2305. DUPUIS (C. F.), Works of.—
Your
undertaking [to read] the twelve volumes of
Dupuis, is a degree of heroism to which I could
not have aspired even in my younger days. I
have been contented with the humble achievement
of reading the analysis of his work by
Destutt Tracy, in two hundred pages octavo. I
believe I should have ventured on his own
abridgment of the work, in one octavo volume,
had it ever come to my hands; but the marrow
of it in Tracy has satisfied my appetite; and
even in that, the preliminary discourse of the
analyser himself, and his conclusion, are worth
more in my eye than the body of the work.
For the object of that seems to be to smother
all history under the mantle of allegory. If histories
so unlike as that of Hercules and Jesus,
can, by a fertile imagination and allegorical
interpretations, be brought to the same tally, no
line of distinction remains between fact and
fancy.—
To John Adams. Washington ed. vii, 38.
(M.
1816)
