 Introduction of Letters on England by Voltaire, edited by Henry Moley. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith. Letters on England by Voltaire. Introduction by Henry Moley. François-Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire, was the son of François Arouet of Poitreau, who lived in Paris, had given up his office of notary two years before the birth of his third son, and obtained some years afterwards a treasurer's office in the Chambre des Comptes. Voltaire was born in the year 1694. He lived until within 10 or 11 years of the outbreak of the Great French Revolution, and was a chief leader in a movement of thought that preceded the revolution. Though he lived to his 84th year, Voltaire was born with a weak body. His brother Armand, eight years his senior, became a Johnsonist. Voltaire, when ten years old, was placed with the Jesuits in the Collège Louis-le-Garrant. There he was taught during seven years, and his genius was encouraged in its bent for literature. Skill in speaking and in writing being especially fostered in the system of education, which the Jesuits had planned to produce capable men who by voice and a pen could give a reason for the faith they held. Verses written for an invalid soldier at the age of 11 won for young Voltaire the friendship of Nino L'Enclos, who encouraged him to go on writing verses. She died soon afterwards, and remembered him with a legacy of 2,000 livres for purchase of books. He wrote in his lively school days a tragedy that afterward he burnt. At the age of 17, he left the Collège Louis-le-Garrant, where he said afterwards that he had been taught nothing but Latin and the stupidities. He was then sent to the law schools and saw life in Paris as a gay young poet who with all his brilliant liveliness had an aptitude for looking on the tragic side of things, and one of whose first poems was an old on the misfortunes of life. His mother died when he was 20. Voltaire's father thought him a fool for his versifying and attached him as secretary to the marquee of Chateau-Neuve when he went as an ambassador to the Hague. In December 1713, he was dismissed for his irregularities. In Paris, his unsteadiness and his addiction to literature caused his father to rejoice in getting him housed in a country Chateau with Monsieur de Courmardin. Monsieur de Courmardin's father talked with such enthusiasm of Henry IV and the sully that Voltaire planned the writing of what became his on-heat and his history of the age of Louis XIV, who died on the 1st of September 1715. Under the regency that followed, Voltaire got into trouble again and again through the sharpness of his pen and at last accused of verse that satirized the regent. He was locked up on the 17th of May 1717 in the Bastille. There he wrote the first two books of his on-heat and finished a play on Oedipus, which he had begun at the age of 18. He did not obtain full liberty until the 12th of April 1718 and it was at this time with a clearly formed design to associate the name he took with work of high attempt in literature that François-Marie Arrouet, aged 24, first called himself Voltaire. Voltaire's Oedip was played with success in November 1718. A few months later he was again banished from Paris and finished the on-heat in his retirement, as well as another play, Arithymith, that was acted in February 1720. Other plays followed. In December 1721 Voltaire visited Lord Bollingbroke, who was then an exile from England at the Chateau of La Source. There was now constant literary activity. From July to October 1722 Voltaire visited Holland with Madame de Raubelmond. After a serious attack of smallpox in November 1723, Voltaire was active as a poet about the court. He was then in receipt of a pension of 2,000 livres from the king and had inherited more than twice as much by the death of his father in January 1722. But in December 1725, a quarrel fastened upon him by the Chevalier de Roi who had him relayed and beaten caused him to send a challenge. For this he was arrested and lodged once more in April 1726 in the Bastille. There he was detained a month, and his first act when he was released was to ask for a passport to England. Voltaire left France, reached London in August 1726, went as guest to the house of a rich merchant at Wandsworth, and remained three years in this country from the age of 32 to the age of 35. He was here when George I died and George II became king. He published here his Enquillard. He wrote here his history of Charles XII. He read the Galliviers travels as a new book and might have been presented the first night of the Beggar's opera. He was here when Sir Isaac Newton died. In 1731 he published at the Hohen the Lettre sur les Anglais which appeared in England in 1733 in the volume from which they are here reprinted. End of introduction. Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith. Letter 1 of Letters on England by Voltaire edited by Henry Moley. