Under the regency that followed, Voltaire got into trouble again and again through the sharpness of his pen, and at last, accused of verse that satirised the Regent, he was locked up--on the 17th of May, 1717--in the Bastille. There he wrote the first two books of his _Henriade_, and finished a play on OEdipus, which he had begun at the age of eighteen. He did not obtain full liberty until the 12th of April, 1718, and it was at this time--with a clearly formed design to associate the name he took with work of high attempt in literature--that Francois Marie Arouet, aged twenty-four, first called himself Voltaire. Voltaire's _OEdipe_ was played with success in November, 1718. A few months later he was again banished from Paris, and finished the _Henriade_ in his retirement, as well as another play, _Artemise_, that was acted in February, 1720. Other plays followed. In December, 1721, Voltaire visited Lord Bolingbroke, who was then an exile from England, at the Chateau of La Source. There was now constant literary activity. From July to October, 1722, Voltaire visited Holland with Madame de Rupelmonde. After a serious attack of small-pox in November, 1723, Voltaire was active as a poet about the Court. He was then in receipt of a pension of two thousand livres from the king, and had inherited more than twice as much by the death of his father in January, 1722. But in December, 1725, a quarrel, fastened upon him by the Chevalier de Rohan, who had him waylaid and beaten, caused him to send a challenge. For this he was arrested and lodged once more, in April, 1726, in the Bastille. There he was detained a month; and his first act when he was released was to ask for a passport to England. Voltaire left France, reached London in August, 1726, went as guest to the house of a rich merchant at Wandsworth, and remained three years in this country, from the age of thirty-two to the age of thirty-five. He was here when George I. died, and George II. became king. He published here his _Henriade_. He wrote here his "History of Charles XII." He read "Gulliver's Travels" as a new book, and might have been present at the first night of _The Beggar's Opera_. He was here whet Sir Isaac Newton died. In 1731 he published at Rouen the _Lettres sur les Anglais_, which appeared in England in 1733 in the volume from which they are here reprinted. H.M. LETTERS ON ENGLAND LETTER I.--ON THE QUAKERS