_ reputation of
Voltaire: 'Both are very splendid memoir writers, and of the two, Lord
Orford is the more brilliant.' In the same tone he compares Gibbon to
Southey, giving the advantage to the latter on the score of his poetical
ability; and his view of another great infidel may be inferred from the
following phrase. One of Rousseau's opinions is only known to us through
Cowper, 'for in the unventilated pages of its originator it would have
lurked undisturbed down to this hour of June, 1819.'

Voltaire and Rousseau have the double title to hatred of being Frenchmen
and freethinkers. But even orthodox Frenchmen fare little better. 'The
French Bossuets, Bourdaloues, Fenelons, &c., whatever may be thought of
their meagre and attenuated rhetoric, are one and all the most
commonplace of thinkers.' In fact, the mere mention of France acts upon
him like a red rag on a bull. The French, 'in whom the lower forms of
passion are constantly bubbling up, from the shallow and superficial
character of their feelings,' are incapable of English earnestness.
Their taste is 'anything but good in all that department of wit and
humour'--the department, apparently, of anecdotes--'and the ground lies
in their natural want of veracity;' whereas England bases upon its
truthfulness a well-founded claim to 'a moral pre-eminence among the
nations.' Belgians, French, and Italians attract the inconsiderate by
'facile obsequiousness,' which, however, is a pendent of 'impudence and
insincerity. Want of principle and want of moral sensibility compose the
original _fundus_ of southern manners.' Our faults of style, such as
they are, proceed from our manliness. In France there are no unmarried
women at the age which amongst us gives the insulting name of old maid.
'What striking sacrifices of sexual honour does this one fact argue!'
The French style is remarkable for simplicity--'a strange pretension for
anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their
style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of
their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, too, by 'the
prodigious defects of the French in all the higher qualities of prose
composition.' Even their handwriting is the 'very vilest form of
scribbling which exists in Europe,' and they and the Germans are 'the
two most gormandising races in Europe.' They display a brutal
selfishness in satisfying their appetites, whereas Englishmen at all
public meals a