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith. Letters on England by Voltaire. Letter 1 on the Quakers. I was of opinion that the doctrine and history of so extraordinary a people were worthy the attention of the curious. To acquaint myself with them I made a visit to one of the most eminent Quakers in England who after having traded thirty years had the wisdom to prescribe limits to his fortune and to his desires and was settled in a little solitude not far from London. Being coming to it I perceived a small but regularly built house, vastly neat but without the least upon poor furniture. The Quaker who owned it was a hell, ruddy complexion the old man who had never been afflicted with sickness he had always been insensible to passions and a perfect stranger to intemperance. I never in my life saw a more noble or a more engaging aspect than his. He was dressed like those of his persuasion in a plain coat without pleats in the sides or buttons on the pockets and sleeves and had on a beaver the brims of which were horizontal like those of our clergy. He did not uncover himself when I appeared and advanced towards me without once stooping his body. There appeared more politeness in the open humane air of his continents then in the custom of drawing one leg behind the other and taking that from the head which is made to cover it. Friend, says he to me, I perceive thou art a stranger but if I can do anything for thee only tell me. Sir, said I to him, bending forwards and advancing as usual with us, one leg towards him I flatter myself that my just curiosity will not give you the least offence and that you will do me the honour to inform me of the particulars of your religion. The people of thy country replied quicker are too full of their bows and compliments but I never yet met with one of them who had so much curiosity as thyself coming and let us first dine together. I still continued to make some very unseasonable ceremonies it not being easy to disengage oneself at once from habits we have been long used to and after taking part in a frugal meal which began and ended with a prayer to God I began to question my courteous host and opened with that which good Catholics have more than once made to Huguenots. My dear sir, said I, were you ever baptised? I never was, replied Quaker, nor any of my brethren. Zanz, said I to him, you are not Christians then? Friend, replies the old man in a softer tunnel of voice swear not, we are Christians an endeavour to be good Christians and we are not of opinion that the sprinkling water on the child's head makes him a Christian Heavens, say I, shocks at his impiety you have then forgot that Christ was baptised by Saint John Friend, replies the mild Quaker once again swear not, Christ indeed was baptised by John but he himself never baptised anyone we are the disciples of Christ and not of John I pitied very much the sincerity of my worthy Quaker and was absolutely for forcing him to get himself christened Were that all? replied he very gravely we would submit chairfully to baptism purely in compliance with thy weakness for we don't condemn any person who uses it but then we think that those who profess a religion of so holy, so spiritual a nature profess that of Christ or to upstain to the utmost of their power from the Jewish ceremonies O unaccountable, said I, what baptism a Jewish ceremony? Yes, my friend, said he, so truly Jewish that a great many Jews use the baptism of John to this day look into Asian authors and thou wilt find that John only revived this practice and that it had been used by the Hebrews long before his time, in like a manner as the Mohammedans imitated Ishmaelites in their pilgrimage to Mecca Jesus indeed submitted to the baptism of John as he had suffered himself to be circumcised but circumcision and the washing with water ought to be abolished by the baptism of Christ that baptism of the spirit, that ablution of the soul which is the salvation of mankind thus the foreigner said and indeed a baptised you with water onto repentance but he that cometh after me is mightier than I whose shoes I am not worthy to bear he shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost and with fire likewise Paul, the great apostle of the Gentiles writes as follows to the Corinthians Christ sent me not to baptise but to preach the gospel and indeed Paul never baptised but two persons with water and that very much again is his inclinations he circumcised his disciple Timothy and the other disciples likewise circumcised all who were willing to submit to that carnal ordinance but art thou circumcised added he I am not the honour to be so said I well friend continues the Quaker thou art a Christian without being circumcised and I am one without being baptised thus did this pious man make a wrong but very specious application of four or five texts of scripture which seemed to favour the tenets of his sect but at the same time forgot very sincerely and hundred texts which made it directly against them I had more sense then to contact with him since there is no possibility of convincing an enthusiast a man should never pretend to inform a lover of his mistresses' faults no more than one who is at law of the badness of his cause nor attempt to wing over a phonetic by strength of reasoning accordingly a waived subject well I said I to him what sort of a communion have you we have none like that thou chintis to Adam on us replied he how no communion said I only that spiritual one replied he of a heart he then began again to throw out his texts of scripture and preached a most eloquent sermon against