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Having minutely inspected the theatre, | you can dare to live with a man who prothe party returned to the château, and fesses to have no religion whatever, or, Voltaire easily persuaded his visitor to if anything, is a stricter disciple of Constay for dinner. fucius than you can be of your humble master, then come to me."

Under these circumstances, it is not: surprising Father Adam was forced to eat his pudding, and hold his tongue. He became the butt of Voltaire, and lived comparatively happy dependant upon his bounty.

Among those who dined at Ferney, was a certain Duc de Villars, son of the famous marshal who had been called the Saviour of France. The noble duke had come to Ferney in order to consult Tronchin a pupil of Boerhaave. The repu-a tation of Tronchin stood high in those days. Voltaire believed in him, in spite of his incessant abuse of doctors in general, and Tronchin in particular. It was a comfort to him to feel that by a careful study of the maladies incident to human life amelioration was possible, and he gave Tronchin as much credit for perseverance and intelligence as he thought he deserved. It is recorded that at the rehearsal of one of his own tragedies, Mr. Cramer, a bookseller at Geneva (and Voltaire's own immediate publisher), was finishing his part, which was to end with some dying sentences. Voltaire, objecting to the manner in which the deathscene was played, cried out in accents of burning scorn, Cramer, you lived like a prince during the four preceding acts, but at the fifth you die like a bookseller."

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Tronchin, being present, could not help in kindness interfering. "Monsieur Voltaire," said he deprecatingly, can you ever expect to have gentlemen to be at this expense of dresses, and fatigue of getting up such long parts, if you thus upbraid them? On the contrary, I think they all deserve the greatest encouragement at your hands; and as to my friend Cramer, I declare that, so far as I am a judge, he dies with the same dignity he lived."

Voltaire contented himself with the cool reply, "Prithee, doctor, when you have got kings to kill, kill them your own way; let me kill mine as I please."

To return to the dinner table. Among those present was a certain Father Adam, whom Voltaire introduced to his visitor in the following words: "Il est père Adam, mais pas le premier des hommes "

a mode of introduction decidedly embarrassing to both parties concerned. It appears that at the dissolution, and consequent dispersal of the Order of Jesuits from France, Voltaire, out of pure audacity and not, as some writers have pretended, out of pity-selected Father Adam as boon companion, and fellow chess-player. The invitation (which was promptly accepted) was couched in the following highly characteristic terms: "If

Voltaire's dining-room presented a slov. enly, uninviting appearance. Like the Aulæ of classic times,* women of various ages were engaged at needlework all round the room. Their work, which was not always of the most delicate kind, was never suspended during the repast. Voltaire was in some things meaner than Harpagon. He declined to supply his servants with livery. It was the fashion in those days to permit servants to retain the livery they wore in service for the rest of their natural lives. So that, when those given by their previous masters became threadbare, Voltaire's attendants were reduced to the necessity of waiting at table in their shirt-sleeves. Nor was Voltaire more particular in his own attire, which generally consisted in a faded dressing gown, an unpowdered wig, with knots in front instead of behind, crowned by a velvet cap, embroidered with silk by one or other of his female admirers.

"Being naturally waspish, and hasty in his manner, he was not unlike Lear as represented in a strolling company, whose wardrobe furnishes the same suit for the insane king as for the Mahomet of some Turkish tragedy, incomplete at least, and at best very shabby."

Sometimes he would throw aside his dressing-gown, and in a spirit of rank coquetterie, encase himself from head to foot in a suit of velvet embroidery, in which he neither felt nor looked at his ease. But who will cavil at the dress of genius? All this banter is unworthy of its subject. Voltaire was an excellent host. Like Pope, he was charming at his own table; and not, like Pope, stingy with his wine. He had the rare gift of kindling and sustaining general conversation, which would effectually draw from each person present the full measure of his wit and wisdom.

On the evening of which we speak, the conversation turned upon the English, for whose society he evinced a fondness.

