Carlyle, in his depreciatory essay, acknowledged: “Perhaps there is no writer, not a mere compiler, but writing from his own invention or elaboration, who has left so many volumes behind him; and if to the merely arithmetical we add a critical estimate, the singularity is still greater; for these volumes are not written without an appearance of due care and preparation; perhaps there is not one altogether feeble and confused treatise, nay, one feeble and confused sentence to be found in them.” And at the end he admits: “He gave the death-stab to modern Superstition! _That_ horrid incubus, which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, is passing away; with all its racks and poison chalices, and foul sleeping-draughts, is passing away without return. It was a most weighty service.” One of the strangest of tributes to Voltaire is that from Ruskin, the disciple of Carlyle. In his _Fors Clavigera_ (vol. viii., p. 76) he says: “There are few stronger adversaries to St. George than Voltaire. But my scholars are welcome to read as much of Voltaire as they like. His voice is mighty among the ages.” Dr. D. F. Strauss wrote: “Voltaire’s historical significance has been illustrated by the observation of Goethe that, as in families whose existence has been of long duration, Nature sometimes at length produces an individual who sums up in himself the collective qualities of all his ancestors, so it happens also with nations, whose collective merits (and demerits) sometimes appear epitomised in one individual person. Thus in Louis XIV. stood forth the highest figure of a French monarch. Thus, in Voltaire, the highest conceivable and congenial representative of French authorship. We may extend the observation farther, if, instead of the French nation only, we take into view the whole European generation on which Voltaire’s influence was exercised. From this point of view we may call Voltaire emphatically the representative writer of the eighteenth century, as Goethe called him, in the highest sense, the representative writer of France.”