Vous venez de mettre a la Bastille [says the writer, who, it is
     supposed, was an ecclesiastic] un homme que je souhaitais y voir il
     y a plus de 15 annees.

The writer goes on to speak of the

metier que faisait l’homme en question, prechant le deisme tout a decouvert aux toilettes de nos jeunes seigneurs ...  L’Ancien Testament, selon lui, n’est qu’un tissu de contes et de fables, les apotres etaient de bonnes gens idiots, simples, et credules, et les peres de l’Eglise, Saint Bernard surtout, auquel il en veut le plus, n’etaient que des charlatans et des suborneurs.

‘Je voudrais etre homme d’authorite,’ he adds, ’pour un jour seulement, afin d’enfermer ce poete entre quatre murailles pour toute sa vie.’  That Voltaire at this early date should have already given rise to such pious ecclesiastical wishes shows clearly enough that he had little to learn from the deists of England.  And, in the second place, the deists of England had very little to teach a disciple of Bayle, Fontenelle, and Montesquieu.  They were, almost without exception, a group of second-rate and insignificant writers whose ‘onslaught’ upon current beliefs was only to a faint extent ‘systematic and reasoned.’  The feeble and fluctuating rationalism of Toland and Wollaston, the crude and confused rationalism of Collins, the half-crazy rationalism of Woolston, may each and all, no doubt, have furnished Voltaire with arguments and suggestions, but they cannot have seriously influenced his thought.  Bolingbroke was a more important figure, and he was in close personal relation with Voltaire; but his controversial writings were clumsy and superficial to an extraordinary degree.  As Voltaire himself said, ’in his works there are many leaves and little fruit; distorted expressions and periods intolerably long.’  Tindal and Middleton were more vigorous; but their work did not appear until a later period.  The masterly and far-reaching speculations of Hume belong, of course, to a totally different class.

Apart from politics and metaphysics, there were two directions in which the Lettres Philosophiques did pioneer work of a highly important kind:  they introduced both Newton and Shakespeare to the French public.  The four letters on Newton show Voltaire at his best—­succinct, lucid, persuasive, and bold.  The few paragraphs on Shakespeare, on the other hand, show him at his worst.  Their principal merit is that they mention his existence—­a fact hitherto unknown in France; otherwise they merely afford a striking example of the singular contradiction in Voltaire’s nature which made him a revolutionary in intellect and kept him a high Tory in taste.  Never was such speculative audacity combined with such aesthetic timidity; it is as if he had reserved all his superstition for matters of art.  From his account of Shakespeare, it is clear that he had never dared to open his eyes and frankly look at what he should see before him.  All was ’barbare, depourvu de bienseances, d’ordre, de vraisemblance’; in the hurly-burly he was dimly aware of a figured and elevated style, and of some few ‘lueurs etonnantes’; but to the true significance of Shakespeare’s genius he remained utterly blind.