The Right Hon. John Morley testifies: “Voltaire was the very eye of modern illumination. It was he who conveyed to his generation in a multitude of forms the consciousness at once of the power and the rights of human intelligence. Another might well have said of him what he magnanimously said of his famous contemporary, Montesquieu, that humanity had lost its title-deeds, and he had recovered them. The four-score volumes which he wrote are the monument, as they were the instrument, of a new renascence. They are the fruit and representation of a spirit of encyclopaedic curiosity and productiveness. Hardly a page of all these countless leaves is common form. Hardly a sentence is there which did not come forth alive from Voltaire’s own mind, or which was said because some one else had said it before. Voltaire was a stupendous power, not only because his expression was incomparably lucid, or even because his sight was exquisitely keen and clear, but because he saw many new things, after which the spirits of others were unconsciously groping and dumbly yearning. Nor was this all. Voltaire was ever in the front and centre of the fight. His life was not a mere chapter in a history of literature. He never counted truth a treasure to be discreetly hidden in a napkin. He made it a perpetual war cry, and emblazoned it on a banner that was many a time rent, but was never out of the field.” We may fitly conclude with Browning’s incisive lines in _The Two Poets of Croisie_:— _“Ay, sharpest, shrewdest steel that ever stabbed_ _To death Imposture through the armour joints.”_ SELECTIONS FROM VOLTAIRE’S WORKS History The world is old, but history is of yesterday.—_Mélanges Historiques_. If you would put to profit the present time, one must not spend his life in propagating ancient fables.—_Ibid_. A mature man who has serious business does not repeat the tales of his nurse.—_Ibid_. Search through all nations and you will not find one whose history does not begin with stories worthy of the Four Sons of Aymon and of Robert the Devil.—_Politique et Legislation._ Ancient histories are enigmas proposed by antiquity to posterity, which understands them not—_Dict. Phil._ (Art. “Histoire”). A real fact is of more value than a hundred antitheses.—_Melanges Historiques_. I have a droll idea. It is that only people who have written tragedies can throw interest into our dry and barbarous history. There is necessary in a history, as in a drama, exposition, knotty plot, and _dénouement_, with agreeable episode.—_Corr. gén._ 1740. They have made but the history of the kings, not that of the nation. It seems that during fourteen hundred years there were only kings, ministers, and generals among the Gauls. But our morals, our laws, our customs, our intelligence—are these then nothing?—_Corr_., 1740. Is fraud sanctified by being antiquated?—_Sottisier_.