of Europe hastened to bear him the tribute of admiration. The minister, had it been only from motives of policy, could not be tempted to gratify the bishop; he therefore advised Voltaire to guard against these accusations, which the union of the Bishop of Annecy with the French prelates, who possessed more influence, might render dangerous.

It was at this time that he conceived the idea of solemnly receiving the sacrament, which was followed by a public declaration of his respect for the church, and his disdain of his detractors; a fruitless step, which spoke weakness rather than policy, and which the pleasure of compelling his pastor to administer the communion through fear of the secular judges, and of legally insulting the Bishop of Annecy, could not excuse in the eyes of the free and intrepid man who appreciates coolly the rights of truth, and perceives that which prudence requires when haws contrary to natural justness render truth dangerous and prudence necessary. The priests suffered the small advantage to escape which they might have drawn from this singular scene, by falsifying the declaration which Voltaire had made. He had no longer a retreat near Geneva. He had connected himself, on his umival there, with the families whose education, opinions, inclinations, and fortune, were most congenial to his own; and these families had at that time formed the design of establishing a species of aristocracy. In a city which possessed no territory, where the strength of the citizens could be united with as much facility and promptitude as that of the government, such a project would have been absurd mad not the rich citizens entertained the hope of engaging a foreign influence in their

Savour.

The cabinets of Versailles and Turin were easily seduced. The senate of Bern, whose interest it was to banish the picture of republican equality from the eyes of their subjects, made it their constant policy to protect every enterprising aristocracy ground them; and, throughout the whole of Switzerland, such magistrates as became tyrants, were sure of finding at Bern an ardent and faithful protector. Thus the wretched pride of obtaining an odious authority in a small city, and of being bated without being respected, deprived the citizens of Geneva of their liberty, and the republic of its independence. The chiefs of the popular party employed the weapons of fanaticism, for they had read enough to know the influence which religion had formerly obtained in political dissensions, but they did not sufficiently understand the spirit of their own age to feel how much reason, aided by ridicule, had weakened this formerly so dangerous weapon.

It was proposed, therefore, to put in force the laws which prohibited Catholics from possessing property in the territory of Geneva. The magistrates were censured for their connections with Voltaire, who had dared to raise his voice against the barbarous assassination of Servetus, which had been commanded by Calvin in the name of God to the cowardly and superstitious senators of Geneva. Voltaire, was obliged to abandon his house of the Delices.

Soon after, Rousseau advanced, in his "Emilius," principles which developed to the citizens of Geneva all the extent of their rights, and which founded these rights on simple truths that all men could feel, and all must adopt. The aristocracy wished to punish him for the publication, but it was necessary that they should have a pretext; they took that of religion, and united themselves with the priests, who, in every country, indifferent to the form of its constitution and the liberty of man, promise the assistance of heaven to the party which most favours intolerance, and who become, as their interest directs, sometimes the support of the tyranny of a bigoted prince or of a superstitious senate, sometimes the defenders of the liberty of a fanatic people.

Alternately exposed to the attacks of the two parties, Voltaire observed a neutrality, but he remained faithful to his detestation of oppressors. He favoured the cause of the citizens against the magistrates, and that of the common people who possessed no privileges against the citizens; for these people, condemned to be ever excluded from the rights of the citizens, found themselves more oppressed since the latter, better informed of the privileges which are granted by the present system of polity, but less enlightened respecting the natural rights of man, considered themselves as sovereigns, of whom the people were no more than subjects, and whom they thought they had an authority to reduce to subjection, by the same arbitrary power, for assuming which they deemed their magistrates so culpable.

Voltaire, therefore, wrote a poem, every part of which is impregnated with satire, and on which no reproach can be laid, except that of containing some verses against Rousseau, which were dictated by a degree of anger, whose excess and expressions could not be excused by the justice of the motives which inspired them. But when, in a tumult, the citizens had slain some of the people, he was eager to receive at Ferney the families which these troubles compelled to abandon Geneva; and, in the very instant in which the bankruptcy of the Abbé Terrai, which had not even the excuse of necessity, but was occasioned only by shameful expenses, had deprived him of part of his fortune, he was seen to give assistance to those who had no property left; and to build houses which he sold to others at a low price to be paid him in annuities; while he solicited the good offices of the government in their behalf, and employed his influence with sovereigns, ministers, and the leading men of all nations to procure a sale for the clocks and watches of this infant manufactory, which soon became famous throughout Europe.

The year 1771 was one of the most embarrassing periods of Voltaire's life. The Chancellor Maupeou and the Duke d'Aiguillon saw themselves obliged to attack the parliaments, to whom they were both objects of hatred, that they might not become their victims.

The approbation which Voltaire gave to the measures of the Chancellor Maupeou which succeeded, was at least serviceable to the oppressed. Though he could not procure justice to be done to the memory of the unfortunate La Barre, though he could not restore the young d'Etallonde to his country, though the minister's pusillanimous respect for the clergy concealed from him the true interest of his glory, still Voltaire had the happiness to save the wife of Montbailli. This unhappy man, accused of parricide, had perished on the wheel; his wife was also condemned to death; but she was supposed to be pregnant, and was fortunate enough to obtain a respite.

