The life of Voltaire, which some conceive as a prolonged adolescence, has a very clear and instructive division into adolescence, manhood, and ripe age. All the works given in this volume belong to the last part, but we must glance at the others. François Marie Arouet was born, in the very comfortable _bourgeois_ family of a staid Parisian notary, in 1694. He became a precocious, sharp-eared boy. His godfather was an _abbé_, a kind of ecclesiastic--not usually a priest--in the France of the time who drew his income from the Church, and therefore felt more entitled than the ordinary layman to scoff at its dogmas and ignore its morals. He could plead the example of his bishops. Several of these _abbés_ visited the home of the Arouets, and gave little “Zozo” his first lessons in Biblical criticism. In the great college of the Jesuits he learned to articulate his scepticism. In his seventeenth year he set out on the career of letters. The kindly _abbé_, who, having answered to God for him at the baptismal font, felt bound to guide his fortunes, introduced him to one of the most brilliant and dissolute circles in Paris. It was a kind of club of _abbés_, nobles, writers, etc., and in it he would rapidly attain that large and peculiar knowledge of the Old Testament which appears in his writings. He sparkled so much at the suppers of the Epicureans, and earned such reputation, that he was put in the Bastille for certain naughty epigrams, which he had not written; and he was exiled for another epigram, on a distinguished sinner, which he had written. In the pensive solitude of the Bastille he changed his name to Voltaire.[1] He emerged bolder than ever, wrote tragedies and poems and epigrams, was welcomed in the smartest salons of Paris, and behaved as a young gentleman of the time was expected to behave, until his thirty-first year.