"I ask you if you think it easy to define a nation which cut off Charles I.'s head because he wished to introduce the surplice into Scotland, and demanded a tribute which the judges declared to belong to him; whilst the same nation, without a murmur, saw Cromwell drive out Parliament, lords and bishops, and upset all the laws. Understand that James II. was dethroned partly because he gave a place in a college to a Catholic pedant: and remember also that the sanguinary tyrant, Henry VIII., half Catholic, half Protestant, changed the religion of the country because he wished to marry a brazen woman whom he afterwards sent to the scaffold; that he wrote a bad book against Luther in favour of the Pope, and then made himself Pope in England, hanging those who denied his supremacy, and burning those who did not believe in transubstantiation—and all this with gaiety and impunity. A spirit of enthusiasm, a furious superstition, had seized the nation during the civil wars: a soft and lazy irreligion succeeded these troublous times under Charles II. So everything changes and seems to contradict itself. What is truth at one time is error at another. The Spaniards say of a man, 'He was brave yesterday.' It is something in this way we must judge nations, the English in particular: we must say, 'They were of such a mind in this year, in this month.'"
With his usual energy, Voltaire, immediately on coming to England, set himself to learn our language, which he was considered to have mastered, though the proper names seem to have been something of a stumbling-block: the "Wighs and the Torys" are not his only confusions of this kind; Sir John Vanbrugh, having a foreign name, may excusably be represented as the
