and marital veto, and Versailles left Paris | might have stood for the suppor, Voltaire to apotheosize unassisted the old Proteus for the doλaoros, of Plato. But the whole of literature on the old-accustomed scene | incompatibility between them must not of the successes most prized by him be set down to the charge of Voltaire. It the stage. Voltaire was present in his was calm prosaic science contrasted with box, the observed of all observers, while poetic fire, fancy, and impulse. Tronhis bust was being worshipped in rhyme chin imposed respect on Voltaire-Voland crowned with laurels, and the house taire by no means equally so on Tronchin. rang with the reiterated plaudits of the "He is six feet high," wrote the former, Parisian public. "You are stifling me "has the skill of Esculapius, and the with roses," he exclaimed. All that glo- form of Apollo." Tronchin, on the other rious noise was indeed his death-knell. hand, scanned Voltaire with the keen Not only were his nerves strained beyond eye of the physician and physiologist, his strength with excitement, he had and condensed the expression of his filled his hands with work. He had un- physical, and indeed moral state, in the dertaken to aid the Academy in their few following words: -"Bile always irDictionary of the French language: he ritating, nerves always irritated, have took the letter A on his hands, and wound been, are, and will be the perennial sources himself up to his task with strong coffee. of all the ills of which he complains." This produced a return of inflammation Tronchin, in a letter to Bonnet, compares of the bladder from which he had for- to a hurricane the terrible excitement of merly suffered, and then he gave himself Voltaire's dying moments, and declares overdoses of opium to still the pain. that it reminds him of the Furies of OresThe beginning of the end was evident. tes, and that, if anything had been wantTronchin was called in too late. Too late ing to confirm him in his principles, Volalso for the purpose were called in the taire's end would have done it. Tronchin offices of the clergy, whom the dying man was doubtless right; but his acquaintcould not satisfy that he died believ- ance, professional and personal, with ing enough to entitle his corpse to Cath- Voltaire having dated from the first olic burial. arrival of the latter in Switzerland, he Voltaire had always expressed great could scarcely have expected composure, horror at the idea of such indignities be- resignation, and dignity on his death-bed falling his own remains as he had seen inflicted on those of his actress-friend Adrienne Lecouvreur, and which he had branded soon afterwards in indignant verse. An actor or actress dying in harness (like Molière or Lecouvreur) was refused burial in consecrated ground as a matter of course. A fortiori, a writer such as Voltaire, dying unreconciled to the Church, would assuredly not be suffered to repose in consecrated ground. Accordingly, Voltaire, on his death-bed, invited the offices of the clergy, and signed voluntarily a declaration that he died in the Catholic religion in which he was born, and, if he had ever given cause of scandal to the Church, asked pardon of God and of her. The clergy demanded a more explicit and more ample retractation, and the aged patient expired with- Our readers, who have thus far borne out having put his signature to the pre- us company in once more reviewing the scribed document. His Genevan physi- most prominent passages of Voltaire's cian Tronchin, who had made way in strangely chequered career, may perParis, like many less skilful innovators, haps expect that we should not conclude on the strength mainly of his innovations without laying before them some general on the old medical practice, must be ac- estimate of his moral and intellectual incepted as a not unfriendly though un- fluence on his age, for good or evil. sympathetic witness of Voltaire's last moments. The moral temperament of the "There has been no distinguished man," two men was antipathic. Tronchin' says Dr. Strauss, "on whose whole personality

from one who had displayed those qualities at no crisis of his life previously. That unlucky letter A of the French Academy's Dictionary seems to have worked his over-excited brain to the last.

Voltaire's executors had to run a race against the ecclesiastical authorities to obtain for his body the decencies of interment at a distance from Paris. His nephew, Counsellor Mignot, happened to be titular abbot of Scellières, near Troyes, and made pious haste to put Uncle underground, "ere the bishop could bar." Episcopal inhibition followed the day after the funeral. Thus the old persifleur's last trick on the clergy was as complete a success as had been all his other tricks on that order during his long life.

