them, by leading them as if by the hand, without their perceiving it. A good book lent to them, which they read at leisure, produces upon them surer effects, because they do not then blush to be subjugated by the superior reason of an antagonist.

WE ARE in this world only to do good in it.

THE more you know, the less sure you are.

I

COUNTRY LIFE

From the Correspondence>

TO MADAME DU DEFFAND

If I dared

OWE life and health to the course I have taken. I would believe myself wise, so happy am I. I have lived only since the day I chose my retreat; every other kind of life would now be insupportable to me. Paris is necessary to you; to me it would be deadly: every one must remain in his element. I am very sorry that mine is incompatible with yours, and it is assuredly my only affliction. You wished also to try the country: it is not suitable to you. The taste for proprietorship and labor is absolutely necessary when you live in the country. I have very extensive possessions, which I cultivate. I make more account of your drawing-room than of my grain-fields and my pastures; but it was my destiny to end my career between drills, cows, and Genevese.

TO DUPONT

VAST rustic house, with wagons loaded with the spoils of the

A fields, coming and going by four great gateway's. The pil

lars of oak which sustain the whole frame are placed at equal distances upon pedestals of stone; long stables are seen on the right and on the left. Fifty cows, properly fastened, occupy one side, with their calves; the horses and oxen are on the other side: their fodder falls into their racks from immense mows above. The floors where the grain is threshed are in the middle; and you know that all the animals lodged in their several places in this great edifice have a lively sense that the forage, the hay, the

oats, which it contains, belong to them of right. To the south of these beautiful monuments of agriculture are the poultry-yards and sheepfolds; to the north are the presses, store-rooms, fruithouses; to the east are the abodes of the manager and thirty servants; toward the west extend large meadows, pastured and fertilized by all the animals, companions of the labor of man. The trees of the orchard, loaded with fruits, small and great, are still another source of wealth. Four or five hundred beehives are set up near a little stream which waters this orchard. The bees give to the possessor a considerable harvest of honey and wax, without his troubling himself with all the fables which are told of that industrious creature; without endeavoring in vain to learn whether that nation lives under the rule of a pretended queen who presents her subjects with sixty to eighty thousand children. There are some avenues of mulberry-trees as far as the eye can reach, the leaves of which nourish those precious worms which are not less useful than the bees. A part of this vast inclosure is formed by an impenetrable rampart of hawthorn, neatly clipped, which rejoices the senses of smell and sight.

I

VOLTAIRE TO ROUSSEAU

From the Correspondence>

HAVE received, monsieur, your new book against the human race; I thank you for it. You will please men to whom you tell truths which concern them, but you will not correct them. One could not paint in stronger colors the horrors of human society, from which our ignorance and our weakness expect so many consolations. No one has ever employed so much intellect in the attempt to prove us beasts. A desire seizes us to walk on four paws, when we read your work. Nevertheless, as it is more than sixty years since I lost the habit, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to resume it; and I leave that natural mode of walking to those who are more worthy of it than you and I. Nor can I embark to go among the savages of Canada: first because the maladies with which I am afflicted detain me near the greatest physician in Europe, and I should not find the same succor among the Missouris; secondly because war has

broken out in that country, and the example of our nation has rendered the savages almost as wicked as we are. I limit myself to be a peaceful savage in the solitude which I have chosen in your country, where you ought to be.

I agree with you that literature and the sciences have sometimes been the cause of much evil. The enemies of Tasso rendered his life a tissue of misfortunes; those of Galileo made him groan in prison at the age of seventy years for having known. the motion of the earth, and what was more shameful, they compelled him to retract. No sooner had your friends begun the 'Dictionnaire Encyclopédique' than those who presumed to be their rivals called them deists, atheists, and even Jansenists.

If I dared to reckon myself among those whose labors have been recompensed by persecution alone, I should show you men in a rage to destroy me, from the day that I gave the tragedy of 'Edipe'; I should show you a library of ridiculous calumnies printed against me; an ex-Jesuit priest, whom I saved from capital punishment, paying me by defamatory libels for the service which I had rendered him; I should show you a man still more culpable, printing my own work upon the 'Age of Louis XIV.,' with notes, in which the most brutal ignorance poured forth the most infamous impostures; . . I should show you society infested with this kind of men, unknown to all antiquity, who, not being able to embrace an honest calling, whether that of workman or of lackey, and knowing unfortunately how to read and write, become courtiers of literature, live upon our works, steal manuscripts, disfigure them, and sell them; . . I should paint you ingratitude, imposture, and rapine pursuing me for forty years, even to the foot of the Alps, even to the brink of my tomb. But what shall I conclude from all these tribulations? That I ought not to complain; that Pope, Descartes, Bayle, Camoens, and a hundred others, have experienced the same injustice and greater; that this destiny is that of almost all those whom the love of letters has too powerfully influenced.