Matres familiâs vestræ in atriis operantur domo. rum, industrias testificantes suas. - Arnobius.

Close at hand stood the church, which once formed part of the quadrangle to the château. The young Venetian raised his eyes, bewildered to find that the sacred edifice had been sawn in two, an arrangement which enabled the eye to survey 'twixt the rent walls the blue surface of Lac Leman. The prospect was superb. Over the western portal stood the famous words:

"DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE."

The English residing at Geneva had, on So saying, he led his young friend to a more than one occasion, been of practical spot from whence he pointed out the highservice to him. Thus, when he brought way to Geneva- a town he abhorred out his celebrated edition of "Corneille," with Mont Blanc in the far distance. the little colony came forward liberally with subscriptions. But that Voltaire held absurd prejudices against some of our most approved authors is only too evident from the tenor both of his writings and conversation. He admired Locke, Newton, and Pope, and evinced in his affection for the productions of the latter something like paternal solicitude. He claimed to have suggested many of the best philosophical maxims embodied in the "Essay on Man," especially that portion of the third essay which relates to natural governments. His opinions about Shakespeare are too well known to require comment here. He admired our institutions; and was not insensible to the worth which foreigners, as a rule, fail to perceive under that cold, external demeanor which keeps the stranger at a distance. With us he found a welcome at a critical period in his life; and from the English he received the magnificent sum of two thousand pounds for the "Henriade." No wonder then that he affected the English, with the most insignificant of whom he once expressed a wish to exchange nationalities.

But while we digress the dinner is still proceeding at Ferney. Having noticed during dessert that his young visitor did not join in the conversation, Voltaire tried to destroy his reveries by asking, in allusion to his long absence from the Venetian republic, whether he were dissatisfied with the patrician government there. His visitor endeavored to assure Voltaire that no country existed where liberty in the best acceptation of the term could be better enjoyed.

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On his arrival at Ferney, Voltaire found an old château surrounded by a few hovels. The château was forthwith pulled down, and in its stead he erected a noble country-house, only preserving some awkward gateways and turrets which he would have done wisely to raze also, for they spoilt the general effect of this otherwise handsome building. It is strange that in spite of his long residence in England, and notwithstanding his avowed admiration for our methods of planting, building, and gardening, every nook and corner of his little property was as essentially French as any plot of ground around Paris. His woods were cut into walks, star fashion, their variety depending upon the size of the several stars, and the number of their rays.*

Ferney was the first territorial possession of Voltaire - his first child - and he was proportionately proud of it. He never failed to inform his guests during dinner that every dish came from his own property. The potence was his especial pride. It was the distinguishing mark of the lord of the manor. There were several at Ferney, and Voltaire declined to have them moved. "I have as many gallows," said he one day, "as would suffice to hang half the monarchs in Europe. And half the monarchs deserve no loftier position."

"Ay, ay!" replied the great man, his eyes twinkling, provided always that one is content to play the role of a mute." And then, quickly perceiving that the subject was somewhat mal à propos, Voltaire took the young man's arm, and led Little or nothing Voltairian_remains of him into the garden, of which he claimed the château. The founder of a prosperto be the creator. A lofty avenue led dious village, he who made of six hovels an rect to a rushing stream. It was a tribu-arena for useful manufactories, and coltary of the Rhone the swift, arrowy lected industrious workmen for the wealth Rhone, which cleaves its troubled course of a law-abiding community, has gone to through Tarascon and Arles until it loses its identity in the Mediterranean Sea.

Voltaire glanced at the stream for a moment, and then said sadly: "It is my messenger. I can trust it better than 1 can trust the best of men. It never fails me."

a brighter world. Every vestige of a once romantic habitation has become confounded with the tastes and require. ments of an unsympathetic proprietor,

*It would repay the curious in these matters to refer to the "Nouvelle Héloïse," lettre xi., partic 4, note.

whose dreams are haunted by visions of hero-worshippers clamorous for a glimpse at the relics of Voltaire.

