society he thus started in was opposed bit- sense his own master, with the command terly to the court-system of Louis XIV.'s of what all accounts agree in describing as old age, and ( month endeared more every an easy fortune,' though none of them and more among them the sparkling gen- afford any exact notion of its amount. ius, who hardly needed their encouragement Condorcet says, that on reckoning his into develop an audacity matchless as his herited means he perceived he had no wit, in libels and pasquinades all tending need of any profession. He adds, that (as to cover with ridicule the religion of the we may easily suppose) the company he great enemy of all the Châteauneufs, the kept had given him high notions on the arPère la Chaise, and the quondam friend of ticle of expenditure; and, in fine, that reNinon, Madame de Maintenon.* solving henceforth to be a man of fashion, We think the original direction of his with literature for the occupation of his wit is pretty clearly accounted for; and mornings, he determined also to increase, also the scorn with which, on quitting the if possible, his fortune by some preliminary Jesuits, he treated his father's desire that methods, to such an extent as should enable he should turn himself to the study of juris- him to dispense with the usual gains of litprudence with a view to a place in the ma- erary employment-in other words, to exgistracy. His vanity had already soared ert his talents according to his own taste far above such views as M. Arouet's. and bent, without caring whether the results There ensued a series of domestic quarrels, might or might not pass muster with royal of which we have few distinct details, except or ecclesiastical censors, and receive or that when at length the notary turned him want accordingly the protection of the law out of doors, he was sheltered by his moth- as property. What methods he took reer's oracle Châteauneuf, and that gentle- mains in some obscurity; that dabbling in man's liberal friends, one of whom (to the funds was one of them, all his biogra complete the picture) was a bishop. Be-phers seem to take for granted. We have fore his rejection of the paternal counsels little doubt that this was the chief resource, had exposed him to any very severe inconveniences, the notary and the elder brother both died and he found himself in every

* Lord Brougham has a note on Ninon in which he refers to Voltaire's letter in the Mélanges Littéraires,' vol. iii. p. 246, as doing justice to some of her great qualities. We have reperused the letter. It is a gay, jocular summary of Ninon's career as a wit and a strumpet. He recites the most celebrated of her amours and the most indecent of her jests:-but many great qualities! One-and but one-honest action is stated-a lover having given her a casket of money to keep for him, she restored it with integrity. Common honesty is certainly more creditable than uncommon profligacy or uncommon impudence-but still it hardly amounts to a great quality' even in a courtezan-at least not in a rich courtezan. What can Lord Brougham have

meant?

เ

But Lord Brougham has made no reference to another article on Mademoiselle de l'Enclos which occurs in Voltaire's Mélanges Historiques,' vol i. p 217, &c. This is entitled, ‘D'Abraham et de Ninon l'Enclos;'-and here, after some pages of the usual mockery of the Old Testament, we have a full account of the Abbé de Châteauneuf's own love-passages with Ninon sexagenaire--thus concluded Voilà la vérité de cette historiette que l'Abbé de Châteauneuf, mon bon parrain, à qui je dois mon baptême, m'a raconté souvent dans mon enfance, pour me former l'esprit et le As it appears from the paper which Lord Brougham does cite that Ninon had been of old well acquainted with Madame Arouet, the mother of Voltaire, we think the whole affair of no small importance to his early history.

cœur

and, moreover, that he was assisted by persons in high station, who sheltered their own disgraceful traffic in the raw material of official knowledge by conducting it in the name of this roturier strippling. Lord Brougham seems to think that Voltaire owed his largest accession of wealth to some merely commercial speculations, in which he engaged under the guidance and patronage of one Falconer, an English merchant, during the few years that he spent, when still a very young man, in or near London. Where Lord Brougham found this story we are not aware. To the old suspicion that he profited very much by the Mississippi bubble, he objects that Voltaire was not apparently resident in Paris during that insanity; but he admits that he might have speculated through agents: and that he had Parisian friends well skilled in such affairs, seems the best ascertained fact in this department of his history. It is probable that he continued through life as determined a stock-jobber as his disciple Talleyrand; and there were not a few occasions on which Voltaire must have possessed means of access to government secrets both in France and elsewhere, as precious for the purposes of this trade as Talleyrand himself, or any surviving Liberal but one, ever enjoyed. There is no doubt that long before his fortieth year he was master of

