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The Abbe Trublet, with whom I had a slight acquaintance, but whom I had but seldom seen, wrote to me on the 13th of June, 1760, informing me that M. Formey, his friend and correspondent, had printed in his journal my letter to Voltaire upon the disaster at Lisbon.
Nor indeed afterwards, except on good chance rising; the new Academy, with its Perpetual First President, being nothing like so sublime an object now, to readers and me, as it then was to itself and Perpetual President and Royal Patron! Vapid Formey is Perpetual Secretary; more power to him, as the Irish say.
And hence M. Formey, who adopts the opinion of Wolfius, concludes, that those dreams are supernatural, which either do not begin by sensation, or are not continued by the law of imagination. The opinion of Lucretius, translated in our motto, was likewise that of Tully. Locke also traces the origin of dreams to previous sensations.
The same Formey, standing one day somewhere on the streets of Berlin, was himself, he cannot doubt, SEEN by the Crown-Prince in passing; "who asked M. Jordan, who that was," and got answer: is not that a comfortable fact? Nothing farther came of it; respectable Ex-Parson Formey, though ever ready with his pen, being indeed of very vapid nature, not wanted at Reinsberg, as we can guess.
Meanwhile, I have something to quote, as abridged and distilled from various sources, chiefly from Formey; which will be of much concernment farther on.
"However, the Abbe Trublet, with whom I have not the least connection, has just written to me from a motive of the most polite attention that having received the papers of the journal of M. Formey, he found in them this same letter with an advertisement, dated on the 23d of October, 1759, in which the editor states that he had a few weeks before found it in the shops of the booksellers of Berlin, and, as it is one of those loose sheets which shortly disappear, he thought proper to give it a place in his journal.
"Konig, all filial gladness, is received gladly; though, by degrees, with some surprise, on the paternal part, to find Konig ripened out of son, client and pupil, into independent posture of a grown man. Frankly certain enough about himself, and about the axioms of mathematics. Formey confesses, this was uncomfortable to Maupertuis; in fact, a shock which he could not recover from.
In not many months, Formey, a facile and learned but rather vapid gentleman, demitted or was dismissed; and the Journals coalesced into one, or split into two again; and went I know not what road, or roads, in time coming, none that led to results worth naming. Freedom of the Press, in the case of these Journals, was never violated, nor was any need for violating it.
"However, the Abbe Trublet, with whom I have not the least connection, has just written to me from a motive of the most polite attention that having received the papers of the journal of M. Formey, he found in them this same letter with an advertisement, dated on the 23d of October, 1759, in which the editor states that he had a few weeks before found it in the shops of the booksellers of Berlin, and, as it is one of those loose sheets which shortly disappear, he thought proper to give it a place in his journal.
Attempted deep kinds of discourse, in the lecture-room and elsewhere; but usually broke off into endless welters of anecdote, not always of cleanly nature; and after every two or three words, a desperate sigh, not for sorrow, but on account of flabbiness and fat. Formey gives a portraiture of him; not worth copying farther.
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