Voltaire was busy with literature during his whole life. He not only wrote continually himself, but he was a critic of the writings of others. His mind was essentially critical,--formed to analyze, discriminate sharply, compare, and judge by some universal standard of taste. Here, if anywhere, he ought to be at his best; here, if in any department, he should stand at the head of the world's board of literary censors. But here, again, he is not even second-rate; here, more than elsewhere, he shows how superficial are his judgments. He tests every writer by the French standard in the eighteenth century. Every word which Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, have said of other writers is full of value and interest to-day. But who would go to Voltaire for light on any book or author? We have an instinctive but certain conviction that all his views are limited by his immediate environment, perverted by his personal prejudices. Thus, he prefers Ariosto to the Odyssey, and Tasso's Jerusalem to the Iliad.[37] His inability to comprehend the greatness of Shakespeare is well known. He is filled with indignation because a French critic had called Shakespeare "the god of the stage." "The blood boils in my old veins," says he; "and what is frightful to think of, it was I myself who first showed to Frenchmen the few pearls to be found in the dunghill."[38] Chesterfield's Letters to his Son he considers "the best book upon education ever written."[39] This is the book in which a father teaches his son the art of polite falsehood, of which Dr. Johnson says that "it shows how grace can be united with wickedness,"--the book whose author is called by De Vere the philosopher of flattery and dissimulation. He admitted that there were some good things in Milton, but speaks of his conceptions as "odd and extravagant."[40] He thought Condorcet much superior to Pascal. The verses of Helvetius he believed better than any but those of Racine. The era was what Villemain calls "the golden age of mediocre writers;" and Voltaire habitually praised them all. But these writers mostly belonged to a mutual admiration society. The anatomist Tissot, in one of his physiological works, says that the genius of Diderot came to show to mankind how every variety of talent could be brought to perfection in one man. Diderot, in his turn, went into frantic delight over the novels of Richardson. "Since I have read these works," he says, "I make them my touchstone; those who do not admire them are self-condemned. O my friends, what majestic dramas are these three, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, and Pamela!" Such was the eighteenth century; and Voltaire belonged to it with all the intensity of his ardent nature. He may be said never to have seen or foreseen anything better. Living on the very verge of a great social revolution, he does not appear to have suspected what its nature would be, even if he suspected its approach. The cruelties of the Church