follies, whatever flouts and mockeries might play upon the surface, he
was to be in deadly earnest at heart. He was to live and die a fighter
in the ranks of progress, a champion in the mighty struggle which was
now beginning against the powers of darkness in France. The first great
blow in that struggle had been struck ten years earlier by Montesquieu
in his _Lettres Persanes_; the second was struck by Voltaire in the
_Lettres Philosophiques_. The intellectual freedom, the vigorous
precision, the elegant urbanity which characterise the earlier work
appear in a yet more perfect form in the later one. Voltaire's book, as
its title indicates, is in effect a series of generalised reflections
upon a multitude of important topics, connected together by a common
point of view. A description of the institutions and manners of England
is only an incidental part of the scheme: it is the fulcrum by means of
which the lever of Voltaire's philosophy is brought into operation. The
book is an extremely short one--it fills less than two hundred small
octavo pages; and its tone and style have just that light and airy
gaiety which befits the ostensible form of it--a set of private letters
to a friend. With an extraordinary width of comprehension, an
extraordinary pliability of intelligence, Voltaire touches upon a
hundred subjects of the most varied interest and importance--from the
theory of gravitation to the satires of Lord Rochester, from the effects
of inoculation to the immortality of the soul--and every touch tells. It
is the spirit of Humanism carried to its furthest, its quintessential
point; indeed, at first sight, one is tempted to think that this quality
of rarefied universality has been exaggerated into a defect. The matters
treated of are so many and so vast, they are disposed of and dismissed
so swiftly, so easily, so unemphatically, that one begins to wonder
whether, after all, anything of real significance can have been
expressed. But, in reality, what, in those few small pages, has been
expressed is simply the whole philosophy of Voltaire. He offers one an