ew hedges and the fountains; watching the Pierrot of the
Minute make love to Columbine, and the generations of men drift by
like falling leaves.

Voltaire!--He was well advised to choose that name for himself; a
name which sounds even now like the call of a trumpet. And a call it
is; a call to the clear intelligences and the unclouded brains; a call to
the generous hearts and the unperverted instincts; a call to sanity and
sweetness and clarity and noble commonsense; to all that is free and
brave and gay and friendly, to rally to the standard of true
civilisation against the forces of stupidity, brutality and
obscurantism!

Voltaire was one of those great men whose thoughts are armies and
whose words are victories in the cause of the liberation of humanity.
If we do not read his books, we look at his image and we read his
life. We name his name and we seal ourselves of his tribe; the name
and tribe of such as refuse to bow their knees to Baal, and if they
worship in the house of Rimmon, worship with a large reservation!

Voltaire is much more than a man of letters. He is a prophet of the
age to come, when the execrable superstitions of narrow minds shall
no longer darken the sunlight, and the infamous compulsion of
human manners, human intellects, human tastes, into the petty
mould of oppressive public opinion shall be ended forever.

That bust in the Louvre and the sublime story of his life will outlast
all but one of those half a hundred volumes of his which Mr.
Carnegie's liberality has put at the disposal of our "home town."

We too, like the populace of Paris, on the day when he came back to
his own, flock out to see the "saviour of the Calas." We too, like the
passionate actresses who crowned his image in the great
comedy-house while--as they say--he bowed his head so low that his
forehead touched the front of his box, acclaim him still as the
Messiah of the Liberty of the human intellect.

How admirable it is to come back to the spirit and temper of
Voltaire from the fussy self-love and neurotic introspections of
our modern egoists. The new fashionable doctrine among the
"intellectuals" is that one is to live in one's ivory tower and let the
world go; live in one's ivory tower while brutal and detestable
people tyrannise over the gentle and sensitive; live in one's ivory
tower while the heavy hand of popular ignorance lies like a dead
weight upon all that is fine and rare; live in one's ivory tower while