That is his trade; he has a sign, a workshop, articles made to order, and apprentices who work under him.

Prose, verse, what d'ye lack?
He is equally successful in both.

Give him an order for letters of consolation, or on an absence; he will undertake them.

Take them ready made, if you like, and enter his shop; there is a choice assortment.

He has a friend whose only duty on earth is to puff him for a long while in certain society, and then present him at their houses as a rare bird and a man of exquisite conversation, and thereupon, just as the musical man sings and the player on the lute touches his lute before the persons to whom he has been puffed, Cydias, after coughing, pulling up his wristband, extending his hand and opening his fingers, gravely spouts his quintessentiated ideas and his sophisticated arguments." Fontenelle was not destined to stop here in his intellectual developments; when, at forty years of age, he became perpetual secretary to the Academy of Sciences, he had already written his book on the _Pluralite des Mondes,_ the first attempt at that popularization of science which has spread so since then.