there he found many rare and precious works, of which, with even more than his accustomed diligence, he took advantage, giving himself, for the time, entirely up to study, and accumulating materials with which he vastly increased the value of the next edition of his essay. "I had chalked," he says in a letter, "the portrait of the human race in profile—here you will see it painted in three-quarters." The vast reading necessary for the work is disguised by the ease and simplicity of the style; and, in order to realise the extraordinary labour which it implies, it is necessary for the modern reader to bear in mind that Voltaire led the way in paths that, now well trodden and familiar, were then enveloped in darkness. It is rendered less flowing and imposing, but more lucid, by being divided into short chapters, each forming an essential but distinct portion of the argument and narrative. Many problems which are discussed and disputed by the philosophers of our day, are here briefly, clearly, and confidently stated. He is, as we have seen, no believer in savage virtue, or in the nobility sometimes deemed to be the accompaniment of a state of pure nature, and strongly insists that every nation has had its beginning in a condition approaching, and in many respects inferior, to that of brutes. "The reason is, that it is not in the nature of man to desire that which he does not know. Not only a prodigious extent of time, but fortunate conditions also, are necessary in order that man may raise himself above the life of animals." In the spirit, though not with the full knowledge, of a modern geologist and ethnologist, he speaks of the great changes of the earth's surface, and their influence on the races of men. The gradual formation of societies and of languages is briefly but pithily
