Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/12

 lightenment he had enjoyed in England. The splendid English Letters which he wrote with that aim, and was afraid to publish, leaked out in 1734. The book was burned by the hangman, and he had to retire once more, for letting France know how enlightened England was in the days of George I.

I pass over twenty years of his strenuous and brilliant career. He wrote his most famous tragedies and histories; he made an ardent study of, and introduced to France, the new science of Isaac Newton, whose funeral he had witnessed in London; he was banished from his country for smiling at Adam and Eve; he deserted France for Germany, and then quarrelled with Frederick the Great; he tried liberal Switzerland, and found that it gave you liberty only to attack other people's dogmas; and in 1760 he settled at Ferney, since the shrine of Continental Rationalism, on the frontier, so that he could talk to Calvinists from the French side, and cross the border, if need were, to talk to France. But France was at his feet. For eighteen years more he showered his rain of publications on it. Even in those illiterate days some of his publications sold 300,000 copies. And when at last, in 1778, he was tempted to revisit Paris, the roar of delight, of esteem, of abject worship, overwhelmed him, and he died in a flood of glory.

To those last twenty years of his life belong the anti-Christian works reproduced in this volume. He was now a man of mature judgment, vast erudition, and grave humanitarian purpose. The common notion in England of Voltaire's works, as superficial gibes thrown out by the way in a brilliant career,