of the enchanter into little dry crumbling leaves!  He is a Parisian.  He never exaggerates, is never violent:  he treats things with the most provoking sang froid; and expresses his contempt by the most indirect hints, and in the fewest words, as if he hardly thought them worth even his contempt.  He retains complete possession of himself and of his subject.  He does not effect his purpose by the eagerness of his blows, but by the delicacy of his tact.  The poisoned wound he inflicted was so fine, as scarcely to be felt till it rankled and festered in its “mortal consequences.”  His callousness was an excellent foil for the antagonists he had mostly to deal with.  He took knaves and fools on his shield well.  He stole away its cloak from grave imposture.  If he reduced other things below their true value, making them seem worthless and hollow, he did not degrade the pretensions of tyranny and superstition below their true value, by making them seem utterly worthless and hollow, as contemptible as they were odious.  This was the service he rendered to truth and mankind!  His Candide is a masterpiece of wit.  It has been called “the dull product of a scoffer’s pen”; it is indeed the “product of a scoffer’s pen”; but after reading the Excursion, few people will think it dull.  It is in the most perfect keeping, and without any appearance of effort.  Every sentence tells, and the whole reads like one sentence.  There is something sublime in Martin’s sceptical indifference to moral good and evil.  It is the repose of the grave.  It is better to suffer this living death, than a living martyrdom.  “Nothing can touch him further.”  The moral of Candide (such as it is) is the same as that of Rasselas:  the execution is different.  Voltaire says, “A great book is a great evil.”  Dr. Johnson would have laboured this short apophthegm into a voluminous common-place.  Voltaire’s traveller (in another work) being asked “whether he likes black or white mutton best,” replies that “he is indifferent, provided it is tender.”  Dr. Johnson did not get at a conclusion by so short a way as this.  If Voltaire’s licentiousness is objected to me, I say, let it be placed to its true account, the manners of the age and court in which he lived.  The lords and ladies of the bedchamber in the reign of Louis XV. found no fault with the immoral tendency of his writings.  Why then should our modern purists quarrel with them?—­But to return.

Young is a gloomy epigrammatist.  He has abused great powers both of thought and language.  His moral reflections are sometimes excellent; but he spoils their beauty by overloading them with a religious horror, and at the same time giving them all the smart turns and quaint expression of an enigma or repartee in verse.  The well-known lines on Procrastination are in his best manner: