which was established after the confusion of the fall of the Roman power before the inroads of the barbarians, and which constituted the Europe of the early and middle ages, are now tolerably well understood, and the historic continuity or identity of that order is typified in two institutions, which by the middle of the eighteenth century had reached very different stages of decay, and possessed very different powers of resisting attack. One was the German Empire, and the other was the Holy Catholic Church. Frederick dealt a definite blow to the first, and Voltaire did the same to the second. Those who read history and biography with a sturdy and childish pre-conception that the critical achievements in the long course of the world’s progress must of necessity have fallen to the lot of the salt of the earth, will find it hard to associate the beginning of the great overt side of modern movement with the two men who versified and wrangled together for some two and a half years in the middle of the eighteenth century at Berlin. It is hard to think of the old state, with all its memories of simple enthusiasm and wild valour and rude aspiration after some better order, finally disappearing into the chaos for which it was more than ripe, under the impulse of an arch cynic. And it is hard, too, to think that the civilising religion which was founded by a Jew, and first seized by Jews, noblest and holiest of their race, got its first and severest blow from one who was not above using a Jew to cheat Christians out of their money. But the fact remains of the vast work which this amazing pair had to do, and did.