him in such terms as these:—­“Sensible of the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude of my fellow-citizens, and hope that it will increase when they have profited by the lessons that you of all men are able to give them.  Embellish the asylum you have chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your instruction; and do you who know so well how to paint virtue and freedom, teach us to cherish them in our walls."[333]

Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded.  In 1756 Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate pieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century, his poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755).  No such word had been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had figured the doom of man.  It was the reaction of one who had begun life by refuting Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the optimism of Pope and Leibnitz, who had done Pope’s Essay on Man (1732-34) into French verse as late as 1751,[334] and whose imagination, already sombred by the triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged around him, was suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a world where whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures in the smoking ashes and engulfed wreck of their city.  How, he cried, can you persist in talking of the deliberate will of a free and benevolent God, whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling climax of misery and injustice as this?  Was the disaster retributive?  If so, why is Lisbon in ashes, while Paris dances?  The enigma is desperate and inscrutable, and the optimist lives in the paradise of the fool.  We ask in vain what we are, where we are, whither we go, whence we came.  We are tormented atoms on a clod of earth, whom death at last swallows up, and with whom destiny meanwhile makes cruel sport.  The past is only a disheartening memory, and if the tomb destroys the thinking creature, how frightful is the present!

Whatever else we may say of Voltaire’s poem, it was at least the first sign of the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination against the polished common sense of the great Queen Anne school, which had for more than a quarter of a century such influence in Europe.[335] It is a little odd that Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile branch of this stock, should have broken so energetically away from it, and that he should have done so, shows how open and how strong was the feeling in him for reality and actual circumstance.

Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was with prosperity and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this life and pronounce that all is evil and vanity.  “Voltaire in seeming always to believe in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, since his pretended God is a maleficent being who according to him finds all his pleasure in working mischief.  The absurdity of this doctrine is especially revolting in a man crowned with good things of every sort, and who from the midst of his own happiness tries to fill his fellow-creatures with despair, by the cruel and terrible image of the serious calamities from which he is himself free."[336]