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 but was the first to introduce them to French readers. England appeared to him as at once the land of reason and the paradise of men of letters. He was never tired of telling how posts in the State had been conferred on Prior and Addison, and how Newton and Pope were held in higher esteem than the king's ministers. He was convinced that among the chief results of the liberty of thought which prevailed among us were the advances made in philosophy and science by Locke and Newton. He studied and criticised the works of Locke, and became a chief exponent of the theories of Newton, whom he never mentioned but with reverence. But it was from the number of sceptical English philosophers, who had set up natural against revealed religion, that he received the impulse which may be regarded as forming a main influence in the rest of his career. It is true he was already a professed disciple of natural religion. But it was one thing to hold opinions in common with the abbés and rakes among whom he lived in Paris, and another to find those opinions gravely maintained by philosophers. Hitherto his shafts against Christianity had been mere jests; he now gathered the means of reinforcing them with facts and arguments. Shaftesbury (whose opinions he recognised again as versified by Pope), Bolingbroke, Toland, Collins, Wollaston, Chubb, formed the school in which his deism was confirmed and rendered aggressive.

But the main influence which England exercised on him was through its general atmosphere of free thought. From the standpoint of these shores tyranny of all sorts in France wore a new aspect. There he had only dreamed of what a country might be if relieved from the