Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/268

 translated many English works, and published some twenty volumes of a magazine which, with much greater vivacity, carried on the work of the Dutch journalists. These writers were eclipsed by Voltaire, whose epoch-making visit to England lasted from 1726 to 1729. Voltaire, as Mr. Morley says, 'left France a poet and returned to it a sage.' The Lettres Anglaises appeared in 1733, and Voltaire was the ambassador who definitely proclaimed the new alliance between the French and English mind.

The full story, as told by M. Texte, is very interesting, and obviously suggests one comment. The man who was told that so many tons of water fell over Niagara, very naturally asked, Why shouldn't they? That France and England should come into intellectual contact was surely inevitable. The difficulty would have been to keep them apart. Historians of politics or commerce would have no difficulty in showing why the England of George I. should be much more interesting in France than the England of Charles II. The French refugees, no doubt, stimulated, but they could also presuppose, an interest in the nation which had taken so important a position in Europe. Many subsidiary