left unread; like Swift, his most enduring works are satires in the form of stories. Gulliver's Travels have their counterpart in Candide and Zadig. And it is probable that these will continue to be read, if but as masterpieces of story-telling, as long as the two languages endure. But the comparison with Swift leaves out of account the fact that Voltaire is always sane. Sanity was his genius, and his defects are the defects of sanity. In France he is still the idol of those thinkers who put common sense above everything else-French common sense, however, not English.

Voltaire's Style

In the slightest trifles of Voltaire, in writing or in conversation, his style comes flashing forth. The bust of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre was pronounced a speaking likeness. "Not speaking," said Voltaire, "or it would have said something silly." “I wish the Germans," he remarked on another occasion, "more wit and fewer consonants." He made the prettiest compliments and wrote the prettiest drawing-room verses of any poet of his time. Here is an example:

Last night in sleep I seemed a king,

A crown of gold was mine,

And mine a more delightful thing

I loved a maid divine;

A maid, my darling, like to thee;
And lo, when sleep had flown
The best of these he left to me-

I only lost my throne!

This same light touch which he displayed in trifles comes out in his more serious work. One or two examples will suffice as well as many to convey an idea of the style which has given Voltaire his unique place in the world of letters.

In rescuing his lady, Semire, from a troop of brigands Zadig received an arrow near the eye. The wound was deep,

VOL. II-19

an abscess formed, and the eye itself was threatened. Messengers were despatched to Memphis to fetch the celebrated doctor Hermes, who arrived in due course with a train of servants. He paid a visit to the wounded man, and pronounced that he would lose his eye; he even predicted the exact day and hour when the sad event would happen. "If it had been the right eye," he declared, "I could have saved it; but wounds in the left eye are incurable." All Babylon, while they pitied Zadig, were filled with admiration of the doctor's wisdom. Two days later, the abscess broke of its own accord, and Zadig was as well as ever. The learned doctor wrote a book to prove that he had no business to recover and ought to have lost his eye.

Here is a passage which not only shows Voltaire as a storyteller at his best, but reveals the fact that he was a Sherlock Holmes born before his time.

One day when Zadig was walking near a little wood he saw the Queen's chief attendants and several officers running towards him. He noticed that they were in great anxiety, for they ran about as if they were quite bewildered, looking for something of great value which they had lost. When they came up to him the chief Eunuch said: "Have you seen the Queen's pet dog?"

Zadig replied, "It is a little female dog."

"You are right," said the Eunuch.

"It is a very small spaniel," added Zadig; "she has recently had puppies, she has a limp of the left forefoot, and she has very long ears.'

"You have seen her, then?" exclaimed the Eunuch joyfully.

"No," replied Zadig, "I have never seen her. I did not know that the Queen had such a dog."

Precisely at the same time, by an extraordinary coincidence, the most beautiful horse in the King's stable had escaped from the hands of the stable attendants and galloped out on the plains of Babylon. The Grand Vizier

and all the other officers ran after it with as much anxiety as the first Eunuch after the spaniel. The Grand Vizier addressed himself to Zadig, and asked him if he had seen the King's horse pass. Zadig replied, "It is a horse which gallops to perfection; it is five feet high, with very small hoofs. It has a tail three and a half feet long; the bit of its bridle is of twenty-three-carat gold; its shoes are of silver."

"What road has it taken? Where is it?" demanded the Vizier.

"I have never seen it," replied Zadig, "and I have never heard it spoken of."

The Grand Vizier and the first Eunuch had no doubt that Zadig had stolen the King's horse and the Queen's dog. They had him conveyed before the Great Desterhan, who condemned him to the knout and to pass the rest of his days in Siberia. The judgment had scarcely been pronounced when the horse and the dog were found. The judges were under the sad necessity of reversing their judgment, but they condemned Zadig to pay four hundred ounces of gold for having said that he had never seen what he had seen. He was first obliged to pay this fine; after which he was permitted to plead his cause before the council of the Great Desterhan. He spoke in these terms.

"This is what happened to me. I was walking towards the little wood, where I lately encountered the venerable Eunuch and the most illustrious Grand Vizier. I had seen on the sand the traces of an animal, and I had easily judged that they were those of the little dog. The light and the long furrows imprinted on the little eminences of the sand between the traces of the feet showed me that it was a female that had lately given birth to pups. Other traces which appeared to have continually raised the surface of the sand by the side of the front feet told me that she had long ears. As I remarked that the sand was always less crushed by one foot than by the three others, I understood that the dog of our august Queen was, if I may dare say so, a little lame.

"With regard to the King's horse, you must know that while I was walking in the roads of this wood I perceived the marks of the hoofs of a horse. They were all at equal distances. 'Here,' said I, 'is a horse which gallops perfectly.' The dust of the trees in a narrow route only seven feet broad was brushed off here and there, to right and left, at three and half feet from the middle of the road. "This horse,' I added, 'has a tail of three and half feet long, which, by its movement right and left, has scattered the dust.' I had seen under the trees, which formed a canopy five feet high, newly fallen leaves from the branches, and I knew that this horse had touched them, and therefore it was five feet high. As to the bridle, it must be of twentythree-carat gold, for it had rubbed its bit against a stone, and I had made the assay of it. I judged, finally, by the marks which its shoes had left on the pebbles of another kind, that it was shod with silver of a fineness of twelve deniers."

Perhaps, as time goes on, the Great Mocker will become more and more regarded as the Great Amuser.

The new ideas, the new knowledge, the whole spirit of revolt against misgovernment and superstition, found expression in the pages of the famous Encyclopædia, the first volume of which was published in Paris in 1751 and the final volume in 1772. This great enterprise owed its existence to the energy and courage of Denis Diderot, who was born in 1713. Like Voltaire, he was educated by the Jesuits, and his varied literary life as playwright, novelist, and philosopher is second only in interest and importance to the careers of Voltaire and Rousseau.

The Encyclopædia, with which Diderot's name will always

be connected, sprang from a publisher's suggestion that Diderot should prepare a French edition of Ephraim Chambers's Encyclopædia. But it extended far beyond such limits. It covers the whole area of human thought and activity, emphasising the triumphs of Science and, to quote Lord Morley, asserting "the democratic doctrine that it is the common people in the nation whose lot ought to be the main concern of the nation's government." Diderot was assisted by a host of distinguished collaborators, the best known of whom were Buffon, the famous naturalist, and Voltaire. As to the manner in which this gigantic scheme was carried out, a letter of Voltaire's to Diderot is of peculiar interest: "Your work is a kind of tower of Babel: things that are good, bad, true, false, grave, and gay, are all jumbled up together. There are articles which seem written by a drawing-room dandy, others by a scullion in the kitchen. The reader is carried from the boldest flight of thought to platitudes that turn him sick."

The Encyclopædia naturally gave offence to the upholders of the old order, and the later volumes had to be produced clandestinely, and in constant fear of police interference, and at the end Diderot suffered the mortification of having all his proofs mutilated without his knowledge by a timorous printer.

The Encyclopædia was a great success, but Diderot's earnIngs from it averaged only a hundred and twenty pounds a year for twenty years. He was an apostle of knowledge. His disbelief in revealed religion was as thorough as Voltaire's and much more thorough than Rousseau's. He thought that the world could be saved by knowledge and virtue. He translated Clarissa into French, and he was largely responsible for the popularity of Richardson's novels in France in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Apart from the Encyclopædia, Le Neveu de Rameau is Diderot's greatest achievement. It is a satire on contemporary manners, written with abounding wit and a sort of bitter pity.