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Göthe in the European Commonwealth, without taking into view those performed by his predecessors; not merely because his mind was of course in great measure formed by theirs, but also because his philosophy is just what was looked for by a generation which, like his, had been taught by Voltaire and Rousseau, and had become dissatisfied with its teachers-partly a complement of their doctrines, partly a protest against them.

It scarcely seems necessary to go higher than to Voltaire in tracing, for popular purposes, the parentage of modern continental philosophy. For his most extraordinary gift was that of assimilating, combining, and reproducing the thoughts of others; so that, with little originality of his own, he was able to pass off his second-hand inspiration as genuine. Clear, subtle, daring, with every quality but depth, he obtained all that sway over the public mind which is seldom acquired by the real originator of thought - too conscious, in general, of the inadequacy of his own views to be able to impose them with the tone of a sovereign. Few indeed looked through Voltaire, at Bayle and Pascal, who stood behind him. He seemed to France, and Europe in general, to occupy the extremity of the visible horizon -the father of authorship- the oracle alike of politics, philosophy, and literature-the living We' of journalism. before journalism had acquired its present substantial existence. He deserves, therefore, to rank as the first of the great priests of the modern creed of Negation. There were poets before Homer, and sceptics before Voltaire; and it may be a profitable as well as curious research to inquire after both but for us, whose object is only to trace in some degree the course of popular thought and writing in later days, Voltaire is the beginning of all things.

To many, indeed, the examination of peculiarities in his character seems superfluous. Voltaire was an infidel and an archteacher of infidelity; and as such to be cast aside with one general mark of reprobation. We would willingly remain at peace with critics such as these, for we respect their feelings, nay, sympathise with them, far too sincerely to condemn or sneer at them: we travel by a more arduous and doubtful road than they; but it is to meet at the same point, if possible, at last. But we would, nevertheless, ask those who imagine that the mere fact of his infidelity dispenses with all serious inquiry into his tenets and motives, by implying utter perversity and worthlessness of judgment, what else they would have had him but an infidel? He was endowed with a clear spirit and a penetrating genius: he could not have remained among the nameless millions who live and die in nominal belief. Was he VOL. XCII. NO. CLXXXV.

to be a zealous Romanist of his own time and country? Was he to acquiesce in the religion à la Maintenon which was in fashion in his young years, that lowest and worst of hypocrisies,when coarse, deliberate vice, unexcused by passion, was not only varnished over by outward decency, but actually intruded among religious observances, with the respectful acquiescence, at least, of the prelates and saints of an age which the Duc de Noailles, a Christian writer, is not ashamed to indicate, in his recent Life of Madame de Maintenon,' as a model for ours? Would they have had him reverence Christianity under the cardinal's hat of Dubois, or Alberoni, or Fleury? or in the wretched series of low intrigues, craven tempers, and obscure ambitions, which characterised the last years of the company of Jesuits before their dissolution? Was he to join one half of the sincere believers of Paris in persecuting the other half, in the affair of the Jansenists? or was he to side with the martyrs in their one-sided orthodoxy, mingled as it was with credulity of the most contemptible order? All this was impossible. There was, no doubt, an alternative. There was then, in Romanist France, as there has been, and ever is, in Christian countries of whatever persuasion, the small company of God's chosen servants - of those to whom it is given to extract truth even from the midst of bewildering errors of those who are rarely known to the world, and can but seldom even know and recognise each other in it. But to say of any one that he was not a member of this invisible Church is scarcely a reproach; and between this and unbelief there was no resting-place for a mind like Voltaire's, and in his day.

The open and literal character of his unbelief, wherein he differs from all other really great men, was a consequence of a certain necessity both of his moral and intellectual nature. He could never utter half his thought. If he could have done so, he might have avoided his thirty years of exile, or have spent them under the shadow of royalty at Berlin. And his thought went always directly to its point. When once the apparent logical truth was reached, he had no conception of the possibility of error from too wide generalisation in the premises, and entertained the greatest contempt for all who suggested it. It was utterly impossible that he should frame for himself any of those more or less hazy atmospheres of mixed sentiment and reasoning-mixed faith and incredulity in which so many minds of a different, perhaps a superior order, have been and are involved. attacking the letter of the Bible, he had no doubt whatever that he was dealing direct blows at the foundation of all revealed religion. His reasoning on the one side was as concise as the

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popular reasoning of that day, and of ours, on the other. There is a revelation from God, says the common syllogism: therefore every word of the Bible is true in its literal sense. Much of the Bible is demonstrably false in its literal sense, says Voltaire, therefore there is no revealed religion. His judgment needed no further proof than this: his conscience never awakened to the void which so many feel whose judgment has been led astray. He had no shrinking whatever from the abyss of negation, which opens on most men when revealed truth is discarded. It was filled up to his perfect satisfaction by natural religion. There was no doubt, no mystery, about his God of Nature. A few trivial deductions from design and contrivance-a few probabilities turned into axioms-were quite enough to satisfy him. It might be said of him, as Heine says of his offspring, the Genevese School;' They made of the Deity an able artist, 6 who has constructed the world much as their fathers manufactured watches.' The being of God was in his view, if not quite as strictly demonstrated as the falsehood of the Bible, at least firmly established on the basis of convenience; and an Atheist was quite as absurd a person as a priest. Whatever may have been his occasional fits of complaisance towards thorough-going friends who outstripped him in their unbelief, his own judgment always repudiated Atheism. He also dreaded it. If,' said he in 1765, in one of those moments of almost prophetic clairvoyance which distinguished him, the world were ever to be governed by Atheists, we might as well be under the empire of those infernal beings who are represented to us as savagely 'tormenting their victims.'