an estate not only abundant but splendid. | omits all reference to these incidents, and After that time he seems to have acted as a Condorcet only mentions them to deplore sort of banker to many of the French no-that such mind should have condescendbles-and even to several of the smaller Ger- ed, for obvious reasons of personal interest man potentates. When he died he left, besides some landed possessions, a moneyed capital producing a revenue of full 70007. a-year-equal in France then to double the sum in England now at the very least. And we see no reason to suppose that any part worth mentioning of this great fortune was derived from the sale of those productions which had been piled on or under every counter in Europe during half a century of uniform and unrivalled popularity.

From eighteen to seventy-eight this indefatigable stock-jobber and money lender was continually before the world as a productive author; no modern diligence ever equaled his—not Southey's, or Goethe's, or Scott's. In all these years not one can be pointed out in which he did not add something considerable to the anti-Christian literature of Europe. In all his voluminous correspondence there is not one letter, not one line, indicating the slightest pause of doubt or hesitation in his hostility to the whole scheme of revealed religion. We should be curious to know at what period Lord Brougham inclines to fix his turning his mind with sufficient anxiety' to the evidences of Christianity. Did any man ever study those evidences with any anxiety, and yet discover not even reason for a momentary halt-a slight shade of suspicion that the system might be true?

or convenience, to a momentary dereliction of the path of truth. In even the last of the three cases he almost instantly retracted. Even then he found time to renounce by an insolent sarcasm, the Saviour, in whose sacrament he had not feared to participate. We rather wonder that Lord Brougham did omit these things. They might perhaps have afforded him some support in his views as to the effect of the Jesuit education. He might have observed that Voltaire had at least taken in so much of its doctrine as to be at ease whenever it suited him, in the practice of subscribing creeds in the nonnatural sense.'

Voltaire is distinguished among infidels we mean of course among infidels at all entitled to be considered of his order in mind and accomplishment-by two circumstances, both of which seem pregnant with extraordinary difficulty for those who assert that he had really turned his mind with honest anxiety to the study of Chistianity. He stands alone, among really eminent men of letters,' in his uniformly maintained opinion of the Bible. Many before, and many more after him, have denied not only the inspiration of the sacred volume, but the reality of the most momentous facts recorded in it; but Voltaire was the first who constantly denied its title to be considered at all events as the most curious monument of remote antiquity, and the reposi tory of some of the sublimest effusions of human genius. He treated it, boy and man, as a bundle of course imbecilities. In this, we believe, we may safely say he had no predecessor. Far different was the tone even of his master Bayle-the master from whom he drew nineteen-twentieths of what is called his ecclesiastical learning, and also how and where to get at the other twentieth; far different was the tone even of his greatest successor, Gibbon. Entirely different is that of every French infidel, possessing any considerable reach of capacity, in the pres

He had other occupation for his time; and Condorcet glories in avowing it. I am weary,' said Voltaire, ere his career was half done,' of hearing it eternally said that twelve men were sufficient to establish Christianity; ere I die I shall have proved that one man was sufficient to destroy it.' This was his purpose-this was his ambition-in this cause it was that his monstrous vanity had been embarked at the outset-and in this cause he never faltered. Whatever he read was read not with a view to the ascertainment of truth, but in quest of fresh ammunition for the post which he had pledged his vanity-his all-ent age. to maintain.

