abstract fashion that he lets his ideas about government be seen. He flattered the Regent and Louis XV.; his eulogies on Louis XIV. are splendid; he would have been a courtier if he could. Far different is the spirit in which he attacked what he called superstition. It is evident that he thought spiritual despotism worse, and therefore a fitter object of hostility, than temporal despotism. The lower classes were sunk in ignorance, the upper in frivolity; while among their pastors a vicious life was so common as to be scarcely a scandal. Amid such a state of things the Church sought to maintain its authority not by amending the lives of the priesthood and humanising their precepts, but by maintaining the empire of stupidity and superstition over the ignorant, and by forcibly repressing the dissent of those who were neither stupid nor superstitious. Voltaire, therefore, believed that to sap the misused authority of the Church was the first necessary step towards awakening the mind of the nation.
Soon after his return to France, an event occurred which was well calculated to exasperate his hostility against intolerance. Adrienne le Couvreur, the finest tragic actress of the age, the best who had ever at that time trod the French stage, died in Paris in the height of her fame. She was a woman of a warm and generous heart; she wrote letters in a way in which only the most cultivated Frenchwomen of the time, such as Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Sevigné, could write them—that is to say, in a way which raised and refined the standard of the French language. She was the first example of a French actress who combined professional renown with consideration in society. She
