eyes there was one influence which, from the earliest ages, had continually retarded the progress of humanity, and that influence was religious belief.  Thus his book, though far more brilliant and far more modern than that of Bossuet, was nevertheless almost equally biased.  It was history with a thesis, and the gibe of Montesquieu was justifiable.  ‘Voltaire,’ he said, ’writes history to glorify his own convent, like any Benedictine monk.’  Voltaire’s ‘convent’ was the philosophical school in Paris; and his desire to glorify it was soon to appear in other directions.

The Essai sur les Moeurs is an exceedingly amusing narrative, but it is a long and learned work filling several volumes, and the fruit of many years of research.  Voltaire was determined henceforward to distil its spirit into more compendious and popular forms.  He had no more time for elaborate dissertations; he must reach the public by quicker and surer ways.  Accordingly there now began to pour into Paris a flood of short light booklets—­essays, plays, poems, romances, letters, tracts—­a multitude of writings infinitely varied in form and scope, but all equally irresistible and all equally bearing the unmistakable signs of their origin at Ferney.  Voltaire’s inimitable style had at last found a medium in which it could display itself in all its charm and all its brilliance.  The pointed, cutting, mocking sentences laugh and dance through his pages like light-toed, prick-eared elves.  Once seen, and there is no help for it—­one must follow, into whatever dangerous and unknown regions those magic imps may lead.  The pamphlets were of course forbidden, but without effect; they were sold in thousands, and new cargoes, somehow or other, were always slipping across the frontier from Holland or Geneva.  Whenever a particularly outrageous one appeared, Voltaire wrote off to all his friends to assure them that he knew nothing whatever of the production, that it was probably a translation from the work of an English clergyman, and that, in short, everyone would immediately see from the style alone that it was—­not his.  An endless series of absurd pseudonyms intensified the farce.  Oh no!  Voltaire was certainly not the author of this scandalous book.  How could he be?  Did not the title-page plainly show that it was the work of Frere Cucufin, or the uncle of Abbe Bazin, or the Comte de Boulainvilliers, or the Emperor of China?  And so the game proceeded; and so all France laughed; and so all France read.

Two forms of this light literature Voltaire made especially his own.  He brought the Dialogue to perfection; for the form suited him exactly, with its opportunities for the rapid exposition of contrary doctrines, for the humorous stultification of opponents, and for witty repartee.  Into this mould he has poured some of his finest materials; and in such pieces as Le Diner du Comte de Boulainvilliers and Frere Rigolet et l’Empereur de la Chine one finds