casion for rapturous exultation
over the lowliness and humanity of the French court.

[167] _Voyage d'un Philosophe, etc._; a work published in 1768, and
in great vogue for some time, partly because it furnished material
for the speculations of Raynal, Helvetius, and the rest. See _De
l'Homme_, II. xiii., etc. Grimm, v. 450.

In the same spirit Raynal made no scruple in filling his pages with the
sentimental declamations in which the reaction of that day against the
burden of a decaying system of social artifice found such invariable
relief and satisfaction. None of these imaginary pieces of high
sentiment was more popular than the episode of Polly Baker. It occurs in
the chapters which describe the foundation of New England.[168] The
fanaticism and intolerance of the Puritan Fathers of that famous land
are set forth with the holy rage that always moved the reformers of the
eighteenth century against the reformers of the seventeenth. Religion is
boldly spoken of as a dreadful malady, whose severity extended even to
the most indifferent objects. It may be admitted that the cruel
persecution of the Quakers, and the grotesque horrors of witch-finding
in New Salem, gave Raynal at least as good a text against Protestantism
as he had found against Catholicism in the infernal doings in the West
Indian Islands or in Peru. Even after this bloody fever had abated, says
Raynal, the inhabitants still preserved a kind of rigorism that savours
of the sombre days in which the Puritan colonies had their rise. He
illustrates this by the case of a young woman who was brought before the
authorities for the offence of having given birth to a child out of
wedlock. It was her fifth transgression. Raynal, conceiving history
after the manner of the author of the immortal speeches of Pericles, put
into the mouth of the unfortunate sinner a long and eloquent apology. At
the risk of her life, she cries, she has brought five children into
existence. "I have devoted myself with all the courage of a mother's
solicitude to the painful toil demanded by their weakness and their
tender years. I have formed them to virtue, which is only another name
for reason. Already they love their country, as I love it.... Is it a
crime, then, to be fruitful, as the earth is fruitful, the common mother
of us all?... And how am I not to cry out against the injustice of my
lot, when I see that he who seduced and ruined me, after being the cause
of my d