The tribunals had just rejected a provident law which, placing an interval between judgment and execution in which the truth might be discovered and innocence displayed, would have prevented almost all their unjust decisions; and they had refused it with an intemperance which sufficed to prove its necessity. Women alone, by declaring themselves pregnant, could escape the danger of these precipitate executions. In the space of less than twenty years, the lives of three innocent persons, who had attracted the public curiosity by some particular circumstances, had been saved by this privilege; another proof of the utility of that law which was opposed only by a barbarous pride, and which ought to exist till experience shall have proved that the new legislation (which doubtless will soon replace the old code), no longer exposes innocence to any danger.

The trial of the wife of Montbailli was revised; the council of Artois, by which she had been condemned, declared her innocent; and, more noble or less presumptuous than the parliament of Thoulouse, they lamented the irreparable misfortune

e

of having caused an innocent person to perisn, and they imposed on themselves the duty of providing for the remaining days of the unfortunate women whose happiness they had destroyed.

Had Voltaire expressed his zeal against such acts of injustice only as were connected with public events or the cause of toleration, he might have been accused of vanity; but this zeal was equally ardent in that obscure case, to which his name alone has given celebrity.

A new occasion of avenging insulted humanity was presented to Voltaire. Vasslage, solemnly abolished in France by Louis Hutin (the boisterous), again existed under Louis XV. in many provinces. In vain had a project of abolishing it been more than once formed. Avarice and pride had silenced justice, by a resistance which had fatigued the indolence of government; and the superior tribunals composed of nobles, had favoured the pretensions of the proprietors of these seigniories.

This enormity tyrannised over Franche Comté, and particularly over the territory of St. Claude, the secular monks of which, in 1742, owed the greatest part of their lands, held in mortmain, to nothing better than false titles; and exercised their rights with a rigour which reduced to misery an uninformed but good and industrious people. At the death of each possessor, if his children had not constantly inhabited the paternal house, the fruit of his labours appertained to the monks; the widow and her offspring, without furniture, without clothes, and without dwelling, passed to the competence procured by labour to all the horrors of want. Should a stranger die after having dwelt a year on this species of land, stricken with the feudal anathema, his property also became that of the monks; nor did a son succeed to the inheritance of his father, if it could be proved that he had passed the night of his nuptials out of the paternal house.

These people suffered without daring to complain, and beheld, with mute grief, the fruits of their economy, which should have furnished useful capitals to industry, and the culture of the land, become the prey of the monks. Happily, the construction of a great road opened a communication between them and the neighbouring cantons. They learnt that, at the foot of Mount Jura, there existed a man whose intrepid voice had more than once caused the very palaces of kings to resound with the complaints of the oppressed, and at whose name sacerdotal tyranny turned pale. To him they related their griefs, and in him they found a

protector.

These usurpations, this inexorable cruelty of hypocritical priests, who dared to call themselves the disciples of an humble master, yet wished to hold men in slavery, were proclaimed not only to France but to all Europe. Yet, after soliciting relief for many years, nothing could be obtained from the timid successor of M. de Maupeon, except an arret of council, which forbade this base violation of the rights of mankind. His fear of disobliging the parliament of Besançon would not permit him to withdraw from its jurisdiction, a cause which could not be regarded as an ordinary suit without shamefully acknowledging the legitimacy of the feudal slavery. The vassals of St. Claude were sent back to a tribunal whose members, the lords of the lands subject to this tyranny, took a barbarous pleasure in rivetting the chains of those poor people who still continue enslaved.

All they have obtained was the liberty, granted them in 1778, of abandoning their home and their country, to escape from the dominion of the monks; but another article of that same law more than balanced this benefaction, so ineffectual to unfortunate men, whom poverty rather than the law has confined to the spot of their barth. In this very edict the sovereign has, for the first time, given the name

and sacred character of property to the detestable rights which, even in the midst of the ignorance and barbarity of the thirteenth century, were considered as usurpations which neither time nor titles can render legitimate; and a hypocritical minister has made the liberty of the peasant depend, not on the justice of laws, but on the will of his tyrants.

Who that reads these details would suppose that he reads the life of a great poet, of a prolific and indefatigable writer? We forget his literary fame, as he himself lost sight of it. He seemed no longer to pursue any object of fame, but that of avenging the human race, and of snatching victims from oppression.