The other point is that evidence of honIt is indeed true that at three different est study supplied by his stubborn refusal to times-once when still a young man-once admit that Christianity, whether a revealed when in the meridian brightness of his or a human system, has had any beneficial course-and once again when within sight influence on the human race-that it has of the gates of death-Voltaire made sol- been a humanizing religion. You will emn professions of his adherence to the find no denial of this in any preceding stuChurch of Rome: but Lord Brougham | dent of classical antiquity-but in that de

'A spirit more lewd

partment at least Voltaire merited John- | means of an intellectual supremacy to be son's description 'vir paucarum literarum.' established for himself over the mind of the Neither, however, will you find any denial civilized world. How could this influence of it in any real student even of the history be created if he were to set at defiance and literature of the ages subsequent to the openly upon every ocasion the prevailing Christian era-except only, if as a student opinion and sentiment of the world-how he must here be excepted, Voltaire. Slen-maintained, strengthened, consolidated, der, nevertheless, as Voltaire's stock of unless by a most sedulous conciliation of classical, perhaps we might add of media- that opinion and sentiment, through a thouval, learning may have been-he had sand arts-especially the affectation, in enough of both to render it very hard to performances meant to be put into the reconcile his obstinacy on this head with hands of women and young people, of some the theory that considers him as an honest sympathy and respect for what it was well man; more than enough to overwhelm all known parents and guardians, generally who attribute to him either the smallest re- speaking, still esteemed and cherished? spect for purity of morals, or the slightest It is, we repeat, impossible to point out the comprehension of the efficacy of social reg- year, aye, or the month in which he was ulations in raising or lowering the general not laboring at some directly and avowedly standard of well-being among mankind infidel work; and to say that' bigotry' only and womankind. Here, however, Voltaire saw the same infidelity in contemporaneous has had a plentiful succession. He is the productions of a less flagrant blazon, is in parent of that new German school (recruit- fact to say that bigotry' alone considered ed largely from the philosophizing Jews) these last with sufficient anxiety for the by which religious unbelief is proclaimed discovery of the truth.' When Voltaire in in the same breath with systematic deprav- a tragedy introduces a scornful description ity of morals. To him, of whom we may of priests, what does it signify that, as Lord well say, as Milton does of Belial, that Brougham observes, the priests are those of some pagan superstition? Did the inFell not from heaven,' tention escape any one familiar with Voltaire's works? Did it ever elude the Parwe may trace those myriad abominations of isian parterre? How could it, when he the modern continental press, in which the had a thousand times explained that all religion of the Gospel is boldly denounced as priests are part and parcel of the same cona tyrannical scheme for the abridgment spiracy; not less of the same brotherhood, of the natural liberty of man in the indul- because this calls himself a Druid, that a gence of every passion embraced in his Bonze, a third an Imaum, the fourth a nature, as we have that nature before us. Bishop, than soldiers are efficient members But indeed even many infidels who have of the same army for wearing, one of them not ventured to avow the Voltaire doctrine a blue uniform, a second red, another boton this score, appear to betray no scanty tle-green? But we are still more at a loss sympathy with it. From the old Italian to understand Lord Brougham's calling scoffers downwards it is curious to trace attention to passages of tragic verse in the almost perpetual combination of skepti- which Voltaire expresses the faith and feelcism and lubricity. In Bayle's Dictionary, ings of Christians, as if such things ought that grand arsenal of all learning, all wit, to have at all disturbed the judgment of the and all wickedness, it is difficult to say 'bigots.' The 'bigots' must have been which element is the more copiously exhib- blockheads truly if they had considered the ited; and it is much the same with Gib- Christianity of one play as more reflective bon's History. of the author's opinion than the Islamism We do not well understand Lord of the next in the scroll. Men of religious Brougham's meaning where he analyzes conviction were quite justified in not only and quotes this or that Poem or Essay of not attaching any value to such patches Voltaire's, and then remarks that nothing of piety,' but rejecting them with even but Romish bigotry' could have detect- greater indignation than the most unblushed' infidelity lurking' in the piece. ing of his libels (since we must not say Whether glaring or lurking, it is always blasphemies) against their Saviour. there you can never detect what does not exist. Voltaire's ambition was to destroy Christianity-but by what means?

