the proportion of iniquity between them." Sir Joshua, in an allegorical portrait of Dr Beattie, introduced Voltaire as the personification of Sophistry. He was the helot of innumerable homilies, and served to point innumerable morals. When the Revolution came, Voltaire—considered as having been a main cause of the state of public feeling in France which produced that infinite convulsion—was also, though then many years in his grave, held responsible for its excesses and its crimes. Thus it is that what memory of him was left among us till within this last generation, was the reflection of the fleering, shallow scoffer, the literary Mephistopheles, whom our fathers had learned to detest.
But all this time his reputation in his own country (except with his enemies the clergy) was of a kind altogether different. The works which first made him famous were, if not orthodox, far from irreligious; and any signs of hostility to the authority either of Church or State which might be found in them, were such as Englishmen might be expected to sympathise with, for the objects of that hostility were superstition, fanaticism, and tyranny. The state of things, however, against which he contended, did not exist in England. With the degree of freedom of thought to which we had then attained, and which contented the nation, we, all through George III.'s reign, feared tyranny less than licence, and superstition less than free-thinking. Deism was in disgrace: it threw a dark shadow on the repute of writers of the highest rank, such as Hume and Gibbon; and to lesser men the imputation of it was extinction. In these days opinion, far more tolerant, would probably not be very severe on Voltaire; for while his
