e other's fame and genius. Voltaire said one day
to Rousseau, who was showing him an _Ode Addressed to Posterity_, "This
is a letter which will never reach the place of its address." At another
time, Voltaire having read a satire of his own composition to Rousseau,
the latter advised him to "suppress it lest it should be imagined that
he had lost his abilities and preserved only his virulence." But
Voltaire was inordinately ambitious; he longed to rise to fame, as on
the wings of the eagle. "How unworthy, and how dull of appreciation is
sluggish France," thought he. For her rewards he had toiled, and
thought, and racked his brain for years. But she was stern, and would
not honor him. He therefore became disgusted with his native land, and
set out for England, whose scientific and theological literature had
already fired his mind. George I. and the Princess of Wales, afterward
Queen Caroline, distinguished him by their attentions, and relieved his
poverty by securing large subscriptions to his works. It was here that
he commenced to lay up a princely fortune; but it was not until the
close of his long and stirring life that he forswore his miserly habits.
He found in the deistical literature of England everything that could
suit his taste and ambition. "Here," reasoned he to himself, "I find
what I never dreamed of before. France would not tolerate these thoughts
if her own sons had given birth to them; but this is England, and we
Frenchmen respect the thinking of the English mind. I will not translate
much, but I will go to work with hearty earnestness, and reproduce in
French literature what I find worthy of it in these free-thinking
masters. May be, after all, I shall become a great man." The plan
succeeded. Voltaire, on his return, became more outspoken in his
infidelity. His star ascended; and he ruled, not by original but by
borrowed lustre.

Frederic the Great of Prussia was captivated by the skeptical and
literary celebrity of Voltaire. The latter was not long back again in
France before his selfish sensitiveness imagined that all the literary
men of his country had entered into a cabal to deprive him of his fame
and hurl him from the throne of his literary authority. He was therefore
ready to be caught by the most tempting bait; and when Frederic offered
him a pension of twenty-two thousand livres, it was more than the
miserly plagiarist could resist. Of his reception by the king he thus
speaks in his usual styl