We think most readers will agree with us in regretting these specimens of loose By phraseology; but we shall probably be

His Lordship rivals Condorcet in the lenity with which he dismisses Voltaire's conduct in relation to the King of Prussia. We hear enough of Frederick's offences, which were worthy of all contempt as well as wonder: but the Patriarch gets off as if he had merely been the innocent victim of the despot's caprice.-- The King,' says Lord Brougham, claims the whole blame.' It seems to us that the more you load the King with the blame of the separation, the more abominably shabby is the figure that Voltaire makes, when one turns over the large portion of his writings occupied in

classed with the worst of the bigots when | seventy years of age he invented and propawe say that Lord Brougham seems to us gated against an innocent girl of sevento give Voltaire a great deal too much teen-whose only offence had been that the credit for his conduct in the famous cases attractions of her acting in some old play of Calas and de la Barre-a conduct which deferred the production on the Parisian indeed has been extolled in very unmea- stage of his own 'Lois de Minos.' Not a sured terms by many who regard his gen- word of the enforced completeness of the eral character much as we ourselves have al- jealous old tyrant's retraction-not a word ways done. We are not so absurd as to ques- of the shout of scorn that reached his ears tion that Voltaire would have heard the details from even his own most steadfast partisans of such atrocious injustice as that in the Ca- in the capital. las case with sincere indignation, in whatever part of the world it might have been perpetrated; but it is impossible not to consider his pertinacious zeal and diligence in the matter as having been principally stimulated by the fact that the barbarity was instigated by his own elected enemies, the French Clergy. He saw the opportunity of carrying the sentiments of all mankind with him against them-and he seized it and used it with matchless energy, adroitness, and success. In the affair of La Barre his personal interest-not merely that of his vanity as pledged to the ruin of the clerical influence, but that of one shape or another with the King. Volhis own immediate safety-was directly compromised. The shocking cruelty of which La Barre was the victim had been invoked in the name of outraged religion; and one of the assigned proofs of the unfortunate youth's infidelity was that he had Voltaire's works in his chamber. The patriarch was bitterly twitted with these particulars by his own friends the Encylopédistes, when, at a later period, he refused to give them any assistance in the affair of M. de Morangiés.

taire, says his Lordship, had given Frederick no cause of offence-he had only served and praised and extolled him-his dismissal was wanton in the highest degree: Voltaire would have continued at Berlin all his days but for this odious outbreak of the tyrannical temper. Very well-and what did Voltaire do after he left Prussia? Did he not immediately commence a series of satirical writings, in every possible shape of prose and verse, by which the King was held up to universal odium, scorn, nay, Lord Brougham admits that Voltaire horror-the materials all supplied by what was guilty of many meannesses-he espe- Voltaire had observed of Frederick's concially notices the levity with which he duct and manners from day to day, from communicated his most obnoxious writings night to night, during the residence in to all that approached him, and the astound- Berlin and Potsdam-the period when Voling solemnity with which he constantly taire had been not only worshipping him to denied his concern in these writings, when his face with unwearied adulation, but reprethey got into circulation, and threatened to senting him in every book and every letter he bring him into trouble. There was hardly wrote as the model of every virtue, as well a year in his life that he did not subject as of universal genius?* Did ever vituper himself to this sort of humiliation. The ation recoil so dreadfully upon its author? eternal succession of dirty petty personal Nor was any possible creeping paltriness quarrels that kept him all his days in hot omitted. Can any man contemplate withwater is mentioned and his reckless vin-out blushing the various readings in Voldictiveness is alluded to, condemned, and lamented. But Lord Brougham does not go into any one of these affairs so as to give his uninformed reader the very slightest notion of the, in truth, unparalleled base- about the usual Ferney nickname for Frederick* Lord Brougham has a mysterious little note ness of which Voltaire was capable. Not Luc. We infer that his Lordship has not penea word of the infamous calumny which at trated the shocking meaning of the Patriarch,

taire's earlier Epitres, &c., &c., to and about his Achille-Homère :'—every high wrought panegyric, every delicate compli

· -lose no drop of the immortal man!