that ordinance he harangued in a tongue as though he had been inspired to prove that the sacraments were merely of human invention and that the word sacrament was not once mentioned in the Gospel excuse said he my ignorance for I have not employed a hundredth part of the arguments which might be brought to prove the truth of our religion but these thou thyself miest to peruse in the exposition of our faith written by Robert Barclay it is one of the best pieces that ever was penned by man and as our adversaries confess it to be of dangerous tendency the arguments in it must necessarily be very convincing I promised to peruse this piece and my Quaker imagined he had already made a convert of me he afterwards gave me an accounting few words of some singularities which make this sect to contempt of others confess said he that it was very difficult for thee to refrain from laughter when answered all thy civilities without uncovering my head and at the same time said thee and thou to thee however thou appearest to me too well read not to know that in Christ time no nation was so ridiculous as to put the plural number for the singular Augustus Caesar himself was spoken to in such phrases at these I love thee, I beseech thee, I thank thee but he did not allow any person to call him domain, sir it was not till many ages after that man would have the word you as though they were double instead of thou employed in speaking to them and you served the flattering titles of lordship of eminence and of holiness which mere worms bestow on other worms by assuring them that they are with a most profound respect and in famous falsehood their most obedient humble servants it is to secure ourselves more strongly from such a shameless traffic of lies and flattery that we, thee and thou, are king with the same freedom as we do a beggar and salute no person we owe nothing to mankind but charity and to the laws respect and obedience our apparel is also somewhat different from that of others and this purely that it may be a perpetual warning to us not to imitate them others wear the badges and the marks of their several dignities and we those of Christian humility we fly from all assemblies of pleasure from diversions of every kind and from places where gaming is practised and indeed our case would be very deplorable should we feel with such levities as those I have mentioned the heart which ought to be the habitation of God we never swear not even in a court of justice being of opinion that the most holy name of God ought not to be prostituted in the miserable contests between a man and a man when we are obliged to appear before a magistrate upon other people's account for lawsuits are unknown among the friends we give evidence to the truth by sealing it with our yay or nay and the judges believe us on our bare affirmation while as the so many other Christians for swear themselves on the holy gospel we never war or fighting any case but it is not that we are afraid for so far from shuddering at thoughts of death we on the contrary bless the moment which unites us with the being of beings and the reason of our not using the outward sword is that we are neither wolves tigers nor mastiffs but man and Christians our God who has commanded us to love our enemies and to suffer without repining would certainly not permit us to cross the seas merely because murderers clothed in scarlet and wearing caps two foot high enlisted citizens by the noise made with two little sticks on an ass sking extended and when after a victory is gained the whole city of London is illuminated when a sky is in a place with fireworks and a noise is heard in the air of thanksgivings of bells of organs and of the cannon we groan in silence and are deeply affected with sadness of spirit and brokenness of heart for the sad havoc which is the occasion of those public rejoicings End of letter one Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter two of Letters on England by Voltaire edited by Henry Morley This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letters on England by Voltaire Letter two on the Quakers Such was the substance of the conversation I had with this very singular person but I was greatly surprised to see him come the Sunday following and take me with him to the Quakers meeting There are several of these in London but that which he carried me to stands near the famous pillar called the Monument The brethren were already assembled at my entering it with my guide There might be about 400 men and 300 women in the meeting The women hid their faces behind their fans and a man were covered with their broad brimmed hats All were seated and the silence was universal I parts through them but did not perceive so much as one lift up his eyes to look at me This silence lasted a quarter of an hour when at last one of them rose up took off his hat and after making a variety of rye faces and groaning in a most lamentable manner he, partly from his nose and partly from his mouth a strange confused jumble of words borrowed as he imagined from the Gospel which neither himself nor any of his hearers understood When this distorter had ended his beautiful soliloquy and that the stupid but greatly edified congregation were separated I asked my friend how it was possible