Excerpt from Essay on the Mysteries of Eleusis Men of letters have generally chosen for the discussion of such subjects, one common language; and the Latin was for a long time the interpreter of antiquity. But since it has lost the ancient privilege of unlversality, the French has appropriated a great portion of its rights: the justness and clearness which cha racterise it, seem, in fact, to qualify this lan guage for becoming the habitual idiom of a science in which a perspicuous arrangement of ideas, and propriety of expression, are 311 most as necessary as a spirit of analysis and of criticism. These considerations have influenced me: but I feel the necessity of indulgence for having undertaken to write in a foreign lan guage: one -whichpresents, above all others; so many difficulties to strangers employing it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.