But Voltaire is commonly called an immoral as well as an irreligious writer; and the saying is true of course, but not true in the sense, or to the extent, usually intended. Immoral he was, as a writer, as far as an imagination as lively as it was depraved, great regardlessness of truth, much jealousy and much arrogance, and these all obtruded on the world with an utter absence of self-restraint, could make him. But immoral in the sense of an impugner of the laws of morality he was not; herein, again, differing from the great men who followed him. He never attacked those laws directly: never indirectly on purpose, whatever may have been the effect of his reckless ridicule. On the contrary, he upheld them, even ostentatiously, as the foundations of his system; which had only the defect, quite imperceptible to his eyes, of containing nothing on which the foundations themselves might rest. It was enough for him that the excessive inconvenience of a world without morality was demonstrable. The Supreme Intelligence which

has formed us willed that there should be justice on the earth, in order that we might be able to live on it a certain number of years.' La morale vient de Dieu, comme la lumière.' Thou shalt not do murder, like the Dominicans; nor be ambitious, like the Jesuits; nor licentious, like the Capuchins: such were his daily edicts. Why not? Because the God of Nature has willed it: and I, Voltaire, am his prophet: and if you preach aught to the contrary, you are a Lamétrie, a Velche,' a barbarian.

The same hard clearness in his outlines of thought equally distinguishes Voltaire in other points, in which he comes closely within range of the thoughts and feelings of his readers. His very egotism is of this description. It is as superficial as his ethics and his religion. Egotism, which is the greatest attraction of other leading writers with whom he is commonly compared and contrasted, in him only provokes our propensity to ridicule. He is no self-anatomiser. He never dreams of bringing before you the man Voltaire, with his intimate thoughts and sympathies. He introduces you to Voltaire the historian, the tragedian, the literary oracle of his age. He drapes himself, and poses before you in every variety of attitude: but you never for a moment imagine yourself Voltaire, or enter with him into that deep communion of spirit which turns books into living men. His whole life was representation, and he never seems to have conceived life under any other aspect. And this is the reason why, unlike almost all other great men, he is perhaps less himself in his familiar correspondence than anywhere else. Nothing makes the reader less intimate with Voltaire than his letters. They have spirit enough, but no body. They disclose nothing, because their author had no secrets, and put his soul, such as it was, quite as much into his Philosophical Dictionary, or his fugitive criticisms, as into his closest correspondence. It was an odd compliment paid by an Austrian empress to Voltaire's familiar verses, that, addressed as they often are to the highest correspondents, and playing with the most delicate subjects, she never detected an expression in them contrary to etiquette.

Such was Voltaire in some of his most salient features; and being such, it may be matter of surprise with some that his influence should have been, not only so extensive in his own day, but so permanent with later generations. Qualities of style, and the other faculties of the artist,' will not account for this. His wit, unrivalled as it is, might maintain his popularity, but could not perpetuate his empire. The unequalled conversational beauty of his style, by which the reader is carried,

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as in a pleasant journey on an easy road, over, or past, all the difficulties at which deeper reasoning would stumble, is also a quality rather to excite pleasure than to ensure admiration. Nor has the good which Voltaire really worked in his own time much to do with his present position. As a destroyer of past abuses he may be entitled to gratitude; but so are the impugners of witchcraft, and other respected but forgotten benefactors. We must therefore seek for the real ground of his supremacy elsewhere; and we find it in the close adaptation of his philosophy to the requirements of a large portion of mankind. How many are there and especially men whose business makes them much conversant with the world, statesmen, men of business, and the like,-to whose minds scepticism like that of Voltaire is not only a natural element, but one in which they feel contented, and out of which they seek not for escape! Dogmatism has no attractions for them; but mysticism is even more adverse to their dispositions. The first will not satisfy their shrewd and cautious natures; but the second always produces on them the effect of imbecility, or cheatery. They find the world full of problems, and compel themselves to take the first and simplest practical solution. faut prendre un parti' (the motto of Voltaire's latest defence of natural religion, 1772,) is the principle on which they choose their line but criticism, not faith, is their natural element. They have a clear perception, if not a keen sense, of moral right and wrong; and none of the sophistry by which minds of a different class seek daily to obscure it has any effect upon them. Such men are true Voltairians; and it matters not whether they are sceptics in the ordinary sense of the word, or whether they have deliberately chosen a religion, rather by an act of the will than of the intellect,―rather as a thing to be received than believed. While such men exist, and have, as they must have, a marked share in the conduct of the affairs of mankind, their great master, whether his influence be felt direct or at secondhand, will remain one of the literary sovereigns of the world.

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But such minds will always constitute a minority, however important a one, among thinking and feeling men. The multitude of those to whom faith is a necessity is far greater. It would far exceed the present purpose to examine, how the Voltairian influence required and called into existence by inevitable reaction a counterbalancing power; and how this was furnished by a spirit of a very different character, one far inferior in those points wherein Voltaire's supremacy lay, but as infinitely superior in others, and great above all in his own weaknesses: one too who resembled Voltaire at least in this, that he adopted