hs to which this
dramatic insensibility of Voltaire's was able to go--his adaptation of
_Julius Caesar_ for the French stage. A comparison of the two pieces
should be made by anyone who wishes to realise fully, not only the
degradation of the copy, but the excellence of the original. Particular
attention should be paid to the transmutation of Antony's funeral
oration into French alexandrines. In Voltaire's version, the climax of
the speech is reached in the following passage; it is an excellent
sample of the fatuity of the whole of his concocted rigmarole:--

ANTOINE: Brutus ... ou suis-je? O ciel! O crime! O barbarie!'
Chers amis, je succombe; et mes sens interdits ...
Brutus, son assassin!... ce monstre etait son fils!
ROMAINS: Ah dieux!

If Voltaire's demerits are obvious enough to our eyes, his merits were
equally clear to his contemporaries, whose vision of them was not
perplexed and retarded by the conventions of another age. The weight of
a reigning convention is like the weight of the atmosphere--it is so
universal that no one feels it; and an eighteenth-century audience came
to a performance of _Alzire_ unconscious of the burden of the Classical
rules. They found instead an animated procession of events, of scenes
just long enough to be amusing and not too long to be dull, of startling
incidents, of happy _mots_. They were dazzled by an easy display of
cheap brilliance, and cheap philosophy, and cheap sentiment, which it
was very difficult to distinguish from the real thing, at such a
distance, and under artificial light. When, in _Merope_, one saw La
Dumesnil; 'lorsque,' to quote Voltaire himself, 'les yeux egares, la
voix entrecoupee, levant une main tremblante, elle allait immoler son
propre fils; quand Narbas l'arreta; quand, laissant tomber son poignard,
on la vit s'evanouir entre les bras de ses femmes, et qu'elle sortit de
cet etat de mort avec les transports d'une mere; lorsque, ensuite,
s'elancant aux yeux de Polyphonte, traversant en un clin d'oeil tout le
theatre, les larmes dans les yeux, la paleur sur le front, les sanglots
a la bouche, les bras etendus, elle s'ecria: "Barbare, il est mon
fils!"'--how, face to face with splendours such as these, could one
question for a moment the purity of the gem from which they sparkled?
Alas! to us, who know not La Dumesnil, to us whose _Merope_ is nothing
more than a little sediment of print, the precious stone of our
forefa