l, no doubt, have furnished Voltaire with arguments and
suggestions, but they cannot have seriously influenced his thought.
Bolingbroke was a more important figure, and he was in close personal
relation with Voltaire; but his controversial writings were clumsy and
superficial to an extraordinary degree. As Voltaire himself said, 'in
his works there are many leaves and little fruit; distorted expressions
and periods intolerably long.' Tindal and Middleton were more vigorous;
but their work did not appear until a later period. The masterly and
far-reaching speculations of Hume belong, of course, to a totally
different class.

Apart from politics and metaphysics, there were two directions in which
the _Lettres Philosophiques_ did pioneer work of a highly important
kind: they introduced both Newton and Shakespeare to the French public.
The four letters on Newton show Voltaire at his best--succinct, lucid,
persuasive, and bold. The few paragraphs on Shakespeare, on the other
hand, show him at his worst. Their principal merit is that they mention
his existence--a fact hitherto unknown in France; otherwise they merely
afford a striking example of the singular contradiction in Voltaire's
nature which made him a revolutionary in intellect and kept him a high
Tory in taste. Never was such speculative audacity combined with such
aesthetic timidity; it is as if he had reserved all his superstition for
matters of art. From his account of Shakespeare, it is clear that he had
never dared to open his eyes and frankly look at what he should see
before him. All was 'barbare, depourvu de bienseances, d'ordre, de
vraisemblance'; in the hurly-burly he was dimly aware of a figured and
elevated style, and of some few 'lueurs etonnantes'; but to the true
significance of Shakespeare's genius he remained utterly blind.

Characteristically enough, Voltaire, at the last moment, did his best to
reinforce his tentative metaphysical observations on 'M. Loke' by
slipping into his book, as it were accidentally, an additional letter,
quite disconnected from the rest of the work, containing reflexions upon
some of the _Pensees_ of Pascal. He no doubt hoped that these
reflexions, into which he had distilled some of his most insidious
venom, might, under cover of the rest, pass unobserved. But all his
subterfuges were useless. It was in vain that he pulled wires and
intrigued with high personages; in vain that he made his way to the aged
Minister, Cardina