fools on his shield well.
He stole away its cloak from grave imposture. If he reduced other things
below their true value, making them seem worthless and hollow, he did
not degrade the pretensions of tyranny and superstition below their true
value, by making them seem utterly worthless and hollow, as contemptible
as they were odious. This was the service he rendered to truth and
mankind! His _Candide_ is a masterpiece of wit. It has been called "the
dull product of a scoffer's pen"; it is indeed the "product of a
scoffer's pen"; but after reading the Excursion, few people will think
it _dull_. It is in the most perfect keeping, and without any appearance
of effort. Every sentence tells, and the whole reads like one sentence.
There is something sublime in Martin's sceptical indifference to moral
good and evil. It is the repose of the grave. It is better to suffer
this living death, than a living martyrdom. "Nothing can touch him
further." The moral of Candide (such as it is) is the same as that of
Rasselas: the execution is different. Voltaire says, "A great book is a
great evil." Dr. Johnson would have laboured this short apophthegm into
a voluminous common-place. Voltaire's traveller (in another work) being
asked "whether he likes black or white mutton best," replies that "he is
indifferent, provided it is tender." Dr. Johnson did not get at a
conclusion by so short a way as this. If Voltaire's licentiousness is
objected to me, I say, let it be placed to its true account, the manners
of the age and court in which he lived. The lords and ladies of the
bedchamber in the reign of Louis XV. found no fault with the immoral
tendency of his writings. Why then should our modern _purists_ quarrel
with them?--But to return.

Young is a gloomy epigrammatist. He has abused great powers both of
thought and language. His moral reflections are sometimes excellent; but
he spoils their beauty by overloading them with a religious horror, and
at the same time giving them all the smart turns and quaint expression
of an enigma or repartee in verse. The well-known lines on
Procrastination are in his best manner:

"Be wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer;
Next day the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till wisdom is push'd out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an