It is impossible to read the multitudinous volumes of Voltaire’s correspondence, and they are being added to every two or three years, with entire satisfaction. They are wittier than any other letters in the world. For lightness, swiftness, grace, spontaneity, you can find no second to them, at however long an interval. But they abound in many things which are disagreable in the letters of an old man who had so true an interest in the spread of virtue, knowledge, and the other conditions of human dignity. These, however, may be passed over as the innocent and unconscious unseemliness of a very gay nature living in a very free age. It is less easy to banish the unpleasant impressions with which we find him playing the equivocal part of being all things to all men. One would have been pleased to have a little more stiffness, a little less pliancy of phrase. We would not go through the world insisting on grim Puritanic earnestness at every moment of a man’s life, but Voltaire’s lively complaisance with all sorts of unworthy people is something worse than unedifying. One can hardly help sympathising with D’Alembert’s remonstrance. ‘You have rather spoilt the people who persecute us. ’Tis true you have had greater need than anybody else to keep them quiet, and that you have been obliged to offer a candle to Lucifer to save yourself from Beelzebub, but Lucifer has only grown the prouder, without Beelzebub growing the less malignant.’[281] The truth probably is that Voltaire did not always take—much thought of Lucifer or Beelzebub. For one thing, he was, as we have said more than once, intensely sympathetic by temperament, and in writing to a friend, or even an acquaintance only, he was for the moment animated by a lively good will and anxiety to be in harmony with his correspondent. There was nothing false in these purring pleasantries, with which he amused all correspondents alike. They came as naturally from his mobile and genial constitution, as an equality of prosaic moroseness comes from persons of fundamentally different constitutions. For another thing, the old fashion of his youth never dropped away from him, and the elaborate courteousness and friendly ardour of manner, which he had learnt among the aristocratic friends of the days of the Regency and afterwards at Paris and Versailles, did not desert him in the solitudes of the Jura. He was to the last a man of quality, as well as a crusher of the Infamous, and to the last he kept up the tone of one who had been a gentleman of the chamber to one king, and court-chamberlain to another. Voltaire’s temperament and earliest surroundings fully explain what was a more public, as well as more serious, falling away from the rigorous integrity which men are now accustomed to demand from the leaders of unpopular causes. His sins in this order are nearly as numerous as his public acts. Rousseau, perhaps we may say without breach of charity, as