When Voltaire heard of the case, he first thought, like the whole of France, that old Calas was guilty. The idea that a full bench of judges (there was no jury then in France) had caused an innocent man to be put to death, found no lodgment in his mind. But after he had heard the true story from the lips of young Donald Calas, he determined to spare no effort to have the iniquitous judgment reversed. He set to work at once, placing his large fortune at the disposal of the unfortunate family, engaging lawyers, preparing briefs for them, writing to men of power or influence, stirring public opinion by the publication of pamphlets and broadsides of all forms and descriptions,—such, for instance, as his Treatise on Toleration,' the most important of his writings on that subject. This campaign of his lasted no less than two years; during which, he said, he never smiled once without blaming himself for it. But success at last rewarded his efforts. Public indignation rose to such a height that the government of Louis XV. had to compel the Toulouse judges to reopen the case; with the result that Calas's memory was fully exonerated, and his family indemnified for the tortures it had undergone.

In other cases - those of Sieven, of La Barre, of Count de LallyTollendal, of Count de Morangier, of the serf peasantry of the Abbey of Saint Claude in the Jura mountains-Voltaire displayed the same energy on behalf of the victims of tyranny, not always but often with the same success. Moreover, he never allowed the public to rest. His short writings, most of them dealing with this great question of human liberty, are numbered during that period by the hundred. It must be added that in his struggle against fanaticism he was often carried too far; and that a great many of the pamphlets he at that time issued under assumed names, assail with unpardonable scurrility all the creeds in which he did not believe. His attacks against the Bible, and most of the dogmas of the Christian faith, nearly all belong to these years. Of Jesus himself he always spoke with sympathy and veneration.

But the people saw in him simply the great antagonist of tyrannical government and unequal privileges. They wanted to be allowed to pay him honor. They wanted him in Paris. The government of Louis XVI. had to allow him to visit the capital. He left Ferney on February 6th, 1778, reaching Paris on the 10th of the same month. His arrival in the city took all the proportions of a triumph. Wherever he went-in the streets, in the theatres, at the opera, at the Academy - he was the recipient of the most enthusiastic ovations. Everybody called on him. Benjamin Franklin brought to him his grandson, asking for the boy the old man's blessing: "God and Liberty," Voltaire said, in placing his hand over the head of the great American's grandson.

All this was too much excitement for a man who was over eightythree years old. It finally told on him. He had to take to his bed; and he died on the 30th of May, not quite four months after leaving Ferney.

As a writer, it is somewhat difficult to-day to assign to Voltaire his exact rank. He was primarily a man of action. He wrote with a purpose. He wished to effect a transformation of the public mind; and the high value of what he wrote, its adaptation to the end he had in view, is shown by the results which were achieved by him. His greatest gifts were clearness of statement and vividness of illustration. His many-sidedness has never been surpassed. It must be recognized, however, that he succeeded in prose work better than in

verse.

His complete works are perhaps more bulky than those of any other writer. This is what made him say, "A man does not ride to immortality with a load of one hundred volumes." Some of the editions of his works indeed number as many as ninety-two volumes. The most authoritative ones, though,- those of Kehl (1784-89), of Benchot (Paris: 1829-1839), and Moland (Paris: 1875-1884), — number respectively seventy-two, seventy-two, and fifty-two volumes.

Poetry fills many of these. There are first his dramatic works: about twenty tragedies and a dozen comedies. Strange to say, witty as he was, he never wrote an entertaining comedy. But he was highly gifted in tragedy. In 'Brutus,' in 'Zaïre,' in 'Alzire,' in 'Mahomet,' in 'Mérope,' in 'Tancrède,' are to be found pathetic scenes which justify the great applause with which they were received. Voltaire, however, cannot be considered one of the great dramatists of the world. He lacked power of concentration; he lacked the art of forgetting himself and living out, in his mind, the life of his characters: so that his dramas always present to us something artificial. And besides, he did not dare to free himself from the tyranny of the rules of classical tragedy as they had been stated in the preceding century.

His epic poem, the 'Henriade,' is a fine piece of narrative, but on the whole somewhat cold. Still, for fully a hundred years it was considered in France a great epic. Every educated Frenchman could recite from memory hundreds of its lines. The people were carried away by the generous sentiments of the work, which appealed a good deal less to posterity after the victory for which Voltaire had fought had been finally secured by the triumph of the French Revolution.

In light verse Voltaire excelled, and his philosophical poems also deserve high esteem. Among the latter must be especially mentioned the 'Discourses upon Man'; the 'Poem on the Disaster at Lisbon,'

on the occasion of an earthquake which destroyed thousands of lives; and the 'Poem on Natural Law,' a eulogy on Natural Religion.

Once at least, unhappily, Voltaire put his powers of verse composition to a use wholly unworthy of his genius, and even disgraceful. This was in his poem on Joan of Arc,- a scurrilous and decidedly dull production, in which, in trying to ridicule the idea that the pseudomystics of his time entertained of the heroic Maid of Orléans, he allowed himself to befoul even the chaste heroine of patriotism herself.

His chief glory as a writer, though, rests upon his prose works, of which this first must be said: that every line in them may be quoted as a model of perfect, clear, lucid, quick French style. His clearness of thought, and, thanks to his knowledge of the ex.t value of words, his precision of statement, cannot be surpassed.

