Voltaire, still far from having ended, still
only just beginning his Anti-Maupertuis discharges, has, in the interim,
privately got his DOCTOR AKAKIA ready. Compared to which, the former
missile is as a popgun to a park of artillery shotted with old nails and
broken glass!--Such a constraint, at the Royal dinner-table, amid wine
and wit, could not continue. The credible account is, it soon cracked
asunder; and, after the conceivable sputterings, sparklings and
flashings of various complexion, issued in lambent airs of "tacit
mutual understanding; and in reading of AKAKIA together,--with peals of
laughter from the King," as the common French Biographers assert.

"Readers know AKAKIA," [DIATRIBE DU DOCTEUR AKAKIA (in
Voltaire,--OEuvres,--lxi. 19-62).] says Smelfungus: "it is one of the
famous feats of Satirical Pyrotechny; only too pleasant to the corrupt
Race of Adam! There is not much, or indeed anything, of true poetic
humor in it: but there is a gayety of malice, a dexterity, felicity,
inexhaustibility of laughing mockery and light banter, capable
of driving a Perpetual President delirious. What an Explosion of
glass-crackers, fire-balls, flaming-serpents;--generally, of sleeping
gunpowder, in its most artistic forms,--flaming out sky-high over all
the Parish, on a sudden! The almost-sublime of Maupertuis, which exists
in large quantities, here is a new artist who knows how to treat it.
The engineer of the Sublime (always painfully engineering thitherward
without effect),--an engineer of the Comic steps in on him, blows him up
with his own petards in a most unexampled manner. Not an owlery has that
poor Maupertuis, in the struggle to be sublime (often nearly successful,
but never once quite), happened to drop from him, but Voltaire picks it
up; manipulates it, reduces it to the sublimely ridiculous; lodges it,
in the form of burning dust, about the head of MON PRESIDENT. Needless
to say of the Comic engineer that he is unfair, perversely exaggerative,
reiterative, on the owleries of poor Maupertuis;--it is his function
to BE all that. Clever, but wrong, do you say? Well, yes:--and yet the
ridiculous does require ridicule; wise Nature has silently so ordered.
And if ever truculent President in red wig, with his absurd truculences,
tyrannies and perpetual struggles after the sublime, did deserve to
be exploded in laughter, it could not have been more consummately
done;--though perversely always, as must be owned.

"'T