ely literary man; henceforth he was fired with an ambition to be a
philosopher and a liberator. Certainly France was unfortunate in the
education she gave this brilliant and wayward child of her genius.

There was hardly a Frenchman of eminence in this period who did not
either visit England or learn the English language, many doing both. And
one so bright and receptive as Voltaire could not fail to notice many
things. He could see how free thought was: he could make a contrast
between the respect paid to letters in London, and their degradation
under Louis XIV and later; he saw Newton and Locke in places of honor,
Prior and Gay acting as ambassadors, Addison as secretary of state; he
reached England in time to see the national funeral given to the remains
of Newton. Bolingbroke took him in hand; he was astonished to find a
learned and literary _noblesse_; Locke was his true teacher.

He went back to France another man, after three years' absence: above
all, he carried with him the then popular English way of thinking as to
the supernatural, and became a somewhat cold, common-sense deist,
opposed to the atheism of some and the dull bigotry of the established
creed in the hands of others. God was to him conscious creator of the
world, and only faintly, if at all, its ruler; he recognized the need of
a deity as a starting-point for his system, though he did not feel the
need of his care and presence in life; not God our Father, only God our
Creator.

He brought over with him a great ripening of humane feelings: this is
his noblest quality and parent of his best acts. When we see him as a
champion of oppressed Huguenots, combating wrong and ill-doing with all
the vehemence of his fiery soul, we find a common ground, which is lost
sight of as we contemplate his equally hot attacks on Christianity, or
his dwelling in kings' courts, or his panegyrics on great sovereigns who
had so fiercely crushed down that liberty of thought of which he was the
life-long defender.

In his _OEdipus_ he had assaulted priestcraft with not undeserved
severity; we must always remember what he saw around him. In his
_Henriade_ (1725), perhaps almost unintentionally, he had glorified
Henry IV at the expense of the Great Monarch. After his stay in England
we have his _Brutus_ (1730), an attack on kingcraft, and his _Zaire_
(1732), a Parisian Othello, both based on Shakespeare. From this time
onward he plunges into a supple and dexterous, if somet