the "dryness" and unpoetical quality of his
poetry, and of the French poetry of the time generally, perhaps for
other reasons. At any rate, as compared with La Fontaine or Prior, he
hardly counts. _Le Mondain_, _Le Pauvre Diable_, etc., are skits or
squibs in verse, not tales. The opening one of the usual collection, _Ce
qui plait aux Dames_,--in itself a flat rehandling of Chaucer and
Dryden,--is saved by its charming last line--

Ah! croyez-moi, l'erreur a son merite,

a rede which he himself might well have recked.

[352] In justice to Voltaire it ought to be remembered that no less
great, virtuous, and religious a person than Milton ranked as one of the
two objects to which "all mortals most aspire," "to offend your
enemies."

[353] It has been noted above (see p. 266, _note_), how some have
directly traced _Zadig_ to the work of a person so much inferior to
Hamilton as Gueulette.

[354] _Micromegas_ and one or two other things avowed--in fact,
Voltaire, if not "great," was "big" enough to make as a rule little
secret of his levies on others; and he had, if not adequate, a
considerable, respect for the English Titan.

[355] Cacambo was not a savage, but he had savage or, at least,
non-European blood in him.

[356] Not in the Grandisonian sense, thank heaven! But as has been
hinted, he is a _little_ of a prig.

[357] He has been allowed a great deal of credit for the Calas and some
other similar businesses. It is unlucky that the injustices he combated
were somehow always _clerical_, in this or that fashion.

[358] It was said of them at their appearance "[cet] ouvrage est sans
gout, sans finesse, sans invention, un rabachage de toutes les vieilles
polissonneries que l'auteur a debitees sur Moise, et Jesus-Christ, les
prophetes et les apotres, l'Eglise, les papes, les cardinaux, les
pretres et les moines; nul interet, nulle chaleur, nulle vraisemblance,
force ordures, une grosse gaiete.... Je n'aime pas la religion: mais je
ne la hais pas assez pour trouver cela bon." The authorship, added to
the justice of it, makes this one of the most crushing censures ever
committed to paper; for the writer was Diderot (_Oeuvres_, Ed. Assezat,
vi. 36).

[359] It is a singular coincidence that this was exactly the sum which
Johnson mentioned to Boswell as capable of affording decent subsistence
in London during the early middle eighteenth century.

[360] _Songe de Platon_, _Bababec et les Fakirs_, _Aventure de la