negative criticism, with which the Encyclopædic design had once thrown it into alliance. Diderot, the third chief of the attack, does even fuller justice than Rousseau to Voltaire’s share in stimulating thought and opening the mind of France; and in spite of the extravagance of its first clause, there is a glimpse of true discrimination in the characteristic sentence—‘Were I to call him the greatest man nature has produced, I might find people to agree with me; but if I say that she has never yet produced, and is never likely to produce again, a man so extraordinary, only his enemies will contradict me.’[299] This panegyric was specially disinterested, because Voltaire’s last years had been not least remarkable for his bitter antipathy to the dogmatic atheism and dogmatic materialism of that school, with which Diderot was most intimate personally, and with whose doctrines, if he did not at all times seem entirely to share them, he had at any rate a warmer sympathy than with any other system of that negative epoch, when every chief thinker was so vague positively, so weak constructively, and only the subalterns, like D’Holbach and Helvétius, presumed to push on to conclusions. The story of Voltaire’s many long-sustained and unflagging endeavours to procure whatever redress might be possible for the victims of legal injustice, has been very often told, and mere commemoration of these justly renowned achievements may suffice here. ‘The worst of the worthy sort of people,’ he once said, ‘is that they are such cowards. A man groans over wrong, he shuts his lips, he takes his supper, he forgets.’[300] Voltaire was not of that temper. He was not only an extremely humane man; extraordinary vividness of imagination, lack of which is at the root of so much cruelty, and unparalleled sympathetic quality, thinness of which explains so much appalling indifference, animated him to a perseverance in protecting the helpless, which entitles him to a place by the side of Howard and the noblest philanthropists. There were three years in which the chief business of his life was to procure the rehabilitation of the name of the unfortunate Calas, and the payment of a money recompense to his family. He agitated the whole world with indignation and pity by means of narratives, pleas, short statements and long statements, passionate appeals and argumentative appeals. Powerful ministers, fine ladies, lawyers, men of letters, were all constrained by his importunate solicitations to lend an ear to the cause of reason and tolerance, and to lift up an arm in its vindication. The same tremendous enginery was again brought into play in the case of Sirven. In the case of La Barre and his comrade D’Etallonde, his tenacity was still more amazing and heroic. For twelve years he persevered in the attempt to have the memory of La Barre rehabilitated. One of the judicial authorities concerned in that atrocious exploit, struck with horror at the thought of being held