history down to the establishment of Charlemagne's empire, and at that point Voltaire took it up, and continued it down to the reign of Louis XIII. In his preface he sets forth his idea of what are the proper subjects of history, and how it should be written:—
"There is no object," he says, "in knowing in what year a prince unworthy of remembrance succeeded a barbarous ruler in a rude nation… The more important it is to know of the great actions of sovereigns who have rendered their people better and happier, the more we should ignore the herd of kings who only load the memory."
Prefacing his essay by a sketch of earlier times, he dwells for a moment on the horrors from which, as he has so often insisted, civilisation has rescued the world. "Let us avert our eyes," he says, "from those times of savagery which are the shame of nature;" and then, after describing the horribly barbarous condition of the peoples of Germany and Gaul at the time when Cæsar was making war on them, he remarks:—
"See what Tacitus has the impudence to praise, in order to disparage the Court of the Roman Emperor by contrast with the virtues of the Germans. It is the part of a mind as just as yours [Madame du Châtelet's] to regard Tacitus as an ingenious satirist, no less profound in his ideas than concise in his expressions, who has written rather a criticism than a history of his own time, and who would have deserved the admiration of ours had he been impartial."
In after-years it seemed to him expedient to introduce his essay by another, which he called the "Philosophy of History," and they now appear as one work. In returning from his last visit to Prussia (to be hereafter adverted to), he passed some time at the Abbey of Sénones, and
