charlatanry to pretend to paint a personage with whom you have never lived.’[243] Napoleon, in the memorable campaign of 1812, coming to various places which Voltaire had occasion to describe in his History of Charles XII., found his account weak and inaccurate, and threw it aside in favour of Adlerfeldt. This was to be expected from the very merit of the book; for how should a picture, painted in large for the general instruction of the world, satisfy the minute requirements of strategical topography? It was precisely Voltaire’s object to separate history from geography, statistics, anecdote, biography, tactics, and to invest it with an independent character and quality apart from all these. It is another of the distinctions of his new method of writing history that, with the exception of the book on Charles XII., he throws persons and personal interests into a second place, as being no more than instruments or convenient names for critical turning-points in the large movements of peoples. In the narration of the rise of Russia to a place among civilised nations, the character of Peter the Great inevitably comes into marked prominence, because when a population lies on the stagnant level of barbarism, the first man who summons them to undertake the task of national elevation constitutes an element of paramount importance in their annals. In proportion, however, as they rise to the fulfilment of this surpassing work, the importance of the heroic individual diminishes; as the national self-consciousness and collective powers become greater, the figure of the individual shows less.