his attacks upon religion. He gave this opinion in Parliament; and he was wont to say, that the ground of it was his belief in the truths of religion. "If religion be, as I believe it, true, it has nothing to fear from any such assaults. But it may be injured by the secular arm interfering." Just so the well-known Duke of Queensberry, when conversing upon the writings of Paine, and other assailants of the constitution, made answer to a sycophant, who said of those attacks, "And so false too.' "No," said his Grace, "not at all: they are true, and that is their danger, and the reason I desire to see them put down by the law; were they false, I should not mind them at all."

In the like spirit we have the unsuspected testimony of men like Dr. Lardner and Bishop Jeremy Taylor, Christians whose piety and virtue, and whose orthodoxy, are beyond all suspicion :-"The proper punishment," says Lardner, "of a low, mean, indecent, scurrilous way of writing, seems to be neglect, contempt, scorn, and final indignation." (Letter to the Bishop of Chester on the Prosecution of Woolston, 1729).—"Blasphemy" (says Taylor) "is in aliena republica, a matter of another world. You may as well cure the colic by brushing a man's clothes, or fill a man's belly with a syllogism, as prosecute for blasphemy. Some men have believed it the more as being provoked into a confidence and vexed into a resolution. Force in matters of opinion can do no good, but is very apt to do hurt; for no man can change his opinion when he will. But if a man cannot change his opinion when he list, nor ever does heartily or resolutely but when he cannot do otherwise, then to use force may make him a hypocrite, but never to be a right believer; and so, instead of erecting a trophy to God and true religion, we build a monument for the devil." (Liberty of Prophesying, s. xiii. 19.)—Bishop Warburton says plainly, "he should have been ashamed of even projecting to write in defence of Moses had he not thought that all infidels

had equal liberty to attack him." (Dedication to the Divine Legation.)

These things being premised, we may now proceed with more ease and less interruption from controversial topics, to examine the extraordinary history of this eminent person.

He was the son of the Sieur Arouet, a person of respectable family, filling the place of treasurer in the Chamber of Accounts, an exchequer office of considerable emolument. His mother was of a noble family, that of d'Aumart. A small estate possessed by the father was called Voltaire; and the custom in those days being for the younger children of wealthy commoners to take the name of their estate, leaving the family name to the eldest, François Marie, as the younger of two sons, took the name of Voltaire, which on his brother's death many years after he did not change. He was born the 20th of February, 1694; and being so feeble that his life was not expected, he was baptised immediately, the christening being deferred till the 22d of November following. This has given rise to doubts at which of the two periods his birth took place. It has frequently been remarked as a singular circumstance, that two eminent authors who have lived to extreme old age, Fontenelle and Voltaire, were both thus unlikely at their birth to live at all, both being born almost in a dying condition; yet not only did they enjoy unusually long life, but they retained their great faculties entire to the last, although the one died in his eighty-fifth year, and the other lived to within a few weeks of a hundred.

When only twelve years of age, he distinguished himself by the excellence of some begging verses to the Dauphin from an invalid who had served under the prince, and who applied for this help to the Master of the College of Louis le Grand, where Voltaire then was. The master being busy, handed him over to his promising scholar, as being quite able to do what was

desired. The lines are very good, and the idea sufficiently happy. The old soldier is made to say that the different heathen gods having given Monseigneur various gifts at his birth, a more beneficent Deity had provided the petitioner's Christmas-box by bestowing on their favourite the boon of generosity. It is known that this incident procured for him the favour of the famous Ninon de l'Enclos, then in her ninetieth year, and to whom he was presented by his godfather, the Abbé de Châteauneuf. She died soon after, and left him a legacy of 2,000 francs, to buy books with. When his father found that he was introduced by the Abbé into this and other fashionable society, and that he was cultivating his taste for poetry, he became alarmed for his success in life, having destined him for the profession of the law. He placed him, therefore, in a school of jurisprudence, intending to purchase for him a President's place, according to the practice of the French bar in those days. Voltaire, however, had already begun to taste the sweets of classical study, and he had lived in a society frequented by the Abbé his godfather, who appears to have been a person of loose morals and of sceptical opinions. The extreme bigotry which Madame de Maintenon had introduced into the

* He has, in a letter which remains (Mélanges Lit., ii. 294), recorded many particulars of her extraordinary life and great qualities. Her portrait by St. Evremond is well known; it is happily drawn:

"L'indulgente et sage Nature

A formé l'ame de Ninon
De la volupté d'Epicure,

Et de la vertu de Caton."

