ike a
torrent over the surrounding countries. Wherever there was
oppression, his voice was raised in protest; wherever there was
falsity, his rapier wit assailed it. He held correspondence with and
influenced most of the crowned heads of Europe. He became the hero
of his countrymen. Christianity, and especially Catholicism, served
only too often as his subjects of assault, but he was never, as his
enemies called him, an atheist.

In 1778, an old man of eighty-three, he ventured to return to Paris
to see the production of his last tragedy, _Irene_. Tremendous was
the enthusiasm. Paris, grown more Voltairean than Voltaire himself,
went mad in its reception of its teacher. The excitement proved too
much for his feeble frame, and he died in the full tide of his
triumph.

JOHN MORLEY

When the right sense of historical proportion is more fully developed in
men's minds, the name of Voltaire will stand out like the names of the
great decisive movements in the European advance, like the Revival of
Learning or the Reformation. The existence, character, and career of
this extraordinary person constituted in themselves a new and prodigious
era. The peculiarities of his individual genius changed the mind and
spiritual conformation of France, and in a less degree of the whole of
the West, with as far-spreading and invincible an effect as if the work
had been wholly done, as it was actually aided, by the sweep of
deep-lying collective forces. A new type of belief, and of its shadow,
disbelief, was stamped by the impression of his character and work into
the intelligence and feeling of his own and the following times. We may
think of Voltairism in France somewhat as we think of Catholicism or the
Renaissance or Calvinism. It was one of the cardinal liberations of the
growing race, one of the emphatic manifestations of some portion of the
minds of men, which an immediately foregoing system and creed had either
ignored or outraged.

Voltairism may stand for the name of the Renaissance of the eighteenth
century, for that name takes in all the serious haltings and
shortcomings of this strange movement, as well as all its terrible fire,
swiftness, sincerity, and strength. The rays from Voltaire's burning and
far-shining spirit no sooner struck upon the genius of the time, seated
dark and dead like the black stone of Memnon's statue, than the clang of
the breaking chord was heard th