Category: Biographies
When the right sense of historical proportion is more fully developed in men’s minds, the name of Voltaire will stand out like the names of the great decisive movements in the European advance, like the Revival of Learning, or the Reformation. The existence, character, and car...
When the right sense of historical proportion is more fully developed in men’s minds, the name of Voltaire will stand out like the names of the great decisive movements in the E...
9. CHAPTER II.Voltairism may be said to have begun from the flight of its founder from Paris to London. This, to borrow a name from the most memorable instance of outward change marking inwar...
10. CHAPTER III.On the whole, the critic’s task is perhaps less to classify a type of character as good or bad, as worthy of so much praise or so much censure, than to mark the material out of...
11. CHAPTER IV.The Marquise du Châtelet died under circumstances that were tragical enough to herself, but which disgust the grave, while they give a grotesque amusement to those who look with...
12. CHAPTER V.In examining the Voltairean attack upon religion we have to remember that it was in the first instance prompted, and throughout its course stimulated and embittered, by antipath...
13. CHAPTER VI.The activity of the foremost men of the eighteenth century in the composition of history is too remarkable a circumstance, not to deserve some attempt at explanation. There were...
14. CHAPTER VII.Voltaire, as we have seen, took possession of Ferney in 1758, and he lived here almost without a break for something like twenty years. His estate was a feudal seigniory in the...
15. Letter xxiv. (pp. 197-202).[72] Villemain’s _Cours de Lit. Française_, i. p. 111. See also De Maistre, _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_, vi. p. 424. On the other hand, see Lanfrey’s _L’Eglise et les Philosoph...