ma does not disqualify a man for
serving his king and country on the busy fields of affairs. The
following year, after Fleury's death, when French fortunes in the war
of the Austrian succession were near their lowest, Voltaire's own idea
that he might be useful from his intimacy with Frederick seems to have
been shared by Amelot, the secretary of state, and at all events he
aspired to do some sort of active, if radically futile, diplomatic work.
In later times when the tide had turned, and Frederick's star was
clouded over with disaster, we again find Voltaire the eager
intermediary with Choiseul, pleasantly comparing himself to the mouse of
the fable, busily striving to free the lion from the meshes of the
hunter's net.

In short, on all sides, whatever men do and think was real and alive to
Voltaire. Whatever had the quality of interesting any imaginable
temperament had the quality of interesting him. There was no subject
which any set of men have ever cared about which, if he once had mention
of it, Voltaire did not care about likewise. And it was just because he
was so thoroughly alive himself that he filled the whole era with life.
The more closely one studies the various movements of that time, the
more clear it becomes that, if he was not the original centre and first
fountain of them all, at any rate he made many channels ready and gave
the sign. He was the initial principle of fermentation throughout that
vast commotion. We may deplore, if we think fit, as Erasmus deplored in
the case of Luther, that the great change was not allowed to work itself
out slowly, calmly, and without violence and disruption. These graceful
regrets are powerless, and on the whole they are very enervating. Let us
make our account with the actual, rather than seek excuses for
self-indulgence in pensive preference of something that might have been.
Practically in these great circles of affairs, what only might have been
is as though it could not be; and to know this may well suffice for us.
It is not in human power to choose the kind of men who rise from time to
time to the supreme control of momentous changes. The force which
decides this immensely important matter is as though it were chance. We
cannot decisively pronounce any circumstance whatever an accident, yet
history abounds with circumstances which in our present ignorance of the
causes of things are as if they were accidents.

It was one of the happy chances of circumstance t