Immediately upon his accession, he wrote to Rollin and Voltaire, that he desired the continuance of their friendship; and sent for Mr. Maupertuis, the principal of the French academicians, who passed a winter in Lapland, to verify, by the mensuration of a degree near the pole, the Newtonian doctrine of the form of the earth.

He requested of Maupertuis to come to Berlin, to settle an academy, in terms of great ardour and great condescension.

Frederick of Prussia sought, in the bosom of a cold philosophy, to chill every generous impulse, and each warm aspiration after immortality; but he painfully felt, how inefficient was grandeur, or power, to fill the heart, and plaintively exclaimed to Maupertuis, "Que notre vie est peu de chose;" all is vanity.

The movement begins in the middle of the thirties, when Montesquieu commences to naturalize Locke's political views in France, and Voltaire does the same service for Locke's theory of knowledge, and Newton's natural philosophy, which had already been commended by Maupertuis.

The morality of enlightened self-love or "intelligent self-interest" appears in a milder form in Maupertuis (Works, 1752), and Frederick the Great, to the latter of whom D'Alembert objected by letter that interest could never generate the sense of duty and reverence for the law.

Maupertuis went farther, and proposed to keep the body covered with pitch for this purpose: conceive, Dolorosus, of spending threescore years and ten in a garment of tar, without even the ornament of feathers, sitting tranquilly in our chairs, waiting for longevity!

MATY, Dr. Matthew, Bibliotheque Britannique, i. 284; Johnson's Dictionary, reviews, i. 284, n. 3; 'little black dog,' i. 284; Memoirs of Chesterfield, iv. 102, n. 4. MAUPERTUIS, ii. 54.

When the two armies were close to one another, on the platform of Maupertuis, two leagues to the north of Poitiers, two legates from the pope came hurrying up from that town, with instructions to negotiate peace between the Kings of France, England, and Navarre.

Maupertuis, La Mettrie, and the Marquis of Argens had preceded Voltaire to Berlin.

" Whilst Voltaire was defending the Great Elector against his successor, a certain coldness was beginning to slide into his relations with Maupertuis, president of the Academy founded by the king at Berlin.

"Maupertuis has not easygoing springs," the poet wrote to his niece; "he takes my dimensions sternly with his quadrant.

" Voltaire was not proud; he readily heaped apology upon apology; but he was irritable and vain; his ill-humor against Maupertuis came out in a pamphlet, as bitter as it was witty, entitled La Diatribe du Docteur Akakia; copies were circulating in Berlin; the satire was already printed anonymously, when the Great Frederick suddenly entered the lists.

In vain did Frederick have it burned on the Place d'Armes by the hands of the common hangman; he could not assuage the despair of Maupertuis.

He sent me his great factotum Federshoff, who brought me back my toys; he wrote me a letter saying that he would rather have me to live with than Maupertuis.

"I will not go and reap the succession to Maupertuis during his lifetime.

AKAKIA, DOCTOR, a satire of a very biting nature by Voltaire, directed against pretentious pedants of science in the person of Maupertuis, the President of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, which so excited the anger of Frederick the Great, the patron of the Academy, that he ordered it to be burnt by the common hangman, after 30,000 copies of it had been sold in Paris!

M. de Maupertuis, though ill, performed himself this last duty to his friend, and would not permit so sacred an office to fall to the share of any other.

Maupertuis has had an unfortunate fate: he was first annihilated by the ridicule of Voltaire, and then recreated by the humour of Carlyle; but he was an ambitious man, very anxious to be famous, and his desire has been gratified in over-flowing measure.

Maupertuis had very little judgment; so far from attempting to conciliate Voltaire, he was rash enough to provoke hostilities.

Some years previously Maupertuis had, as he believed, discovered an important mathematical lawthe 'principle of least action.'

The law was, in fact, important, and has had a fruitful history in the development of mechanical theory; but, as Mr. Jourdain has shown in a recent monograph, Maupertuis enunciated it incorrectly without realising its true import, and a far more accurate and scientific statement of it was given, within a few months, by Euler.

Not only was Frederick certainly privy to Maupertuis' action, but he was extremely sensitive of the reputation of his Academy and of its President, and he would certainly consider any interference on the part of Voltaire, who himself drew his wages from the royal purse, as a flagrant act of disloyalty.

He had now been more than two years in Berlin, and the atmosphere of a Court was beginning to weigh upon his spirit; he was restless, he was reckless, he was spoiling for a fight; he would take on Maupertuis singly or Maupertuis and Frederick combinedhe did not much care which, and in any case he flattered himself that he would settle the hash of the President.

Upon this Maupertuis utterly lost his head: he wrote to Voltaire, threatening him with personal chastisement.

At first the old grievances still rankled; but in time even the wrongs of Maupertuis and the misadventures of Frankfort were almost forgotten.