Time and man have made a clean sweep of much that might well have been preserved. A similar fate has befallen the famous acacia walk at Lausanne. Love of greed has triumphed over historic associations; and the exigencies of a wave of illiterate, unromantic, timepressed tourists, have swept away the summer-house and the acacias, in whose vicinity on a bright summer night Gibbon put the last strokes to his immortal history.

But nature has proved kinder than man. In the garden at Ferney may still be seen a berceau walk, arched over with clipped hornbeam, a veritable verdant cloister, admitting here and there peeps of the rich prospect afar. Here the bugbear of tyrants and kings, the dauntless champion of liberty, paced to and fro on balmy summer nights. Here, perchance, the great Edward Gibbon conversed with Helvetius and D'Holbach, in the awful presence of Voltaire, on Julian's apostasy. A little yet remains of this enchanted ground. There is just enough of the shadow the magni nominis umbra — to suggest the substance, and the genius of the spot has not entirely vanished.

As the stars began to twinkle in the cloudless sky, the great man led his visitors into the château. Passing through the hall, they entered the sacred study. The floor was strewn with books, papers, and letters.

"Behold my correspondence," quoth Voltaire.

Then taking up a book "The Rape of the Bucket," by Tassoni - he said, "This is the only tragio-comic poem of which Italy can boast. Tassoni was something more than a monk, he was a wit, a savant, a poet, and a man of real genius."

even as Muratori did by his treatise on Italian poetry."

Voltaire held up the book in question, and said: "At all events, you must allow that his learning is profound."

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“Est ubi peccat,” rejoined the Venetian, and the conversation dropped.

The moon's pale light fell upon the paths around Ferney as the young Venetian rose to depart. Voltaire, gracious to the last, placed an arm round his neck, and cordially invited him to repeat the visit. But fate ordered it otherwise. In spite of every assurance and every intention to the contrary, they never met again. That night was passed by the traveller, in an hotel at Geneva, writing a faithful record of his adventures, and thinking of all that had happened at Ferney. When the sun rose next morning he was on the road for Bâle, his mind occupied by recollections of the events of the previous day, and his heart throbbing with natural pride at the distinction which had been shown him by the most celebrated man in Europe.

From The Cornhill Magazine.

THE COLORS OF FLOWERS.

BEFORE me, as I write, stands a small specimen vase, containing a little Scotch bluebell, picked upon a bleak, open moorside, yet wonderfully delicate and fragile in stem, and leaf, and bud, and blossom. For the bluebells of Scotland, the bluebells of Walter Scott and of all the old ballad poetry, are not our stiff, thickstemmed English wild hyacinths, but the same dainty, drooping flowers which we in the south call harebells. The word ought really to be heather-bell; but the corruption is quite in accordance with a common law of English phonology, which has similarly degraded several other early words by dropping out the th between two vowels. Harebell or heather-bell or blue

"That he was a poet cannot be denied," said the young man, "but that he was a savant Í dispute, for in deriding the Copernican system he betrayed his igno-bell, the flower is one of our prettiest and rance." most graceful native forms; and the ex"Where did he deride that system?"quisite depth of its color has always made inquired Voltaire.

it a prime favorite with our poets and our "In his academic lectures." children alike. How it first got that beau"I do not possess a copy, but will certiful color is the problem which I wish, if tainly procure one," said Voltaire, as he possible, to settle to-day. made a note on the fly-leaf of the book he held in his hand. "But Tassoni has criticised Petrarch with considerable acumen," he continued.