In historical writing, his three master works-the 'History of Charles XII., King of Sweden,' 'The Age of Louis XIV.,' and the 'Essay on Manners' effected a revolution. They taught readers that other things were worth knowing of our ancestors' lives besides wars, battles, sieges, diplomatic negotiations, and feuds of royalty. He called their attention to the lives of the common people, and to the philosophical meaning of historical events. He thus made history a vehicle of his ideas relating to the improvement in the condition of mankind.

He did the same thing in his tales, which are delightful reading when they are not too licentious, as is sometimes the case. Of course Candide' is no fit reading, except for people whose taste and morals have been strengthened against the danger of corruption. Others, like 'Zadig,' 'Micromégas,' The Man with Forty Coins,' 'Jeannot and Colin,' are little gems that are unsurpassed in their kind.

For his views of philosophy and sociology the reader must turn to the Philosophical Letters' and the Philosophical Dictionary.' There, as well as in hundreds of shorter productions, which are collected in his works under the comprehensive title of 'Miscellanies,' the real Voltaire appears, more than anywhere else. There we discover the weapons which he so effectively used for the performance of his life work. A great deal of what is found in these collections would no doubt, in an age like ours, have appeared in daily, weekly. or monthly periodicals. But there was no free press, or any press at all deserving of the name, in France in the eighteenth century. There was - Voltaire knew it by his own experience no freedom of utterance, under penalty of imprisonment in the Bastille. This is why most of these works, whatever their size, were published under assumed names and as separate publications. Combined with

Voltaire's masterly strategy in the Calas and other similar affairs; and with what we know of his wonderful eloquence in conversation, they show that under another system of government Voltaire would have been wonderful as a journalist, parliamentary orator, and political leader. But he might not have achieved such great results for mankind as he did, having to fight for freedom when freedom was not yet in existence.

No one who wishes to know Voltaire should fail to acquaint himself with his correspondence. As a letter-writer he is unsurpassed, and his correspondence covers a period of over sixty years, of the most interesting in the history of mankind. We possess over ten thousand letters, written either by or to him; and this represents, very likely, only a small part of the epistolary activity of this extraordinary man.

T

THE IRREPRESSIBLE KING

From the History of Charles XII., King of Sweden'

COMPLETE the misfortunes of Sweden, her King persisted in remaining at Demotica, and still lived on the hope of aid from Turkey which he was never to receive.

Ibrahim-Molla, the haughty vizier who decreed the war against the Muscovites, against the wish of the sultan's favorite, was suffocated between two doors. The place of vizier had become so dangerous that no one dared fill it; it remained vacant for six months: at last the favorite, Ali Coumourgi, took the title. Then all the hopes of the King of Sweden were dashed: he knew Coumourgi the better because that schemer had served him when their interests accorded with his own.

He had been eleven months at Demotica, buried in idleness and neglect; this extreme inertia, following the most violent exertions, had at last given him the malady that he feigned. All Europe believed him dead; the council of regency at Stockholm heard no news of him. The senate came in a body to entreat his sister, Princess Ulrica Eleonora, to assume the regency during his prolonged absence. She accepted it; but when she saw that the senate would constrain her to make peace with the Czar Peter the Great, and with the King of Denmark, who were XXVI-967

attacking Sweden on all sides, she, rightly thinking that her brother would never consent, resigned her office, and sent to Turkey a detailed account of the affair.

The King received the packet from his sister at Demotica. His inborn spirit of despotism made him forget that formerly Sweden had been free, and that the senate had governed the realm conjointly with the kings. He regarded this body as a troop of servants who aspired to rule the house in their master's absence; and wrote them that if they pretended to govern, he would send them one of his boots to convey his orders!

To forestall therefore these supposed attempts to defy his authority in Sweden, and to defend his country, as he hoped nothing further from the Ottoman Porte, and could count only on himself, he informed the grand vizier that he wished to depart, and to return home by way of Germany.

M. Désaleurs, the French ambassador, who had taken the affairs of Sweden in hand, made the request in his own person. "Very good," said the vizier to Count Désaleurs: "did I not rightly say that before the year was out, the King of Sweden would ask leave to depart? Tell him to go or stay, as he chooses; but let him come to a decision, and fix the day of his departure, lest he plunge us a second time into the embarrassment he caused us at Bender."

Count Désaleurs softened this harsh message to the King. The day was set; but Charles wished, before leaving Turkey, to display the pomp of a great king, although he lived in the squalor of a fugitive. He gave to Grothusen the title of ambassador extraordinary, and sent him to take leave in due form at Constantinople, followed by eighty persons all superbly attired.

The secret springs which he touched to obtain the money for this outlay were more humiliating than the embassy was magnificent. Count Désaleurs lent the King forty thousand pieces; Grothusen had agents in Constantinople, who borrowed of a Jew at fifty per cent. interest a thousand pieces, a hundred thousand pieces of an English merchant, a thousand francs of a Turk.

Thus were brought together the means of playing before the divan the brilliant comedy of the Swedish embassy. Grothusen received all the honors that the Porte is wont to show ambassadors extraordinary on their day of audience. The purpose of all this performance was to obtain money from the grand vizier; but that minister was inexorable.