for the judicious part of their assembly to suffer such a babbling We are obliged, says he, to suffer it because no one knows when a man rises up to hold forth whether he will be moved by the spirit or by folly In this doubt and uncertainty we listen patiently to everyone we even allow our women to hold forth Two or three of these are often inspired at one and the same time and it is then that a most charming noise is heard in the Lord's house You have then no priests? said I to him No, no friend replies the Quaker to our great happiness Then opening one of the friend's books as he called it he read the following words in an emphatic tone God forbid we should presume to ordain anyone to receive the Holy Spirit on the Lord's Day to the Prejudice of the rest of the brethren Thanks to the Almighty we are the only people upon earth that have no priests Good is that thou deprives of so happy a distinction why should we abandon our babe to mercenary nurses when we ourselves have milk enough for it These mercenary creatures would soon domineer in our houses and destroy both the mother and the babe God has said freely you have received freely give Shall we, after these words, cheapen as it were the Gospel sell the Holy Ghost and make of an assembly of Christians a mere shop of traders We don't pay a set of men clothed in black to assist our poor to bury our dead or to preach to the brethren These officers are all of too tender a nature for us ever to entrust them to others But how is it possible for you said I with some warmth to know whether your discourse is really inspired by the Almighty Whosoever says he shall employ Christ to enlighten him and shall publish the Gospel truth he may feel inwardly such and one may be assured that he is inspired by the Lord He then poured forth a numberless multitude of scripture texts which proved, as he imagined, that there is no such thing as Christianity without an immediate revelation and added these remarkable words When thou movest one of thy limbs is it moved by thy own power? Certainly not For this limb is often sensible to involuntary motions Consequently, he who created thy body gives motion to this earthly tabernacle And are there several ideas of which thy soul receives the impression formed by thyself? Much less are they since these pouring upon thy mind whether thou wilt or know Consequently, thou receivest thy ideas from him who created thy soul But, as he leaves thy affections at full liberty he gives thy mind such ideas as thy affections may deserve If thou livest in God thou actest thou thinkest in God After this, thou needest only but open thy eyes to that light which enlightens all mankind And it is then thou wilt perceive the truth and make others perceive it By this, said I, is Malbranche's doctrine to a titel? I am acquainted with thy Malbranche, said he He had something of the friend in him but was not enough so These are the most considerable particulars I learned concerning the doctrine of the Quakers In my next letter I shall acquaint you with their history which you will find more singular than their opinions Letters 3 of Letters on England by Voltaire edited by Henry Morley This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in a public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letters on England by Voltaire Letter 3 on the Quakers You have already heard that the Quakers date from Christ who according to them was the first of Quaker Religions, say these was corrupted a little after his death and remained in that state of corruption about 1600 years But there were always a few Quakers concealed in the world who carefully preserved the sacred fire which was extinguished in all but themselves until at last this light spread itself in England in 1642 It was at a time when Great Britain was torn to pieces by the intestine wars which three or four sects had raised in the name of God that one George Fox, born in Leicestershire and son to a silk weaver took it into his head to preach and as he pretended with all the requisites of a true apostle that is without being able either to read or write He was about 25 years of age irreproachable in his life and conduct and a holy madman He was equipped in leather from head to foot and travelled from one village to another exclaiming against the war and clergy Had his invectives being levelled against the soldiery only he would have been safe enough but he invaded against eglossiastics Fox was seized at Derby and being carried before a justice of peace he did not once offer to pull off his leaven hat upon which an officer gave him a great box of the year and cried to him Don't you know you are to appear uncovered before his warship Fox presented his other cheek to the officer and begged him to give him another box for God's sake the justice would have had him swam before he asked him any questions No, friend, says Fox to him that I never swear the justice observing he veered and thouled him sent him to the house of correction in Derby with orders that he should be whipped there Fox praised the Lord all the way he went to the house of correction where the justice's order was executed with the utmost severity the man who whipped his enthousiast were greatly surprised to hear him beseech them to give him a few more