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I am not going to inquire at present why the harebell is colored at all. That question I suppose everybody has now heard answered a dozen times over at least. We all know nowadays that the colors of flowers are useful to them in

attracting the insects which fertilize their | enlarged and flattened stamens, which embryo seeds; and that only those flowers have been set apart for the special work possess bright hues which thus depend of attracting insects. It seems likely that upon insects for the impregnation of their all flowers at first consisted of the central ovules. Wind fertilized blossoms, in organs alone that is to say, the pistil, which the pollen of one head is carried which contains the ovary with its embryo by chance breezes to the stigma of an- seeds; and the stamens, which produce other, are always small, green, and com- the pollen, whose co-operation is necesparatively inconspicuous. It is only those sary in order to fertilize these same plants which are indebted to bees or but- embryo ovules and to make the pistil terflies for the due setting of their seeds mature into the ripe fruit. But in those that ever advertise their store of honey plants which took to fertilization by means by bright-hued petals. All this, as I say, of insects - or, one ought rather to say, we have each of us heard long ago. So in those plants which insects took to visthe specific question which I wish to iting for the sake of their honey or pollen, attack to-day is not why the harebell is and so unconsciously fertilizing the colored, but why it is colored blue. And, flowers soon began to produce an outer in getting at the answer to this one test-row of barren and specialized stamens, question, I hope incidentally to answer adapted by their size and color for attractthe wider question why any given flower ing the fertilizing insects; and these barwhatsoever should be blue, let us say, or ren and specialized stamens are what we red, or lilac, rather than orange, yellow, commonly call petals. Any flowers which white, or any other possible color in nature thus presented brilliant masses of color except the one which it actually happens to allure the eyes of the beetles, the bees, to be. and the butterflies would naturally receive the greatest number of visits from their insect friends, and would therefore stand the best chance of setting their seeds, as well as of producing healthy and vigorous offspring as the result of a proper cross. In this way, they would gain an advantage in the struggle for life over their less fortunate compeers, and would hand down their own peculiarities to their descendants after them.

Briefly put, the general conclusion at which I have arrived is this: all flowers were in their earliest form yellow; then, some of them became white; after that, a few of them grew to be red or purple; and finally a comparatively small number acquired various shades of lilac, mauve, violet, or blue. So that, if this principle be true, the harebell will represent one of the most highly developed lines of descent; and its ancestors will have passed successively through all the intermediate stages. Let us see what grounds can be given for such a belief.

But as the stamens of almost all flowers, certainly of all the oldest and simplest flowers, are yellow, it would naturally fol low that the earliest petals would be yelIn the first place, it is well to observe low too. When the stamens of the outer that when we speak of the colors of flow-row were flattened and broadened into ers we generally mean the color of the petals, there would be no particular reapetals alone. For in most cases the son why they should change their color; stamens and other central organs, which and, in the absence of any good reason, form, botanically speaking, the really im- they doubtless retained it as before. Inportant part of the blossom, are yellow, deed, I shall try to show, a little later on, or at least yellowish; while the petals that the earliest and simplest types of may be blue, red, pink, orange, lilac, or existing flowers are almost always yellow, even green. But as the central organs seldom white, and never blue; and this are comparatively small, whereas the in itself would be a sufficient ground for petals are large and conspicuous, we nat- believing that yellow was the original urally speak of flowers in every-day talk color of all petals.* But as I am peras having the color of their petals, which form by far the greater and most noticeable part of their whole surface. Our question, then, narrows itself down to this Why are the petals in any particular blossom of one color rather than another?

Now petals, as I have more than once already explained to the readers of this magazine, are in all probability originally

* In a part of this article I shall have to go over ground already considered in a valuable paper read by Sir John Lubbock before the British Association at York last August, and I shall take part of my examples from his interesting collection of facts as reported in Nature. But, at the same time, I should like at the outset to point out that I venture to differ on two points from his great authority. In the first place, I do not think all flowers were originally green, because I believe petals were first derived from altered stamens, not from altered sepals or bracts, and that modern green flowers are degraded types, not survivals, of early forms. And

