To every branch of letters Voltaire brought the same splendid qualities of mind, and need I add the same defective qualities of conscience and carelessness of the truth when his personal glory or his material advancement were concerned? The sordid pages of his life would weary us in the turning, yet his native generosity and sympathy incline us to charity; and it is wonderful how his never-failing wit can temper his vindictiveness for us, now that the sting has lost its living poison. I have referred to Professor Dowden's unsatisfactory treatment of the international reactions which characterize the literary history of the eighteenth century. There is another omission which I have remarked in the book on a reperusal of the pages devoted to Rousseau and the encyclopedists. It might have been easily within the scope of a literary story of even moderate dimensions to have more explicitly accounted for the crumbling of the old classical ideal, to have shown that the once impregnable citadel of classical art was rotten at the base, and that those who still defended the imaginary stronghold were themselves the unconscious agents of its destruction. With reference to the irreligious influences of Cartesianism and the philosophical system of Bayle I shall say no more, save that the evident loss in prestige of the traditional religious faith, combined as it was with the rapid decentralization of the sovereign power in the state, must perforce make impossible the survival of literature on the old national basis. Again, in point of pure art a decline was inevitable in connection with the revival of Cartesianism among writers of the stamp of Fontenelle; for their prestige was synchronous with the triumph of the modern party in the famous quarrel; and no student of the _Art Poétique_ will fail to appreciate the æsthetical significance of an abandonment of classical standards of taste as an unimpeachable canon of art. Defending as Boileau did the supreme value of reason and good sense, what justification could he have found for poetry unless he had proved to the satisfaction of his generation that poetry better than any other mode of expression could render permanent the promptings of the diviner reason, as witness the eternal monuments of ancient art in the domain of poetry? The triumph of the moderns then turned men's faces in other directions, and whether literary art should henceforward advance or decline, it must at least strike root in a newer soil.