Constitutionality and Freethinking; Tolands, Collinses,
Wollastons, Bolingbrokes, still living; very free indeed.
England, one is astonished to see, has its royal-republican ways
of doing; something Roman in it, from Peerage down to Plebs;
strange and curious to the eye of M. de Voltaire.
Sciences flourishing; Newton still alive, white with fourscore
years, the venerable hoary man; Locke's Gospel of Common Sense in
full vogue, or even done into verse, by incomparable Mr. Pope, for
the cultivated upper classes. In science, in religion, in
politics, what a surprising 'liberty' allowed or taken! Never was
a freer turn of thinking. And (what to M. de Voltaire is a
pleasant feature) it is Freethinking with ruffles to its shirt and
rings on its fingers;--never yet, the least, dreaming of the
shirtless or SANSCULOTTIC state that lies ahead for it! That is
the palmy condition of English Liberty, when M. de Voltaire
arrives there.

"In a man just out of the Bastille on those terms, there is a mind
driven by hard suffering into seriousness, and provoked by
indignant comparisons and remembrances. As if you had elaborately
ploughed and pulverized the mind of this Voltaire to receive with
its utmost avidity, and strength of fertility, whatever seed
England may have for it. That was a notable conjuncture of a man
with circumstances. The question, Is this man to grow up a Court
Poet; to do legitimate dramas, lampoons, witty verses, and wild
spiritual and practical magnificences, the like never seen;
Princes and Princesses recognizing him as plainly divine, and
keeping him tied by enchantments to that poor trade as his task in
life? is answered in the negative. No: and it is not quite to
decorate and comfort your 'dry dung-heap' of a world, or the