it also gave him a respite from the
tyranny of the fencing-master, and allowed him to turn to his first,
last and only love--literature. In Voltaire's cosmos was a good deal of
the Bob Acres quality.

There were plenty of reasons for locking him up--heresy and treason have
ever been first cousins--and pamphlets lampooning Churchmen high in
office were laid at his door. No doubt some of the anonymous literature
was not his--"I would have done the thing better or not at all," he once
said in reference to a scurrilous brochure. The real fact was, that that
particular pamphlet was done by a disciple, and if Voltaire's writings
were vile, then was his offense doubled in that he vitalized a ravenous
brood of scribblers. They played Caliban to his Setebos.

Voltaire's most offensive contributions were always attributed by him to
this bishop or that, and to various dignitaries who had no existence
save in the figment of his own fertile pigment.

He once carried on a controversy between the Bishop of Berlin and the
Archbishop of Paris, each man thundering against the other with a
monthly pamphlet wherein each one gored the other without mercy, and
revealed the senselessness of the other's religion. They flung the
literary stinkpot with great accuracy. "The other man's superstition is
always ridiculous to us--our own is sacred," said Voltaire, and so he
allowed his controversialists to fight it out for his own quiet joy, and
the edification of the onlookers.

Then his plan of printing an alleged sermon, giving some unknown prelate
due credit on the title-page, starting in with a pious text and a page
of trite nothings and gradually drifting off into ridicule of the things
he had started in to defend--all this gives a comic tinge to his wail
that "some evil-minded person is attributing things to me I never
wrote," If an occasional sly Churchman got after him with his own
weapon, writing things in his style more hazardous than he dare express,
surely he should not have complained.

But this was a fact--the enemy could not follow him long with a literary
fusillade--they hadn't the mental ammunition.

Well has Voltaire been called "the father of all those who wear
shovel-hats."

* * * * *

A few months in the Bastile, and Voltaire's indeterminate sentence was
commuted to exile. He was allowed to leave his country for his country's
good. Early in the year Seventeen Hundred Twenty-six he landed i