wiser than ourselves. If you throw cold water on Greuze's head,
very likely you will extinguish his talent along with his vanity.
If you make Voltaire less sensitive to criticism, he will lose the
art that took him to the inmost depths of the soul of Merope, and
will never stir a single emotion in you more.

_He._--But if nature be as powerful as she is wise, why did she not
make them as good as she made them great?

_I._--Do you not see how such reasoning as that overturns the
general order, and that if all were excellent here below, then
there would be nothing excellent.

_He._--You are right. The important point is that you and I should
be here; provided only that you and I are you and I, then let all
besides go as it can. The best order of things, in my notion, is
that in which I was to have a place, and a plague on the most
perfect of worlds, if I don't belong to it! I would rather exist,
and even be a bad hand at reasoning, than not exist at all.

_I._--There is nobody but thinks as you do, and whoever brings his
indictment against the order of things, forgets that he is
renouncing his own existence.

_He._--That is true.

_I._--So let us accept things as they are; let us see how much they
cost us and how much they give us, and leave the whole as it is,
for we do not know it well enough either to praise or blame it; and
perhaps after all it is neither good nor ill, if it is necessary,
as so many good folk suppose.

_He._--Now you are going beyond me. What you say seems like
philosophy, and I warn you that I never meddle with that. All that
I know is that I should be very well pleased to be somebody else,
on the chance of being a genius and a great man; yes, I must agree.
I have something here that tells me so. I never in my life heard a
man praised, that his eulogy did not fill me with secret fury. I am
full of envy. If I hear something about their private life that is
a discredit to them, I listen with pleasure: it brings us nearer to
a level; I bear my mediocrity more comfortably. I say to myself:
Ah, thou couldst never have done _Mahomet_, nor the eulogy on
Maupeou. So I have always been, and I always shall be, mortified at
my own mediocrity. Yes, I tell you I am mediocre, and it provokes
me. I never heard the overture t