His genius, however, incapable of inactivity, cultivated every species of literature on which it had ever exercised its powers, and even dared to essay new subjects. He published some tragedies, which we may doubtless reproach with feebleness, and which could no longer force the applauses of an audience whom he himself had rendered difficult, but in which the man of letters may gratify his taste by beautiful verses, and his judgment by profound, enlightened ideas; he wrote tales, in which that species of composition, till then employed only to reflect pleas ing and voluptuous images, which amuse the imagination or awaken gaiety, assumed a more philosophic character, and became, like the apologue, a school of morality and reason; he wrote espistles, which, if compared with his first works, will be found less correct, less uniformly animated, and less poetical; but, in return, possessed of more simplicity and variety, a more general and free spirit of philosophy, and a greater number of those acute and deep remarks which are the product of experi ence. To these he added satires, in which prejudice and its patrons are ridiculed under a thousand varying forms.

About the same time, in his "Philosophy of History," he gave lessons to historians, while he provoked the enmity of pedants, by unveiling their dulness, credulity, and invidious admiration of antiquity; he finished his " Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations," his " Age of Louis XIV," to which he added the "Age of Louis XV," an incomplete but faithful history, the only one by which we can form an adequate idea of the events of that reign, and in which we find all the truth that can be expected in a contemporary history, which is neither a libel nor an eulogium.

New romances, works sometimes serious and sometimes humorous, and dictated by circumstances, did not add to his reputation, but they continued to render it ever present with the public, to sustain the interests of his partisans, and to humiliate that herd of secret enemies, who assumed the mask of austerity, that they might withhold that admiration which the example of Europe commanded them to give.

In fine, he undertook to assemble, in the form of a dictionary, all the ideas which presented themselves to his mind on the various objects of his reflections; that is to say, on almost all that is comprised in the circle of human knowledge. In this collection, modestly entitled “Questions to the Lovers of Science respecting the Encyclopedia," he treats successively of theology, grammar, natural philosophy, and literature. At one time, he discusses the subjects of antiquity; at others, ques tions of policy, legislation, and public economy. His style, ever animated and seductive, clothed these various objects with a charm hitherto known to himself only; and which chiefly springs from the licence with which, yielding to his successive emotions, adapting his style less to his subject than to the momentary disposition of his mind; sometimes he spreads ridicule on objects which seem capable of inspir ing only horror, and, almost instantaneously hurried away by the energy and sensibility of his soul, he vehemently and eloquently exclaims against abuses which he

had just before treated with mockery. His anger is excited by false taste; he quickly perceives that his indignation ought to be reserved for interests which are more important, and he finishes by laughing in his usual way. Sometimes he abruptly leaves a moral or political discussion for a literary criticism; and, in the midst of a lesson on taste, he pronounces abstract maxims of the profoundest philosophy, or makes a sudden and terrible attack on fanaticism and tyranny.

The constant interest which Voltaire took in the success of Russia against the Turks deserves to be noticed. Highly distinguished by the favours of the empress, doubtless gratitude animated his zeal; but we should be deceived did we imagine his zeal had no other cause. Superior to those politics of the counting-house, which take the interest of merchants known to financiers for the interest of commerce, and the interests of commerce for that of the human race; not less superior to those vain ideas of the balance of Europe so valuable to political compilers, he beheld, in the destruction of the Ottoman empire, millions of men at least assured of shunning under the despotism of a sovereign the intolerable despotism of a whole people; he hoped to see the imperious manners of the East, which condemn women to a disgraceful slavery, banished into the unhappy climates that gave them birth. Immense countries situated under a propitious climate, destined by nature to be clothed with all the productions most useful to mankind, would have been restored to the industry of their inhabitants; these countries, the first in which man discovered genius, would have beheld, again springing up in their bosom, the arts of which they gave the most perfect models, and the sciences, whose foundations were laid by them.

The usual speculations of some merchants would without doubt have been deranged, and their profits diminished; but the real welfare of the people would have been augmented, because it is not possible to extend the space on the globe in which griculture flourishes, commerce is secure, and industry active, without increasing for the use of all men the mass of enjoyments and resources. Can it be desirable that a philosopher should prefer the riches of some nations to the liberty of an entire people, and the commerce of a few cities to the progress of agriculture and of the arts in a great empire? Far from us be those despicable reasoners who would still hold Greece in Turkish chains, in order that they may seize on the persons of men, sell them as herds of cattle, compel them by the dread of punishment, to furnish food for their insatiable avarice, and who gravely calculate the pretended wealth which is produced, by these outrages on nature

That men should everywhere be free, and that each country should enjoy the advantages given it by nature, would be the common interests of all people, as well of those who have reassumed their rights, as of those in which certain individuals, and not the community, have been benefited by the distress of others. Opposed to objects so grand, and to that eternal good which would arise out of a revolution so vast, of what importance would the ruin of a few avaricious men be; and of men too, whose wealth originated in the tears and the blood of their fellow

citizens.

Thus thought M. Turgot; and thus Voltaire could not but think

Louis hopes which he had not dared to form. M. Turret was called to the administration. Voltaire knew him to be a man of profound genius, who in every species of science had and according to which he directed the whole of his conduct; a glory that no other created sure and determinate principles on which he had founded all his opinions, lous for the truth and for the happiness of man, M. Turgot united fortitude that statesman has been worthy of partaking with him. He knew that, to a soul zea

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