Tait himself may be regarded as the chief contributor to this stage.
He was a contributor to the first four of the Magdeburg Centuries.
The suppression of the Encyclopedie, to which he had been a considerable contributor, and whose conductors were his intimate friends, drew from him a shower of lampoons directed now at "l'infame" (see infra) generally, now at literary victims, such as Le Franc de Pompignan (who had written one piece of verse so much better than anything serious of Voltaire's that he could not be forgiven), or Palissot (who in his play Les Philosophes had boldly gibbeted most of the persons so termed, but had not included Voltaire), now at Freron, an excellent critic and a dangerous writer, who had attacked Voltaire from the conservative side, and at whom the patriarch of Ferney, as he now began to be called, levelled in return the very inferior farce-lampoon of L'Ecossaise, of the first night of which Freron himself did an admirably humorous criticism.
On entering parliament in 1840 he resigned the editorship to devote himself to history, but he still remained its most important contributor.
Of a similar character was the Correspondance litteraire secrete (1774-1793), to which Matra was the chief contributor.
