Paris, trespasses on the common sense of man, scarcely conceivable
by us if they had not been renewed under our eyes by popery. All France
was in a burst of laughter.

In the midst of this tempest of scorn an extraordinary man arose, to
guide and deepen it into public ruin, VOLTAIRE; a personal profligate;
possessing a vast variety of that superficial knowledge which gives
importance to folly; frantic for popularity, which he solicited at all
hazards; and sufficiently opulent to relieve him from the necessity of
any labours but those of national undoing. Holding but an inferior and
struggling rank in all the manlier provinces of the mind, in science,
poetry, and philosophy; he was the prince of scorners. The splenetic
pleasantry which stimulates the wearied tastes of high life; the
grossness which half concealed captivates the loose, without offence to
their feeble decorum; and the easy brilliancy which throws what colours
it will on the darker features of its purpose; made Voltaire, the very
genius of France. But under this smooth and sparkling surface,
reflecting like ice all the lights flung upon it, there was a dark
fathomless depth of malignity. He hated government; he hated morals; he
hated man, he hated religion. He sometimes bursts out into exclamations
of rage and insane fury against all that we honour as best and holiest,
that sound less the voice of human lips than the echoes of the final
place of agony and despair.

A tribe worthy of his succession, showy, ambitious, and malignant,
followed; each with some vivid literary contribution, some powerful and
popular work, a new despotic of combustion in that mighty mine on which
stood in thin and fatal security the throne of France. Rousseau, the
most impassioned of all romancers, the great corrupter of the female
mind. Buffon, a lofty and splendid speculator, who dazzled the whole
multitude of the minor philosophers, and fixed the creed of
Materialism. Moutesquieu, eminent for knowledge and sagacity in his
"Spirit of Laws" striking all the establishments of his country into
contempt; and in his "Persian Letters," levelling the same blow at her
morals. D'Alembert, the first mathematician of his day, an eloquent
writer, the declared pupil of Voltaire, and, by his secretary-ship of
the French academy, furnished with all the facilities for propagating
his master's opinions. And Diderot, the projector and chief conductor of
the Encyclopedia, a work justly exciting th