Voltaire’s innovations extended beyond the introduction of more masculine treatment. Before his time romantic subjects had been regarded with disfavour, and Corneille’s Bajazet was considered a bold experiment. Racine was more strictly classic, and dramatists went on handling the same ancient fables, ‘Thebes, or Pelops’ line, or the tale of ‘Troy divine,’ just as the Greeks had done, or just as the painters in the Catholic times had never wearied of painting the two eternal figures of human mother and divine child. Voltaire treated the classic subjects as others treated them, and if Œdipe misses the depth, delicate reserve and fateful gloom of the Greeks, Mérope at any rate breathes a fine and tragic spirit. But his restless mind pressed forward into subjects which Racine would have shuddered at, and every quarter of the universe became in turn a portion of the Voltairean stage. L’Orphelin de la Chine introduces us to China and Genghis-Khan, Mahomet to Arabia and its prophet, Tancrede to Sicily; in Zulime we are among Moors, in Alzire with Peruvians. This revolutionary enlargement of subject was significant of a general and very important enlargement of interest which marked the time, and led presently to those contrasts between the condition of France and the imaginary felicity and nobleness of wilder countries, which did so much to breed an irresistible longing for change. Voltaire’s high-minded Scythians, generous Peruvians, and the rest, prepared the way along with other influences for that curious cosmopolitanism, that striking eagerness to believe in the equal virtuousness and devotion inherent in human nature, independently of the religious or social form accidentally imposed upon them, which found its ultimate outcome, first in an ardent passion for social equality, and a depreciation of the special sanctity of the current religion, and next in the ill-fated emancipating and proselytising aims of the Revolution, and in orators of the human race.