Page:Works of Voltaire Volume 01.djvu/23

Rh scribed by Goethe, Hugo, Pompery, Bradlaugh, Paine, and Ingersoll, we might believe with Ingersoll that it was Voltaire who sowed the seeds of liberty in the heart and brain of Franklin, Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, and that he did more to free the human race than any other of the sons of men. Hugo says that "between two servants of humanity which appeared eighteen hundred years apart, there was indeed a mysterious relation," and we might even agree that the estimate of the young philanthropist Édouard de Pompery was temperate when he said, "Voltaire was the best Christian of his times, the first and most glorious disciple of Jesus."

So whatever our authority, no matter how limited our investigation, the fact must be recognized that Voltaire, who gave to France her long-sought national epic in the Henriade, was in the front rank of her poets. For nearly a century his tragedies and dramas held the boards to extravagant applause. Even from his enemies we learn that he kept himself abreast of his generation in all departments of literature, and won the world's homage as a king of philosophers in an age of philosophers and encyclopædists.

He was the father of modern French, clear, unambiguous, witty without buffoonery, convincing without truculency, dignified without effort. He constituted himself the defender of humanity, toler-