tion--quite as just and honest as any which we may feel--at the
legal murder of Calas. We must recollect that, if he exposes baseness
and foulness with too cynical a license of speech (in which, indeed, he
sinned no more than had the average of French writers since the days of
Montaigne), he at least never advocates them, as did Le Sage. We must
recollect that, scattered throughout his writings, are words in favour of
that which is just, merciful, magnanimous, and even, at times, in favour
of that which is pure; which proves that in Voltaire, as in most men,
there was a double self--the one sickened to cynicism by the iniquity and
folly which he saw around him--the other, hungering after a nobler life,
and possibly exciting that hunger in one and another, here and there, who
admired him for other reasons than the educated mob, which cried after
him "Vive la Pucelle."

Rousseau, too. Easy it is to feel disgust, contempt, for the
"Confessions" and the "Nouvelle Heloise"--for much, too much, in the
man's own life and character. One would think the worse of the young
Englishman who did not so feel, and express his feelings roundly and
roughly. But all young Englishmen should recollect, that to Rousseau's
"Emile" they owe their deliverance from the useless pedantries, the
degrading brutalities, of the medieval system of school education; that
"Emile" awakened throughout civilised Europe a conception of education
just, humane, rational, truly scientific, because founded upon facts;
that if it had not been written by one writhing under the bitter
consequences of mis-education, and feeling their sting and their brand
day by day on his own spirit, Miss Edgeworth might never have reformed
our nurseries, or Dr. Arnold our public schools.

And so with the rest of the _philosophes_. That there were charlatans
among them, vain men, pretentious men, profligate men, selfish,
self-seeking, and hypocritical men, who doubts? Among what class of men
were there not such in those evil days? In what class of men are there
not such now, in spite of all social and moral improvement? But nothing
but the conviction, among the average, that they were in the right--that
they were fighting a battle for which it was worth while to dare, and if
need be to suffer, could have enabled them to defy what was then public
opinion, backed by overwhelming physical force.

Their intellectual defects are patent. No one can deny that their
inductions