This bargain was never concluded.) Warburton, indeed, declined to meet this French ‘rogue and atheist’ at dinner. But Helvétius, as a whole, had every reason to like Englishmen, and he came back to France, Diderot told Mademoiselle Volland, as madly attached to England as d’Holbach was the reverse. ‘This poor Helvétius,’ says Diderot, to excuse him, ‘saw only in England the persecutions his book had brought him in France.’ There may certainly be truth in that. A year later, in 1765, he went to stay with Frederick the Great. That astute monarch had not at all approved of ‘On the Mind.’ ‘If I wanted to punish a province, I would give it to philosophers to govern,’ said he. But he found Helvétius, as all the world found him, a thousand times better than his book, and observed very justly that in writing he had much better have consulted his heart than his head. But that was what Helvétius could never do. When he got back to Voré, to Minette and the little daughters (he had not found any spotless and disinterested members of parliament to marry them and enjoy their fortunes of fifty thousand pounds apiece), he settled down to literature again and wrote, with seven years’ severe and unremitting labour, ‘On Man, his Intellectual Faculties, and his Education,’ which was a sort of defence of ‘On the Mind’ and an answer to the criticisms both friends and foes had brought against that work. If he had been persistently lively on ‘Mind,’ he was persistently dull on ‘Man.’ When it was published, after his death, only a few friends who had loved its author defended it. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse voiced a very general opinion when she declared herself ‘staggered’ at its preposterous length; and Grimm (of course) declared that, for his part, he would rather have ten lines of the dear little Abbé Galiani than ten volumes such as that.