Voltaire so well perceived the influence that metaphysics exercise over the general bias of men's minds that to combat Leibnitz he wrote _Candide_. He took up a curious whim against final causes, optimism, free will, in short, against all the philosophical opinions that exalt the dignity of man; and he composed _Candide_, that work of a diabolical gayety, for it appears to be written by a being of a different nature from ourselves, insensible to our condition, well pleased with our sufferings, and laughing like a demon or an ape at the miseries of that human species with which he has nothing in common.... _Candide_ brings into action that scoffing philosophy, so indulgent in appearance, in reality so ferocious; it presents human nature under the most lamentable point of view, and offers us, in the room of every consolation, the sardonic grin which frees us from all compassion for others by making us renounce it for ourselves. When Madame de Stael comes in due course to speak of the masterpiece of Goethe, his "Faust," she prepares her French readers to be shocked with a first disappointment. She says: Certainly we must not expect to find in it either taste, or measure, or the art that selects and terminates, but if the imagination could figure to itself an intellectual chaos, such as the material chaos has often been described, the _Faust_ of Goethe should in propriety have been composed at that epoch.... The drama of _Faust_ certainly is not a good model. Whether it be considered as an offspring of the delirium of the mind, or of the satiety of reason, it is to be wished that such productions may not be multiplied; but when such a genius as that of Goethe sets itself free from all restrictions the crowd of thoughts is so great that on every side they break through and trample down the barriers of art. We close our series of extracts by giving what this most brilliant among the French women that have been at the same time great talkers and great writers found to say of that high art of conversation in which her countrymen surpass the world and in which she surpassed her countrymen: