may be shown from a hundred passages in his correspondence and writings, an abject courtier and a servile adulator of kings. "I ask," says the first petitioner, speaking for all the others--"I ask that the image of this man shall not appear upon our public squares, to cast insult in the face of the country. I ask that this disgrace be spared France." The senatorial report then goes on to say that there are two Voltaires--the Voltaire described in the petition, and the Voltaire who wrote _La Henriade_, who, by various masterpieces in poetry and the drama, placed himself near Horace, Corneille, and Boileau; Voltaire the historian, to whom we are indebted for _Le Siècle de Louis XIV._, the essay _Sur l'Esprit et sur les Mœurs des Nations_, and that perfect model of rapid and lively narration, _L'Histoire de Charles XII._; the Voltaire, in fine, whose name could not be covered with oblivion without obscuring some of the glories of French literature. No, continues the report, whatever may be asserted to the contrary, all of Voltaire is not in some shafts of satire which fell from the ill-humor of the partisan and the angry writer, in pamphlets against religion, as poor in good taste and good sense as in true science, in a poem in which it is most sad to see wit and talent pressed into the disreputable service of ornamenting the wretched obscenity of the argument; all of Voltaire is not in single passages selected from a correspondence of sixty years. If in these were the whole of Voltaire, his memory would long since have been accursed or dead, his works long since have been without readers or publishers, and the idea of raising a statue in his honor would have occurred to no one. Although the avowal is a painful one, it must be confessed that Voltaire has himself and the deplorable errors of his genius alone to blame for the bitterness of the recriminations which injure his brilliant fame. He has too often been unjust to others not to expect that others should be unjust to him. It is his own fault if his name recalls to pious thinkers, to timid hearts, to the faith of ardent souls, only the writer who would not respect in others the noble hopes he himself had lost. Voltaire desired to be the leader of incredulity. He was; and now he pays the penalty for it. Something equivocal remains, and will ever remain associated with his fame. Respectable people can consent to award him eulogies and statues only with distinctions and reserves. The declared enemy of disorder and demagogism, he is sometimes invoked as a seditious tribune, as a burner of churches; and one of the most elegant minds has left in his writings, along with a great many marvellous works, food for passions which, in his better days, his good taste and his good sense would energetically condemn. The report concludes against asking the revocation of the permission granted by the government, on the ground that it will be understood by all that the honor of a statue is