their welfare. If they were equal to you, this anger would cease; but
the fire would break out somewhere else, on ground which appears at
present sound and level. Voltaire, for instance, is less eloquent than
you: but Voltaire is wittier than any man living. This quality----

_Rousseau._ Is the quality of a buffoon and a courtier. But the
buffoon should have most of it, to support his higher dignity.

_Malesherbes._ Voltaire's is Attic.

_Rousseau_. If malignity is Attic. Petulance is not wit, although a
few grains of wit may be found in petulance: quartz is not gold,
although a few grains of gold may be found in quartz. Voltaire is a
monkey in mischief, and a spaniel in obsequiousness. He declaims
against the cruel and tyrannical; and he kisses the hands of
adulteresses who murder their husbands, and of robbers who decimate
their gang.

_Malesherbes._ I will not discuss with you the character of the man,
and only that part of the author's on which I spoke. There may be
malignity in wit, there cannot be violence. You may irritate and
disquiet with it; but it must be by means of a flower or a feather.
Wit and humour stand on one side, irony and sarcasm on the other.

_Rousseau._ They are in near neighbourhood.

_Malesherbes._ So are the Elysian fields and Tartarus.

_Rousseau._ Pray, go on: teach me to stand quiet in my stall, while my
masters and managers pass by.

_Malesherbes._ Well then--Pascal argues as closely and methodically;
Bossuet is as scientific in the structure of his sentences;
Demosthenes, many think, has equal fire, vigour, dexterity: equal
selection of topics and equal temperance in treating them,
immeasurably as he falls short of you in appeals to the sensibility,
and in everything which by way of excellence we usually call genius.

_Rousseau._ Sir, I see no resemblance between a pleader at the bar, or
a haranguer of the populace, and me.

_Malesherbes._ Certainly his questions are occasional: but one great
question hangs in the centre, and high above the rest; and this is,
whether the Mother of liberty and civilization shall exist, or whether
she shall be extinguished in the bosom of her family. As we often
apply to Eloquence and her parts the terms we apply to Architecture
and hers, let me do it also, and remark that nothing can be more
simple, solid, and symmetrical, nothing more frugal in decoration or
more appropriate in distribution, than the apartments of Demosthenes.
Yours excel the