Voltaire was infected by the age in which his impressible youth was passed. The roues of the Regency had in that age suc ceeded the real or pretended bigots of the last years of the Grand Monarque. The dominant Church had silenced or exterminated the religious dissidents who had invaded (very wholesomely to herself) her monopoly of Christian teaching. The angel that troubled the waters was put to flight, and the Bethesda of orthodoxy stagnated. But out of the stagnation sprang new and venomous swarms of irreligious dissidents, whom the Church had left quite out of her reckoning. All that can be said of Voltaire is, that he condensed and concentrated the irreligious ideas, which were bubbling up on all sides at the opening of the eighteenth century, into succinct and sparkling forms of expression, which had never before been equalled, and have never since been surpassed. As for his moral character, that also, it must be confessed, partook of the general laxity which dates more especially from the Orleans ReWhat more, after all, can be said on agency. Then was the grand débâcle of all final review of Voltaire's life and writ- that had preserved public respect for the ings, than was said long ago in his epi- titularly and ostensibly leading classes grammatic epitaph" Ci-git l'enfant gâté in France-of all that had preserved du monde qu'il gâta?" It may, however, respect in those classes for the moral be worth while to examine a little more bonds which hold society together. The closely in what respects his age spoiled world of rank and fashion framed for its him, and he spoiled his age. A writer, own use a practical philosophy, which whom we have before had occasion to Voltaire rationalized and idealized for it quote, on the revolutions of his country,* in prose and verse. He became, as it has observed justly :were, the spiritual director-general of fashionable Irreligion, as his youthful teachers, the Jesuits, had been of fashionable Religion in the preceding century.

it has been more customary to pass judgment in decisive and trenchant terms than Voltaire, and none to whom that treatment has been more inappropriately, we might say senselessly, applied. The same thing, indeed, might be said of such treatment, as applied to any really distinguished person. But amongst such there are, so to speak, monarchical souls, whose rich and manifold endowments, whose impulses and inclinations, all converge towards some one grand all-overruling object of effort. It might be a bald and shallow, but not abso- | lutely absurd way of writing of such men, to deal in general epithets-as noble or ignoble, selfish or self-sacrificing, earnest or frivolous. But Voltaire, in that sense, was no monarchical soul. If, indeed, the effects produced by him were pretty much in one direction, they were, however, the results of the complex play of powers very various, of impulses pure and impure, crossing and jarring with each other as motive forces in his mind. My name is legion, Voltaire's Demon might have said, like that of the Gadarene. In that legion, however, there were good spirits as well as evil. Even of the latter few were exactly fitted to pass into swine, if many into cats or apes.

When you see these great flaws - which it wore puerile to deny - in the French national character, don't forget that France (at the epochs of the Saint Bartholomew and of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes) had torn But the irreligion of the age got beout her own heart and entrails by exterminat-yond Voltaire. Horace Walpole wrote ing the persons or stifling the convictions of from Paris to Mr. Brand in 1765: — nearly two millions of her best citizens. These are wounds which do not heal for centuries. The infliction of such wounds becomes a habit in our history. The amputation first of one member of the body politic, then of another, is the rule amongst us at every difficult epoch. Beware lest, after every noble part has been successively severed, nothing remains at last to France but an enslaved trunk. She had severe virtues; the old régime constrained her to become frivolous- -to scatter abroad

amongst foreigners her best gifts, her most solid faculties. She has retained only half her genius, -éclat, brilliancy, mobility. But it is

not with this mobile temper any nation can found its liberty.

I assure you, you may come hither very safely, and be in no danger from mirth. Laughing is as much out of fashion as pantins and bilboquets. Good folks, they have no time to laugh. There is God and the king to be pulled down first: and men and women, one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition. They think me quite profane for having any belief left.

The same lively writer mentions an atheistic philosopher in petticoats, who exclaimed of Voltaire-"Ne me parlezpas de ce bigot-là; il est Déiste!"

