tion to my work on the origin and changes of the French
civil law. It will take only three hours to read it; but, I assure
you, it has been such a labor to me, that my hair has turned white
under it all.

Finally it touches nadir:--

It [his work] has almost cost me my life; I must rest; I can work
no more.

My candles are all burned out; I have set off all my cartridges.

When Montesquieu died, only Diderot, among Parisian men of letters,
followed him to his tomb.

XV.

VOLTAIRE.

1694-1778.

By the volume and the variety, joined to the unfailing brilliancy, of
his production; by his prodigious effectiveness; and by his universal
fame,--Voltaire is undoubtedly entitled to rank first, with no fellow,
among the eighteenth-century literary men, not merely of France, but of
the world. He was not a great man,--he produced no single great
work,--but he must nevertheless be pronounced a great writer. There is
hardly any species of composition to which, in the long course of his
activity, he did not turn his talent. It cannot be said that he
succeeded splendidly in all; but in some he succeeded splendidly, and he
failed abjectly in none. There is not a great thought, and there is not
a flat expression, in the whole bulk of his multitudinous and
multifarious works. Read him wherever you will, in the ninety-seven
volumes (equivalent, probably, in the aggregate, to three hundred
volumes like the present) which, in one leading edition, collect his
productions,--you may often find him superficial, you may often find him
untrustworthy, you will certainly often find him flippant, but not less
certainly you will never find him obscure, and you will never find him
dull. The clearness, the vivacity, of this man's mind were something
almost preternatural. So, too, were his readiness, his versatility, his
audacity. He had no distrust of himself, no awe of his fellow-men, no
reverence for God, to deter him from any attempt with his pen, however
presuming. If a state ode were required, it should be ready to order at
twelve to-morrow; if an epic poem--to be classed with the "Iliad" and
the "AEneid"--the "Henriade" was promptly forthcoming, to answer the
demand. He did not shrink from flouting a national idol, by freely
finding fault with Corneille; and he lightly undertook to extinguish a
venerable form of Christianity, simply with pricks, innumerably
repeated, of his tormenting pen.

A very