e: "I set out for Potsdam in June, 1750.
Astolpha did not meet a kinder reception in the palace of Alcuia. To be
lodged in the same apartments that Marshal Saxe had occupied, to have
the royal cooks at my command when I chose to dine alone, and the royal
coachman when I had an inclination to ride, were trifling favors. Our
suppers were very agreeable. If I am not deceived I think we had much
wit. The king was witty, and gave occasion of wit to others; and what is
still more extraordinary, I never found myself so much at my ease; I
worked two hours a day with his majesty; corrected his works; and never
failed highly to praise whatever was worthy of praise, though I rejected
the dross. I gave him details of all that was necessary in rhetoric and
criticism for his use: he profited by my advice, and his genius assisted
him more effectually than my lessons."

But matters did not move on a great while thus harmoniously, for
Voltaire, becoming complicated in personal difficulties with greater
favorites of Frederic, received the frown of the man he had so much
flattered, and whose purse had been enriching his coffers. The skeptic
returned to France, wrote other works, settled near the romantic shore
of Lake Geneva, and returned honored, great, and feasted to Paris.
Indulging in unaccustomed excesses, his frail and aged body sank beneath
the weight. But Frederic and Voltaire maintained a correspondence many
years after the flatterer's disgrace. Full of trouble, haunted by dreams
of conspiracy and of poverty, successful in achieving more evil than
usually falls to the lot of a single mind, Voltaire passed from the
society of men to the presence of God. It has been truthfully said of
him in proof of his inconsistency, that he was a free thinker at London,
a Cartesian at Versailles, a Christian at Nancy, and an infidel at
Berlin.

Rousseau sought to establish the proposition that the progress of
scientific education has always involved the decay of moral education.
With Lord Herbert he held that barbarism has ever been the condition of
greatest moral power. A sentiment from his _Emile_ furnishes the key to
his creed: "Everything is good when it comes forth from the hand of the
Creator; everything degenerates under man's hand. In the state in which
things now are, a man who from the moment of his birth would live among
others, would, if left to himself, be most disfigured. Prejudices,
authority, constraint, example, all social inst