On the whole, Alexis de Tocqueville's own practice in life showed that he wrote not only with sincerity, but with earnestness, when he wrote those words. It was not of such Frenchmen as was Tocqueville that the author of that heavy sentence on France could have been thinking--that the French character was made up without conscience. We, for our part, cannot but maintain that Tocqueville is as much more solid as he may be less brilliant than his predecessor and fellow, Montesquieu. They were both too theoretical; that is, too exclusively French as distinguished, for instance, from English, in political philosophy. They began to be deductive, when to be inductive yet longer would have been their wiser part. In a word--like Guizot, too, the author of the "History of Civilization," and the minister of Citizen-King Louis Philippe--both Montesquieu and Tocqueville failed of escaping what the French would call the defect of their quality. XV. VOLTAIRE. 1694-1778. By the volume and the variety, joined to the unfailing brilliancy, of his production; by his prodigious effectiveness; and by his universal fame, Voltaire is undoubtedly entitled to rank first, with no fellow, among the eighteenth-century literary men, not merely of France, but of the world. He was not a great man, he produced no great single work, but he must nevertheless be pronounced a great writer. There is hardly any species of composition to which, in the long course of his activity, he did not turn his talent. It cannot be said that he succeeded splendidly in all; but in some he succeeded splendidly, and he failed abjectly in none. There is not a great thought, and there is not a flat expression, in the whole bulk of his multitudinous and multifarious works. Read him wherever you will, in the ninety-seven volumes (equivalent, probably in the aggregate, to two hundred volumes like the present) which, in one leading edition, collect his productions, you may often find him superficial, you may often find him untrustworthy, you will certainly often find him flippant, but not less certainly you will never find him obscure, and you will never find him dull. The clearness, the vivacity of this man's mind were something almost preternatural. So, too, were his readiness, his versatility, his audacity. He had no distrust of himself, no awe of his fellow-men, no reverence for God, to deter him from any attempt with his pen, however presuming. If a state ode were required, it should be ready to order at twelve to-morrow; if an epic poem--to be classed with the "Iliad" and the "AEneid "--the "Henriade" was promptly forthcoming, to answer the demand. He did not shrink from flouting a national idol, by freely finding fault with Corneille; and he lightly undertook the task of extinguishing a venerable form of Christianity, simply with pricks, innumerably repeated, of his tormenting pen.