lashes for the good of his soul There was no need of entreating these people the lashes were repeated for which Fox thanked them very cordially and began to preach At first the spectators fell laughing but they afterwards listened to him and as enthusiasm is an epidemical distemper many were persuaded and those who scourged him became his first disciples Being set at liberty he ran up and down the country with a dozen proselytes at his heels still declaiming against the clergy and was whipped from time to time Being one day set in the pillory he rang the crowd in so strong and moving amena that fifty of the auditors became his converts and he won the rest so much in his favour that his head being freed tumultuously from the hole where it was fastened The populace went and searched for the Church of England clergyman who had been chiefly instrumental in bringing him to this punishment and set him on the same pillory where Fox had stood Fox was bold enough to convert some of Oliver Cromwell soldiers who thereupon quitted the service and refused to take the oaths Oliver having as greater contempt for a sect which would not allow its members to fight as Sixtus Quintus had for another sector Dovindon C. Chiamaba began to persecute these new converts The prisons were crowded with them but persecution seldom has any other effect than to increase the number of proselytes These came therefore from their confinement more strongly confirmed in the principles they had imbibed and followed by their jailers whom they had brought over to their belief But the circumstances which contributed chiefly to the spreading of this sect were as follows Fox thought himself inspired and consequently was of opinion that he must speak in a manner He thereupon began to writhe his body to screw up his face to hold in his breath and to exhale it in a forcible manner in so much that the priestess of the Pythium God at Delphus could not have acted her part to better advantage Inspiration soon became so habituated to him that he could scarce deliver himself in any other manner This was the first gift he communicated to his disciples These abbed very sincerely their masters several grimaces and shooking every limb the instant the fit of inspiration came upon them whence they were called Quakers The Volga attempted to mimic them They trembled, they sparked through the nose they quaked and fancied themselves inspired by the Holy Ghost The only thing now wanting was a few miracles and accordingly they rolled them Fox, this modern patriarch spoke thus to a justice of peace before a large assembly of people Friend, take care what thou dost God will soon punish thee for persecuting his saints This magistrate, being one who besotted himself every day with bad bienn brandy died often a popex two days after the moment he had assigned a minimus for imprisoning some Quakers The sudden death with which this justice was seized was not ascribed to his intemperance but was universally looked upon as the effect of the Holy Man's predictions so that this accident made more converts to Quakerism than a thousand sermons and as many shaking fits could have done Oliver finding them increased daily was desirous of bringing them over to his party and for that purpose attempted to bribe them by money However, they were incorruptible which made him one day declare that this religion was the only one he had ever met with that had resisted the charms of gold The Quakers were several times persecuted under Charles II not upon a religious account but for refusing to pay the tithes for theing and thowing the magistrates and for refusing to take the oaths enacted by the laws At last Robert Barclay, a native of Scotland, presented to the king in 1675 his Apology for the Quakers a work as well drawn up as the subject could possibly admit the dedication to Charles II is not filled with mean flattering incommunist but are bound with bold touches in favour of truth and with the wisest consuls Thou hast tasted says he to the king at the close of his epistle dedicatory of prosperity and adversity is to what it is to be banished thy native country to be overruled as well as to rule and sit upon the throne and being oppressed Thou hast reason to know how hateful the oppressor is both to God and a man If after all these warnings and advertisements Thou dost not turn on to the Lord with all thy heart but forget him who remember the thee in thy distress to follow lust and vanity surely great will be thy condemnation again is to which snare as well as the temptation of those that may or do feed thee and prompt thee to evil the most excellent and prevalent remedy will be to apply thyself to that light of Christ which shineth in thy conscience which neither can nor will flatter thee nor suffer thee to be at ease in thy sings but dost and will deal plainly and faithfully with thee as those that our followers thereof have plainly done thy faithful friend and subject Robert Barclay A more surprising circumstance is that this episode written by a private man of no figure was so happy in its effect as to put a stop to the persecution End of Letter 3 by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter 4 by Voltaire edited by Henry Morley This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter