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 exquisite dish of whipped cream; one swallows down the unsubstantial trifle, and asks impatiently if that is all?  At any rate, it is enough.  Into that frothy sweetness his subtle hand has insinuated a single drop of some strange liquor—­is it a poison or is it an elixir of life?—­whose penetrating influence will spread and spread until the remotest fibres of the system have felt its power.  Contemporary French readers, when they had shut the book, found somehow that they were looking out upon a new world; that a process of disintegration had begun among their most intimate beliefs and feelings; that the whole rigid frame-work of society—­of life itself—­the hard, dark, narrow, antiquated structure of their existence—­had suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, become a faded, shadowy thing.

It might have been expected that, among the reforms which such a work would advocate, a prominent place would certainly have been given to those of a political nature.  In England a political revolution had been crowned with triumph, and all that was best in English life was founded upon the political institutions which had been then established.  The moral was obvious:  one had only to compare the state of England under a free government with the state of France, disgraced, bankrupt, and incompetent, under autocratic rule.  But the moral is never drawn by Voltaire.  His references to political questions are slight and vague; he gives a sketch of English history, which reaches Magna Charta, suddenly mentions Henry VII., and then stops; he has not a word to say upon the responsibility of Ministers, the independence of the judicature, or even the freedom of the press.  He approves of the English financial system, whose control by the Commons he mentions, but he fails to indicate the importance of the fact.  As to the underlying principles of the constitution, the account which he gives of them conveys hardly more to the reader than the famous lines in the Henriade: 

    Aux murs de Westminster on voit paraitre ensemble
    Trois pouvoirs etonnes du noeud qui les rassemble.

Apparently Voltaire was aware of these deficiencies, for in the English edition of the book he caused the following curious excuses to be inserted in the preface: