The difference between Voltaire and Rousseau was really that between a man of talent and a man of genius. Voltaire, brilliant, adroit, full of resource, quick as a flash, versatile, with immense powers of working, with a life full of literary successes, has not left behind him a single masterpiece. He comes in everywhere second best. As a tragedian he is inferior to Racine; as a wit and comic writer far below Molière; and he is quite surpassed as a historian and biographer by many modern French authors. No germinating ideas are to be found in his writings, no seed corn for future harvests. He thought himself a philosopher, and was so regarded by others; but neither had his philosophy any roots to it. A sufficient proof of this is the fact that he shared the superficial optimism of the English deists, as expressed by Bolingbroke and Pope, until the Lisbon earthquake, by destroying thirty thousand people, changed his whole mental attitude. Till then he could say with Pope, "Whatever is, is right." After that, most things which are, appeared to him fatally and hopelessly wrong. That thirty thousand persons should perish in a few minutes, in great suffering, he thought inconsistent with the goodness of God. But take the whole world over, thirty thousand people are continually perishing, in the course of a few hours or days. What difference does it make, in a philosophical point of view, if they die all at once in a particular place, or at longer intervals in many places? Voltaire asks, "What crime had those infants committed who lie crushed on their mother's breasts?" What crime, we reply, have the infants committed who have been dying by millions, in suffering, since the world began? "Was Lisbon," he asks, "more wicked than Paris?" But had Voltaire never noticed before that wicked people often live on in health and pleasure, while the good suffer and die? Voltaire did not see, what it requires very little philosophy to discover, that a Lisbon earthquake really presents no more difficulty to the reason than the suffering and death of a single child.