In consequence of a quarrel between two of her lovers there was a proposition of sending her to a convent of "Filles repenties:" she said that would not suit her, as she was "ni fille, ni repentie." The provident parents in good society used to place their sons under her patronage to form them for polite company. Of one Renaud, a coxcomb whom she was said to have formed, she observed, "Qu'elle faisait comme Dieu, qui s'était repenti d'avoir fait l'homme." When her old and intimate friend, Madame de Maintenon, became dévote, and offered to provide handsomely for her would she but follow her example, her answer was, "Je n'ai nul besoin ni de fortune, ni de masque."

Court of Versailles when the declining faculties and health of Louis XIV. had rendered him the victim of superstitious terrors, and, through these, the tool of priestly intolerance, gave rise to a reaction in the gay circles of Paris; and in resisting the inroads of that gloom by which the asceticism of the ancient mistress had signalised her late repentance, the Contis, the Chaulieus, the Sullys, the La Fères, carried their opposition further than they perhaps at first intended, or even afterwards were aware of: they patronised universal discussion, even of the most sacred subjects, and best received opinions, until a fashion of free thinking was set; and from being at first revolted at the intolerance which destroyed Catinat at Court, notwithstanding his genius and his probity, on account of his supposed infidelity, and ascribed the defeats of Vendôme to his occasional absence from mass, without reflecting that Marlborough was a heretic and Eugene a deist; the frequenters of the most polished society in the world became accustomed to believe more sparingly than Catinat, and see less of the Host than Vendôme.

It was in this association that Voltaire, then a boy, became inured to the oblivion both of his law books and of his religious principles, when his parent made a last effort to save him, and restore him to the learned profession, and to the bosom of the church, by sending him as page or attaché to the French ambassador at the Hague, a near kinsman of the Abbé Châteauneuf. He there fell in love with the daughter of a profligate woman, Madame Dunoyer, who considering the match a bad one, had him sent home by the ambassador, and published his love letters, which are admitted to have no merit. His father would only receive him on condition of his consenting to serve in a notary's office. A friend of the family, M. de Caumartin, had compassion on the sufferings which this arrangement occasioned, and obtained permission to have him pass some months in his country residence at St. Ange. The

Bishop Caumartin, then an elderly man, and who had lived with all the more learned persons of the past age, excited him, by his conversation upon the Sullys and the Henrys, to meditate two of his greatest works, his epic poem and his history.

The death of Louis, which happened on Voltaire's return to Paris, gave rise to a very indecent expression of public joy, and to many libels upon his memory. One of these being without any foundation ascribed to him, his confinement in the Bastille was the consequence. Here, however, his spirit continued unbroken. He sketched the poem of the Ligue,' afterwards called the 'Henriade;' and he corrected a tragedy, Edipe,' which he had written several years before, when only eighteen years old. The imprisonment being in the course of a few weeks found to be entirely illegal and vexatious, the Regent ordered his immediate liberation, with a sum of money by way of compensation. The tragedy was not acted till two years after, in 1718; and it is a singular fact, that when, in 1713, it had been in its original imperfect state submitted to Dacier, with the pedantry of his nature he strongly recommended the introduction of choruses, to be sung after the manner of the Greek tragedy. A letter of his is still extant, giving this sage and practical counsel; but the Greek critic was not the only pedant. When in 1762, Voltaire had gained the famous cause of Sirven, through the exertions of M. Merville, a leading advocate of Toulouse, he refused all pecuniary remuneration, but desired as his reward, that his client would now consent to add choruses to the Edipe.'

How powerful was the sentiment of ambition in his nature appears not merely from his bold attempt at a tragedy audaxque juventâ in his eighteenth year, but from his adventurous competition for the prize of poetry proposed by the Académie Française a year or two before; the king having, in the superstition of his declining age, at length resolved to fulfil the promise