theater in full blast, exhibiting oddities, the scholar, the monk, the inquisitor, Maupertuis, Pompignan, Nonotte, Fréron, King David, and countless others who appear before us, capering and gesticulating in their harlequin attire. — When a farcical talent is thus moved to tell the truth, humor becomes all-powerful; for it gratifies the profound and universal instincts of human nature:  to the malicious curiosity, to the desire to mock and belitte, to the aversion to being in need or under constraint, those sources of bad moods which task convention, etiquette and social obligation with wearing the burdensome cloak of respect and of decency; moments occur in life when the wisest is not sorry to throw this half aside and even cast it off entirely. — On each page, now with the bold stroke of a hardy naturalist, now with the quick turn of a mischievous monkey, Voltaire lets the solemn or serious drapery fall, disclosing man, the poor biped, and in which attitudes![27] Swift alone dared to present similar pictures.  What physiological crudities relating to the origin and end of our most exalted sentiments!  What disproportion between such feeble reason and such powerful instincts!  What recesses in the wardrobes of politics and religion concealing their foul linen!  We laugh at all this so as not to weep, and yet behind this laughter there are tears; he ends sneeringly, subsiding into a tone of profound sadness, of mournful pity.  In this degree, and with such subjects, it is only an effect of habit, or as an expedient, a mania of inspiration, a fixed condition of the nervous machinery rushing headlong over everything, without a break and in full speed.  Gaiety, let it not be forgotten, is still a incentive of action, the last that keeps man erect in France, the best in maintaining the tone of his spirit, his strength and his powers of resistance, the most intact in an age when men, and women too, believed it incumbent on them to die people of good society, with a smile and a jest on their lips[28].

When the talent of a writer thus accords with public inclinations it is a matter of little import whether he deviates or fails since he is following the universal tendency.  He may wander off or besmirch himself in vain, for his audience is only the more pleased, his defects serving him as advantageously as his good qualities.  After the first generation of healthy minds the second one comes on, the intellectual balance here being equally inexact.  “Diderot,” says Voltaire, “is too hot an oven, everything that is baked in it getting burnt.”  Or rather, he is an eruptive volcano which, for forty years, discharges ideas of every order and species, boiling and fused together, precious metals, coarse scorioe and fetid mud; the steady stream overflows at will according to the roughness of the ground, but always displaying the ruddy light and acrid fumes of glowing lava.  He is not master of his ideas, but his ideas master him; he is under submission to