The conceit of philosophical honnêtes gens in France, during the eighteenth With this mobile temper, however, century-till the crash came was that

Quinet, "La Révolution," vol. i. p. 212.

they could have their irreligion all to themselves, leaving a safe residue of su

perstition to the canaille. Thus Voltaire | tion in all countries, and for all ages. writes to D'Alembert:

Il ne s'agit pas d'empêcher nos laquais mulgated. Locke and Newton never d'aller à la messe ou au prêche.

made the figure at home of incendiary innovators; Bolingbroke, admired as a speaker, never set the Thames on fire as Je pardonne tout, pourvu que l'infâme super- a philosopher. Washington and Frankstition soit décriée comme il faut chez les hon-lin were the most sober-minded of men nêtes gens, et qu'elle soit abandonnée aux whom events ever roused into revolutionlaquais et aux servantes, comme de raison. ists. France showed no originality but that of extravagance in her mode of appropriating theories of Mind, and Rights of Man, which, in the lands of their origin, turned no one's brains, whether of their teachers or learners. Now how came this? May we not be warranted in saying that the main cause of the difference was that England old and new possessed, and France had lost, an unmutilated and independent middle class?

lieu, "the hero of Port-Mahon," that by how to deal with them. He was as acting otherwise his antagonist would nearly as possible precipitated from his have uselessly sacrificed his ships and throne and driven to his dose of corrocrews. All was in vain; a court-martial sive sublimate, by the conspiring exascapitally convicted Byng of not having peration of Maria Theresa and the Mardone all he might have done to achieve quise de Pompadour. The imbecile arms victory. And on such a sentence, passed of France were the saving of Prussia at on such grounds, he was condemned to Rosbach and Crefeld. But Austria and be shot, as Voltaire bitterly expressed it France might have been saved their hour in "Candide,” “pour encourager les of humiliation by the wit of Voltaire.

autres."

Voltaire reigned paramount in French Voltaire gave proof of political sagacity literature and philosophy for nearly half and patriotic feeling, which might have a century; his reign opening, it may be made him an important public man in a said, at his return in 1729 from his three free country by his persistent efforts to years' exile in England, and closing with move that equally sagacious old profli- his life, "stifled with roses " by the Pagate Cardinal Tencin (with whom he had risian public in 1778. The influence which become reconciled by that strongest of he exercised during this long period is earthly motives, idem sentire de republica) well described by Dr. Strauss: to induce the government of Louis XV., or rather of Madame de Pompadour, to entertain the overtures of peace made by Frederick II., at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, when his destruction by the combined arms of Austria, France, and Russia, appeared all but inevitable. The question arose for France, as Voltaire pointedly put it (certainly without any personal tenderness for his old patronpersecutor), why she should aid Austria to destroy an enemy whose destruction must draw after it that of the whole preexisting balance of power in Central Europe. Frederick, it was said, had his capsule of corrosive sublimate ready in the last resort. Voltaire seriously and strenuously dissuaded him from the suicide he was avowedly meditating; but the imbecility of Soubise and the victory of Rosbach proved more effectual antidotes against despair. Voltaire and Tencin, in their well-meant and wellmotived pleadings for peace on the eve of defeat and the brink of bankruptcy, were contending fruitlessly with Petticoat the Second, who then ruled supreme in France. Frederick had repulsed the advances and ignored the sovereignty of Pompadour: Maria Theresa, with more policy, if at some sacrifice of imperial-queenly dignity, condescended to messages of friendship and esteem for that royal mistress. All the foresight of Voltaire and all the experienced tact of Tencin found themselves unequally matched against the petty spites of the seraglio. Frederick was unlucky with the Parisians especially – women-always excepting his devoted sister, and natural and constant ally, Voltaire's not less constant friend, Wilhelmine- or rather his wayward misogynic! temper never would allow him to learn

Voltaire's historical significance has been illustrated by the observation of Goethe that, as in families whose existence has been of long duration, Nature sometimes at length produces an individual who sums up in himself the collective qualities of all his ancestors, so it happens also with nations, whose collective merits (and demerits) sometimes appear epitomized in one individual person. Thus in Louis XIV. stood forth the highest figure of a French monarch. Thus, in Voltaire, the highest conceivable and congenial representative of French authorship. We may extend the observation farther, if, instead of the French nation only, we take into view the whole European generation on which Voltaire's influence was exercised. From this point of view we may call Voltaire emphatically the representative writer of the eighteenth century, as Goethe called him, in the highest sense, the representative writer of France. The two characters coincide very well together, as will be seen if we trace back the respective shares taken by the several civilized European nations in the achievements of the last three centuries. The great work of the sixteenth century-the Reformation-was principally performed by the Germans. In the transition period of the seventeenth, while Germany was tearing herself to pieces in intestine strife, Holland and England were laying the foundations of modern politics and philosophy. At the beginning of the eighteenth, refugees from England, like Lord Bolingbroke, and French visitors of Eng land, like Montesquieu and Voltaire, communicated from that country to the continent the first sparks of that new light which soon afterwards, especially by Voltaire's exertions, burst from France on the world, as the day-star of that century of universal enlightenment. If the French

-were the chosen

people of this new dispensation of Reason, Voltaire was incontestably its high-priest.