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sonally somewhat heretical, in believing, | seems to me, that they mark the transi contrary to the general run of existing tion from one form to the other, any more scientific opinion, that petals are derived than we can say that Gothic architecture from flattened stamens, not from simpli- marks the transition from the Egyptian fied and attenuated leaves, I shall venture style to the classical Greek. I do not to detail here the reasons for this belief; mean to deny that the stamen and the because it seems to me of capital impor- ovary are themselves by origin modified tance in connection with our present sub-leaves - that part of the Wolffian theory ject. For if the petals were originally a is absolutely irrefutable but what I do row of stamens set apart for the function mean to say is this, that, with the light of attracting insects, it would be natural shed upon the subject by the modern docand obvious why they should begin by be- trine of evolution, we can no longer regard ing yellow; but if they were originally a petals and sepals as intermediate stages set of leaves, which became thinner and between the two. The earliest flowering more brightly colored for the same pur-plants had true leaves on the one hand, pose, it would be difficult to see why they and specialized pollen-bearing or ovuleshould first have assumed any one color bearing leaves on the other hand, which rather than another. latter are what we call stamens and carpels; but they had no petals at all, and the petals of modern flowers have been produced at some later period. I believe, also, they have been produced by a modification of certain external stamens, not by a modification of true leaves. Instead of being leaves arrested on their way towards becoming stamens, they are stamens which have partially reverted towards the condition of leaves. They differ from true leaves, however, in their thin, spongy texture, and in the bright pigments with which they are adorned.

The accepted doctrine as to the nature of petals is that discovered by Wolff and afterwards rediscovered by Goethe, after whose name it is usually called; for of course, as in all such cases, the greater man's fame.has swallowed up the fame of the lesser. Goethe held that all the parts of the flower were really modified leaves, and that a gradual transition could be traced between them, from the ordinary leaf through the stem-leaf and the bract to the sepal (or division of the calyx), the petal, the stamen, and the ovary or carpel. Now, if we look at most modern flowers, such a transition can undoubtedly be observed; and sometimes it is very delicately graduated, so that you can hardly say where each sort of leaf merges into the next. But, unfortunately for the truth of the theory as ordinarily understood, we now know that in the earliest flowers there were no petals or sepals, but that primitive flowering plants had simply leaves on the one hand, and stamens and ovules on the other. The oldest types of flowers at present surviving, those of the pine tribe and of the tropical cycads (such as the well-known zamias of our conservatories), have still only these simple elements. But if petals and sepals are later in origin (as we know them to be) than stamens and carpels, we cannot say, it

in the second place, I think yellow petals preceded white petals in the order of time, and not vice versa. I may also perhaps be excused for adding that I had already arrived at most of the substantive conclusions set forth in this article before the appearance of Sir John Lubbock's paper, and had incidentally put forward the greater part of them, though dogmatically and without fully stating my reasons, in an article on the "Daisy's Pedigree," published in the Cornhill Magazine, and in another on the "Rose Family," published in Belgravia, both for August, 1881. At the same time, must express my indebtedness for many new details to Sir John Lubbock's admirable paper. Of course this note is only appended for the behoof of scientific readers.

All stamens show a great tendency easily to become petaloid, as the technical botanists call it; that is to say, to flatten out their filament or stalk, and finally to lose their pollen-bearing sacs or anthers. In the water-lilies — which are one of the oldest and simplest types of flowers we now possess, still preserving many antique points of structure unchanged-we can trace a regular gradation from the perfect stamen to the perfect petal. In the centre of the flower, we find stamens of the ordinary sort, with rounded stalks or filaments, and long, yellow anthers full of pollen at the end of each; then, as we move outward, we find the filaments growing flatter and broader, and the pollensacs less and less perfect; next we find a few stamens which look exactly like petals, only that they have two abortive anthers stuck awkwardly on to their summits; and, finally, we find true petals, broad and flat, yellow or white as the case may be, and without any trace of the anthers at all. Here in this very ancient flower we have stereotyped for us, as it were, the mode in which stamens first developed into petals, under stress of insect selection.

"But how do you know," some one may ask, "that the transition was not in the

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