he spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap of
barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief. In all
epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have
been the indispensable saviour of his epoch;--the lightning, without
which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, I
said already, was the Biography of Great Men.

Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief and universal
spiritual paralysis; but happily they cannot always completely
succeed. In all times it is possible for a man to arise great enough
to feel that they and their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. And
what is notable, in no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out
of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for
Great Men; genuine admiration, loyalty, adoration, however dim and
perverted it may be. Hero-worship endures for ever while man endures.
Boswell venerates his Johnson, right truly even in the Eighteenth
century. The unbelieving French believe in their Voltaire; and
burst-out round him into very curious Hero-worship, in that last act
of his life when they 'stifle him under roses.' It has always seemed
to me extremely curious this of Voltaire. Truly, if Christianity be
the highest instance of Hero-worship, then we may find here in
Voltaireism one of the lowest! He whose life was that of a kind of
Antichrist, does again on this side exhibit a curious contrast. No
people ever were so little prone to admire at all as those French of
Voltaire. _Persiflage_ was the character of their whole mind;
adoration had nowhere a place in it. Yet see! The old man of Ferney
comes up to Paris; an old, tottering, infirm man of eighty-four years.
They feel that he too is a kind of Hero; that he has spent his life in
opposing error and injustice, delivering Calases, unmasking hypocrites
in high places;--in short that _he_ too, though in a strange way, has
fought like a valiant man. They feel withal that, if _persiflage_ be
the great thing, there never was such a _persifleur_. He is the
realised ideal of every one of them; the thing they are all wanting to
be; of all Frenchmen the most French. _He_ is properly their
god,--such god as they are fit for. Accordingly all persons, from the
Queen Antoinette to the Douanier at the Porte St. Denis, do they not
worship him? People of quality disguise themselves as tavern-waiters.
The Maitre de Poste, with a broad oath, orders his Postillion