It consists of a rapid and forcible view of that disastrous period. But it contains no poetry. Voltaire's imagination was fertile, versatile, and gay; in some of his tragedies, he even rose to the passionate and energetic; but it wanted elevation--it wanted the fairy hue--the sublime transfusion of the material into the immaterial. It wanted, above all, a knowledge and love of nature. There is not a word in the "Henriade" descriptive of scenery, or storm, or calm, or night, or day, that is not commonplace, imitative, and without real imagery. Of imagery, indeed, he has no notion. Besides this, he always acted by his own verses as by those of others, and corrected them into tameness. In a word, the "Henriade" has no pretensions to success as an epic poem, and is, in whatever view we take of it, dull and tiresome. Even in his days it had not enjoyed the reputation it reached but for his admirable powers of reciting, by which he fascinated the circles of Paris, and the peculiar circumstances that rendered every other opinion in France an echo of those circles.[2] There is an amusing anecdote told, which shows, however, that the charm of his reading did not always suffice to gain unqualified approbation. One day so many petty criticisms were flung at him, that, irritated to the utmost, he exclaimed, "Then it is only fit to be burnt!" and threw the poem into the fire. The president Hainaut sprang forward, and saved it, saying, as he gave it back to the author, "You must not think that your poem is better than its hero. Yet, notwithstanding his faults, he was a great king, and the best of men." "Remember," the president afterwards wrote, "that it cost me a pair of lace ruffles to save it from the fire."