We get an idea of the kind of imperial authority which attached to Voltaire’s judgment, from the eagerness with which Turgot sought, without revealing his name, an opinion from Ferney as to the worth of a translation with which he lightened the heavy burden of his intendance at Limoges, a translation of the Eclogues and Fourth Æneid into French metric verse. ‘They say,’ wrote Turgot, ‘that he is so busy with his Encyclopædia as neither to speak nor to write to any one.’ If Turgot could have seen Voltaire’s correspondence for 1770, he would have found out how far this rumour was from the truth, and in fact he did get an answer to his own letter; but it can hardly have been very much more satisfactory than silence would have been, for Voltaire, while profuse in praise of the fidelity and spirit of the translation, unfortunately did not detect that it was meant for anything more ambitious than simple prose with enthusiasm in it.[279] As Turgot especially valued in the patriarch his ’superb ear,’ the blow was as sharp as it well could be. He was little concerned or surprised on learning the fallacious reasoning of the poet in political economy. ‘Reasoning,’ he adds, ‘has never been Voltaire’s strong point.’[280] And that was true in matters of abstract science, but he was an unrivalled populariser of the results of other people’s reasoning, from Newton’s Principia down to Middleton’s Free Enquiry, and this popularisation was what the conditions of the time caused to be most ardently demanded. The proof of the demand we may see in the extraordinary respect and curiosity, or dislike and alarm, with which Voltaire for the twenty crowning years of his life was regarded throughout the whole of civilised Europe.