rough Europe, and men awoke in new day
and more spacious air. The sentimentalist has proclaimed him a mere
mocker. To the critic of the schools, ever ready with compendious label,
he is the revolutionary destructive. To each alike of the countless
orthodox sects his name is the symbol for the prevailing of the gates of
hell. Erudition figures him as shallow and a trifler; culture condemns
him for pushing his hatred of spiritual falsehood much too seriously;
Christian charity feels constrained to unmask a demon from the depths of
the pit. The plain men of the earth, who are apt to measure the merits
of a philosopher by the strength of his sympathy with existing sources
of comfort, would generally approve the saying of Dr. Johnson, that he
would sooner sign a sentence for Rousseau's transportation than that of
any felon who had gone from the Old Bailey these many years, and that
the difference between him and Voltaire was so slight that "it would be
difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them." Those of
all schools and professions who have the temperament which mistakes
strong expression for strong judgment, and violent phrase for grounded
conviction, have been stimulated by antipathy against Voltaire to a
degree that in any of them with latent turns for humor must now and then
have even stirred a kind of reacting sympathy. The rank vocabulary of
malice and hate, that noisome fringe of the history of opinion, has
received many of its most fulminant terms from critics of Voltaire,
along with some from Voltaire himself, who unwisely did not always
refuse to follow an adversary's bad example.

Yet Voltaire was the very eye of eighteenth-century illumination. It was
he who conveyed to his generation in a multitude of forms the
consciousness at once of the power and the rights of human intelligence.
Another might well have said of him what he magnanimously said of his
famous contemporary, Montesquieu, that humanity had lost its
title-deeds, and he had recovered them. The fourscore volumes which he
wrote are the monument, as they were in some sort the instrument, of a
new renaissance. They are the fruit and representation of a spirit of
encyclopaedic curiosity and productiveness. Hardly a page of all these
countless leaves is common form. Hardly a sentence is there which did
not come forth alive from Voltaire's own mind or which was said because
someone else had said it before. His works as much as those of any m