To win and keep a position of such eminence of such predominance over a whole age- -not only intellectual gifts and favourable external círcumstances were requisite, but

also and especially there was requisite length of life. Neither Louis XIV. in France, nor Frederick the Great in Germany, would have been in a position to set their stamp each on his own age, had the former died at the epoch of the peace of Nimeguen, or the latter at

good in the main, and a careful, ju-
dicious manager of his means, did for a
time, while its power was fresh and novel,
act with a restraining, even elevating ef-
fect on a fickle, false-natured husband
it was true that in the early days of Kit-
ty's married life she announced to the
entranced Sukie, that she had little else
left to wish for, that she had married not
a mere man but an angel.

Such statements, and the sight of Kitty receiving her and a selection from their neighbours in all the dignity of a house of her own though it was but a furnished lodging, kept up on no higher

Kollin or Hochkirch. As little could Goethe have been recognized as the Prince of German poets, had he been summoned from life just after the production of "Goetz" and "Werther"—had he not, in his own person, during three generations, lived through the youth, maturity, and old age of German poetry. Voltaire was an after-birth of the classical period of French poetry; but he himself opened the era of enlightenment-literature in the eighteenth century, and shared in all its conquests till they culminated and closed on the opening or more secure wages than those of a of the French Revolution era. The latter journeyman house-painter - more than years of Louis XIV. were those of Voltaire's reconciled Sukie to the grievous blank in childhood and early youth; his first years of the watchmaker's house, and to the manhood were spent under the regency of Philip of Orleans; his maturity and decline extended over the long reign of Louis XV.: and he hailed, as an octogenarian, the dawn of Louis XVI., which promised a brighter day. tains and plains through which it flows contri-Cranthorpe, because of the jealousies of butions from every soil and culture to the end foremen, and of natives of the place. of its course, so traces might be recognized through life in Voltaire of the impressions received by him in the different periods, especially the earlier, of his chequered career.

As a river carries down with it from the moun

worse gap in her life which she would be compelled to face when Will Mayne sought in a larger town than Cranthorpe the elbow-room which he was forever asking, but which he could not get in

Kitty would adorn a larger town and that higher sphere into which Will Mayne might lead her; and Sukie at a humble distance would hear of Kitty's exaltation and rejoice in it.

Of Miles and his wife Sukie saw no more, and heard little or nothing. Even in Cranthorpe there were not only nice gradations of rank, but entirely different sets in all ranks. Miles had resented the manner in which his family had taken his marriage more bitterly than strict justice warranted. He did not come back to his father's house, or bring his wife there. Sukie, who was far too much occupied to go almost anywhere except to Kitty's, met neither Miles nor Sal in any other quarter except by casual encounters, which all concerned could easily prevent from becoming closer or more particular.

FOR a few months after Kitty Cope became Kitty Mayne, it did seem as if Sukie's troublesome suspicions of Will Mayne and his motives, had been without foundation, and that she had been guilty of that fearfulness and unbelief of which she had accused herself. So far The entire estrangement was rather a from being sorry to find herself in the result of circumstances, and of the nawrong, Sukie could not rejoice enough. tures concerned in the circumstances, Whatever had actuated Will Mayne in than of a deliberate intention on Sukie's his pursuit of Kitty- whether what was part to have nothing more to do with pretentious and aspiring in the man him- Miles. Indeed, however it might affect self had been really caught by an un-old Miles in the ice-bound seclusion of doubted refinement in Kitty, to the influ- his muddled ambition and reticence, or ence of which young Miles was impervious; whether Will Mayne had married with a hope of old Miles Cope, the most unworldly of men, having laid up money, while yet he was content to make the best of an erroneous calculation; whether the sincere love of a woman guileless and'

Kitty in the expanding glory of her latelyfledged matronly honours, it wounded Sukie's tender heart many a time to think that she was cut off from a brother, -an only brother, a younger brother,whom she had made much of, and regarded as one of the lights of the house,