juger par le susdit memoire.

[_Il prend ses lunettes comme pour lire._

VALERE. (_Avec humeur._) Eh, monsieur, finissez.

M. PAMPHLET. C'est trahir votre gloire
Que de vouloir caeher les immortels ecrits

[_Il lit._

Dont vous etes l'auteur. _Les Boudoirs de Paris,_
_On Journal des Abbes._ _L'Espion des Coulisses,_
Ouvrage assez piquant sur les moeurs des actrices.

And the intention of the pleasantry is pointed by a malicious footnote,
to the effect that people who might be surprised that a serious man like
Valere should have written works of this licentious and frivolous kind,
will conceive that in a moment of leisure a philosopher should write
_Les Bijoux Indiscrets_, for instance, and the next day follow it by a
treatise on morality,[195]--as Diderot unhappily had done.

[195] _Le Satyrique_, iii. p. 84. _note_.

Palissot was not so good as Moliere, Boileau, and Pope, as he was
fatuous enough to suppose; but he was certainly better than the
scribbler who asked--

Mais enfin de quoi se glorifie
Ce siecle de mollesse et de Philosophie?
Dites-moi: le Francais a-t-il un coeur plus franc
Plus prodigue a l'etat de son genereux sang,
Plus ardent a venger la plaintive innocence
Contre l'iniquite que soutient la puissance?
Le Francais philosophe est-il plus respecte
Pour la foi, la candeur, l'exacte probite?
Ou sont-ils ces Heros, ces vertueux modeles
Que l'Encyclopedie a couve sous ses ailes?[196]

[196] Metra, vi. 128.

Tiresome doggrel of this kind was the strongest retort that the party of
obscurantism could muster against the vigour, grace, and sparkle of
Voltaire.

The great official champions of the old system were not much wiser than
their hacks in the press. The churchmen were given over to a blind mind.
The great edition of Voltaire's works which Beaumarchais was printing
over the frontier at Kehl, excited their anger to a furious pitch. The
infamous Cardinal de Rohan, archbishop of Strasburg (1781), denounced
the publication as sacrilege. The archbishop of Paris (1785) thundered
against the monument of scandal and the work of darkness. The archbishop
of Vienne forbade the faithful of his diocese to subscribe to it under
pain of mortal sin. In the general assembly of the clergy which opened
in the summer of 1780, the bishops, in memorials to the king, deplored
the homage paid to the famous writer who was "less