[4] The spirit and tendency of Locke's work appear in the short preface to the English version of the Latin _Epistola de Tolerantia_, which had already met with a general approbation in France and Holland (1689). "This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the principal occasion of our miseries and confusions. But whatever has been the occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure. We have need of more generous remedies than what have yet been made use of in our distemper. It is neither declarations of indulgence, nor acts of comprehension, such as have yet been practised, or projected amongst us, that can do the work. The first will but palliate, the second increase our evil. Absolute Liberty, just and true Liberty, equal and impartial Liberty, is the thing that we stand in need of." The second Letter, styled "A Second Letter concerning Toleration," is dated May 27th, 1690--the year of the publication of his _Essay on the Human Understanding_; the third, the longest, and in some respects the most eloquent, "A Third Letter for Toleration," bears the date June 20th, 1693. [5] Voltaire ridiculed certain peculiarities of Shakespeare when mediocre French writers and critics began to find in his "barbarities" an excuse for irreverence at the expense of Racine, but he never tires of reiterating his admiration for the country of Locke and Hume, of Bolingbroke and Newton. A hundred phrases could be gathered from his correspondence extending over half a century, in which this finds serious or extravagant utterance. Even in the last decades of his life, when he sees the France of the future arising, he writes to Madame Du Deffand: "How trivial we are compared with the Greeks, the Romans, and the English"; and to Helvétius, about the same period (1765), he admits the profound debts which France and Europe owe to the adventurous thought of England. He even forces Frederick the Great into reluctant but definite acquiescence with his enthusiasm--"Yes, you are right; you French have grace, the English have the depth, and we Germans, we have caution." [6] James Thomson, who distinguished himself from the author of the _Seasons_, and defined his own literary aims by the initials B. V., _i.e._, Bysshe Vonalis (Novalis), though possessing neither the wide scholarship nor the depth of thought of Leopardi, occasionally equals the great Italian in felicity of phrase and in the poignant expression of the world-sorrow. Several of the more violent pamphlets on religious themes ascribed to him are of doubtful authenticity. He died in 1882, the year after the death of Carlyle.