ment, erased and supplanted by a fierce observed to M. du Chatelet that St. Lamburst of hatred, or a savage sneer of disgust bert had only served him as he (Voltaire) -all the original eulogy, as he shortsight- had served M. de Richelieu,-one nail,' edly fancied, for ever cancelled and annul- said the bereft lover to the respectable and led-but all raked up and renewed by the honorable husband-'one nail will drive blind zeal of his own chosen disciples in out another.' Condorcet eulogizes her as their enthusiastic determination that the supérieure à tous les préjugés, et n'ayant world should pas la faiblesse de cacher combien elle les dédaignait.' As to the punctiliousness of the Henaults and Deffands,'-the liaison There is one small subject on which it of Louis XV. with his Pompadour was not equally amazed and amused us to find more openly blazoned to the world than was Lord Brougham taking up the cudgels for during a long succession of years that of the Voltaire. After a lively but imperfect ac- President Henault with Madame du Defcount of his long retirement at the chateau fand-whose whole previous and subseof Cirey-lively, for it is Lord Brougham's; quent history (down to old age and blindmost imperfect, because he has neglectedness) was as respects these matters a duthe best authorities;-we have the follow-plicate of Madame du Chatelet's. Lord ing paragraph on the nature of the attach- Brougham has had good opportunities of ment' between Voltaire and Madame du

Chatelet :

observing French Society; but when he says that the strongest argument for the Platonic purity of the attachment is the rigor with which French society forbids all such demonstrations of intimacy between guilty lovers, as were implied in Vol

'Many conjectures have, of course, been raised, as at the time much scandal was circulated. There seems upon the whole no sufficient reason to question its having been Platonic. The conduct of the husband, a respect-taire's domestication at Cirey, we must ask able and honorable man, the character of the whether Lord Brougham considers of no lady herself, but above all the open manner in importance what was the universal opinion which their intimacy was avowed, and the of French society as to the particular case constant recognition of it by persons so respect here in question? Who ever heard of able as the Argentals and Argensons, so punc- any doubt on the subject among the French tilious as the Deffands and the Henaults, seem to justify this conclusion. It is well known society at the time?-where did Lord that, both in former times and in our own; He mentions various appellations for the Brougham find any trace of conjectures?' the laws of French society are exceedingly rigorous, not indeed to the exclusion of the lady that occur in Voltaire's letters-but realities, but to the saving of the appearances he omits one-' Venus-Newton.' -"Les convenances avant tout" is the rule. plain, in short, that granting the rule of It is never permitted, where a grave suspicion society to have been what Lord Brougham exists of a criminal intercourse, that the slight-states, Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet est appearance of intimacy should be seen in public between the parties. Voltaire's letters claimed an exception-and that their claim to all his correspondents, in which he speaks was allowed. In English society also we of Emily to some, of Madame la Marquis to have had and still have some very strict others, of Chatelet-Newton to others, giving rules: yet Lord Brougham knows that the her remembrances to them, and himself invit-influence of party can now and then overing them to the chateau-all seems wholly ride the severest of them in what calls itself inconsistent with the rules of social intercourse the highest life of London. observed by our neighbors, on the supposition

of her having been his mistress.'

Lord Brougham has this note at p.

It is

80:

Can Lord Brougham be serious? The Marquis du Chatelet was an elderly nobody letter to Madame du Deffand, announcing the 'An expression which occurs in Voltaire's -the tame stupid appendage of an imperi- Marchioness's death, seems strange. Though ous voluptuous young blue-stocking and it clearly proves nothing, yet it was an extrafury, who never condescended to the slight-ordinary thing to say at such a moment. He est affectation of regard for him, or for any asks to be allowed to weep with her for one of the vulgar duties and virtues of her sex. "qui avec ses faiblesses avait un âme respecThe respectability' of the husband and table."-(Cor. Gén., iii. 365) In all probathe character of the lady' were such that which Madame du D. might have heard him bility this referred to her violent temper, of Voltaire, on discovering that he had been complain, as he certainly suffered much under supplanted in her fancy by St. Lambert, it.'