ltaire! He is very fidgety,
noisy; something of a pickthank, of a wheedler; but, above all, he
is scorbutic, dyspeptic; hag-ridden, as soul seldom was; and (in his
oblique way) APPEALS to Friedrich and us,--not in vain. And, in
short, we perceive, after the First Act of the Piece, beginning in
preternatural radiances, ending in whirlwinds of flaming soot, he has
been getting on with his Second Act better than could be expected.
Gyrating again among the bright planets, circum-jovial moons, in
the Court Firmament; is again in favor, and might--Alas, he had his
FELLOW-moons, his Maupertuis above all! Incurable that Maupertuis
misery; gets worse and worse, steadily from the first day. No smallest
entity that intervenes, not even a wandering La Beaumelle with his Book
of PENSEES, but is capable of worsening it. Take this of Smelfungus;
this Pair of Cabinet Sketches,--"hasty outlines; extant chiefly," he
declares, "by Voltaire's blame:"--

LA BEAUMELLE.--"Voltaire has a fatal talent of getting into I quarrels
with insignificant accidental people; and instead of silently, with
cautious finger, disengaging any bramble that catches to him, and
thankfully passing on, attacks it indignantly with potent steel
implements, wood-axes, war-axes; brandishing and hewing;--till he
has stirred up a whole wilderness of bramble-bush, and is himself
bramble-chips all over. M. Angliviel de la Beaumelle, for example,
was nothing but a bramble: some conceited Licentiate of Theology,
who, finding the Presbytery of Geneva too narrow a field, had gone to
Copenhagen, as Professor of Rhetoric or some such thing; and, finding
that field also too narrow, and not to be widened by attempts at
Literature, MES PENSEES and the like, in such barbarous Country",--had
now [end of 1751] come to Berlin; and has Presentation copies of MES
PENSEES, OU LE QU'EN DIRA-T-ON, flying right and left, in hopes of doing
better there. Of these PENSEES (Thoughts so called) I will give but
one specimen" (another, that of "King Friedrich a common man,"
being carefully suppressed in the Berlin Copies, of La Beaumelle's
distributing):--

"There have been greater Poets than Voltaire; there was never any so
well recompensed: and why? Because Taste (GOUT, inclination) sets no
limits to its recompenses. The King of Prussia overloads men of talent
with his benefits for precisely the reasons which induce a little German
Prince to overload with benefits a buffoon or a dwarf." [--OEuv