Confess, monsieur, that these are trifling private misfortunes, which the community scarcely perceives. What does it matter to the human race that some hornets pillage the honey of some bees? Men of letters make a great noise about all these little quarrels; the rest of the world does not know them, or laughs at them.

Of all the bitternesses spread over human life, these are the least fatal. The thorns attached to literature and to the reputation which it gives are flowers compared with other evils, which in all times have overwhelmed the earth. Admit that neither Cicero, nor Varro, nor Lucretius, nor Virgil, nor Horace, had the least share in the proscriptions. Marius was an ignorant man; the barbarous Sylla, the debauched Antony, the imbecile Lepidus, read little of Plato and Socrates; and as to that tyrant without courage, Octavius Cepias, surnamed so unworthily Augustus, he was merely a detestable assassin while he was deprived of the society of men of letters.

Confess that Petrarch and Boccaccio did not cause the intestine troubles of Italy; confess that the badinage of Marot did not cause the massacre of St. Bartholomew, nor the tragedy of 'The Cid' the troubles of the Fronde. Great crimes have seldom been committed except by celebrated ignoramuses. That which makes, and will always make, of this world a vale of tears, is the insatiable cupidity and the indomitable pride of men, from Thomas Kouli-kan who did not know how to read, to a clerk of the tax office who knows only how to cipher. Literature nourishes the soul, rectifies it, consoles it: it was of service to you, monsieur, at the time when you wrote against it. You are like Achilles who inveighed against glory, and like Father Malebranche whose brilliant imagination wrote against imagination.

If any one ought to complain of literature, it is myself, since at all times and in all places it has served to persecute me: but we must love it, despite the abuse which is made of it, as we must love society, the agreeableness of which is corrupted by so many wicked men; as we must love our country, whatever injustice we suffer in it; as we must love and serve the Supreme Being, notwithstanding the superstitions and fanaticism which so often dishonor his worship.

M. Chappuis informs me that your health is very bad: you should come to re-establish it in your native air, to enjoy liberty, to drink with me the milk of our cows, and browse our herbs. I am very philosophically, and with the most tender esteem, etc.

THE

THE DRAMA

From a Letter to an Italian Nobleman

HE theatre is the chef-d'œuvre of society. Men in general are compelled to labor at the mechanic arts, and their time is happily occupied; while men of rank and wealth have the misfortune to be abandoned to themselves, to the ennui inseparable from idleness, to gaming more fatal than ennui, to petty factions more dangerous than play and idleness.

What is the true drama? It is the art of teaching virtue and good manners by action and dialogue. How cold in comparison is the eloquence of monologue! Have we retained a single phrase of thirty or forty thousand moral discourses? And do we not know by heart admirable sentences placed with art in interesting dialogues? "Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto."

It is this which makes one of the great merits of Terence; it is that of our own good tragedies, of our good comedies. They have not excited a profitless admiration; they have often corrected men. I have seen a prince pardon an injury after a representation of the clemency of Augustus. A princess, who had despised her mother, went away to throw herself at her feet after witnessing the scene in which Rhodope asks her mother's forgiveness. A man well known sought reconciliation with his wife after seeing 'Préjudice à la Mode.' I saw the proudest man in the world become modest after the comedy of the Glorieux.' And I could cite more than six sons of distinguished families whom the comedy of the 'Prodigal Son' reformed. If our bankers are no longer coarse, if the people of the court are vain dandies no longer, if doctors have abjured the robe, the cap, and consultations in Latin, if some pedants have become men,- to what are we indebted for it? To the theatre, to the theatre alone.

What pity ought we not, then, to have for those who wage war upon this first of the literary arts; who imagine that we ought to judge the theatre of to-day by the trestles of our ages. of ignorance; and who confound Sophocles, Menander, Varius, and Terence, with Tabarin and Punch! But how much more to be pitied are they who admit Punch and Tabarin, while rejecting 'Polyeucte,' 'Athalie,' Zaïre,' and 'Alzire'! Such are the inconsistencies into which the human mind falls every day.