here were nobody who reverenced the volume which begins with _Genesis_
and ends with _Revelation_, the whole thing would be utterly dead and
stupid: except for a few crispnesses of the Egyptian Mambres, which
could, almost without a single exception, have been uttered on any other
theme. The identification of Nebuchadnezzar with the bull Apis is not
precisely an effort of genius; but the assembling, and putting through
their paces, of Balaam's ass and Jonah's whale, the serpent of Eden, and
the raven of the Ark, with the three prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and
Daniel, and with an historical King Amasis and an unhistorical Princess
Amaside thrown in, is less a _conte a dormir debout_, as Voltaire's
countrymen and he himself would say, than a tale to make a man sleep
when he is running at full speed--a very dried poppy-head of the garden
of tales. On the other hand, the very short and very early _Le
Crocheteur Borgne_, which, curiously enough, Voltaire never printed, and
the not much longer _Cosi-Sancta_, which he printed in his queer
ostrich-like manner, are, though a little naughty, quite nice; and have
a freshness and demure grace about their naughtiness which contrasts
remarkably with the ugly and wearisome snigger of later work.

[Sidenote: Voltaire--the Kehl edition--and Plato.]

The half-dozen others,[360] filling scarce twenty pages between them,
which conclude the usual collection, need little comment; but a "Kehl"
note to the first of them is for considerable thoughts:

M. de Voltaire s'est egaye quelquefois sur Platon, dont le
galimatias, regarde autrefois comme sublime, a fait plus de
mal au genre humain qu'on ne le croit communement.

One should not hurry over this, but muse a little. In copying the note,
I felt almost inclined to write "_M. de_ Platon" in order to put the
whole thing in a consistent key; for somehow "Plato" by itself, even in
the French form, transports one into such a very different world that
adjustment of clocks and compasses becomes at once necessary and
difficult. "Galimatias" is good, "autrefois" is possibly better, the
"evils inflicted on the human race" better still, but _egaye_ perhaps
best of all. The monkey, we know, makes itself gay with the elephant,
and probably would do so with the lion and the tiger if these animals
had not an unpleasant way of dealing with jokers. And the tomtit and
canary have, no doubt, at least private agreement that the utterances of
the