“This is no longer a time for jesting: witty things do not go well with massacres. What? These Busirises in wigs destroy in the midst of horrible tortures children of sixteen! And that in face of the verdict of ten upright and humane judges! And the victim suffers it! People talk about it for a moment, and the next they are hastening to the comic opera; and barbarity, become the more insolent for our silence, will to-morrow cut throats juridically at pleasure. Here Calas broken on the wheel, there Sirven condemned to be hung, further off a gag thrust into the mouth of a lieutenant-general, a fortnight after that five youths condemned to the flames for extravagances that deserved nothing worse than Saint Lazare. Is this the country of philosophy and pleasure? It is the country rather of the Saint Bartholomew massacre. Why, the Inquisition would not have ventured to do what these Jansenist judges have done.”[189] When he had received D’Alembert’s letter, ending as we have seen, his remonstrance waxed vehement: ‘What, you would be content to laugh? We ought rather to resolve to seek vengeance, or at any rate to leave a coimtry where day after day such horrors are committed.... No, once more, I cannot bear that you should finish your letter by saying, I mean to laugh. Ah, my friend, is it a time for laughing? Did men laugh when they saw Phalaris’s bull being made red-hot?’[190] This revival in the tribunals of Paris and the provincial towns alike, of the ignorant fanaticism and the unscientific jurisprudence of the most unenlightened times, was the more bitter and insupportable from the new light which shone around such horrors. Beccaria’s treatise on Offences and Penalties had just been translated into French by Morellet, and furnished a strange commentary upon the atrocities of Toulouse and Abbeville. It seemed, men said, as if at every striking vindication of the rights of humanity the genius of cruelty broke its chains, and, to prove the futility of all such vindications, inspired new acts of barbarism and violence.[191] The philosophic group had yielded to a premature exultation, and in their inexperience supposed that they who planted the tree should see the gathering-in of the fruit. The reign of reason was believed to be close at hand, and this belief made the visible recrudescence of fanatical unreason signally insupportable. It is a high honour to Voltaire and his disciples that the trial did not prove too strong for their faith, and that when they saw how far too sanguine they had been, they were more astonished than they were discouraged, and their energy redoubled with the demands made upon it. The meaner partisans of an orthodoxy which can only make wholly sure of itself by injustice to adversaries, have always loved to paint the Voltairean school in the character of demons, enjoying their work of destruction with a sportive and impish delight. They may have rejoiced