uise its composition as something of the kind; but the desire to
annoy Fontenelle, while complimenting him after a fashion as the "dwarf
of Saturn," and perhaps other strokes of personal scratching, have put
Voltaire on his mettle. You will not easily find a better Voltairism of
its particular class than, "Il faut bien citer ce qu'on ne comprend
point du tout, dans la langue qu'on entend le moins." But, as so often
happens, the cracker in the tail is here the principal point.
Micromegas, the native of Sirius, who may be Voltaire himself, or
anybody else--after his joint tour through the universes (much more
amusing than that of the late Mr. Bailey's Festus), with the smaller but
still gigantic Saturnian--writes a philosophical treatise to instruct us
poor microbes of the earth, and it is taken to Paris, to the secretary
of the Academy of Science (Fontenelle himself). "Quand le secretaire
l'eut ouvert il ne vit rien qu'un livre tout blanc. 'Ah!' dit-il, 'je
m'en etais bien doute.'" Voltaire did a great deal of harm in the world,
and perhaps no solid good;[357] but it is things like this which make
one feel that it would have been, a loss had there been no Voltaire.

[Sidenote: _L'Ingenu._]

_L'Ingenu_, which follows _Candide_ in the regular editions, falls
perhaps as a whole below all these, and _L'Homme aux Quarante Ecus_,
which follows it, hardly concerns us at all, being mere political
economy of a sort in dialogue. _L'Ingenu_ is a story, and has many
amusing things in it. But it is open to the poser that if Voltaire
really accepted the noble savage business he was rather silly, and that
if he did not, the piece is a stale and not very biting satire. It is,
moreover, somewhat exceptionally full (there is only one to beat it) of
the vulgar little sniggers which suggest the eunuch even more than the
schoolboy, and the conclusion is abominable. The seducer and,
indirectly, murderer Saint-Pouange may only have done after his kind in
regard to Mlle. de Saint-Yves; but the Ingenu himself neither acted up
to his Huron education, nor to his extraction as a French gentleman, in
forgiving the man and taking service under him.

[Sidenote: _La Princesse de Babylone._]

_La Princesse de Babylone_ is more like Hamilton than almost any other
of the tales, and this, it need hardly be said here, is high praise,
even for a work of Voltaire. For it means that it has what we commonly
find in that work, and also something that we do no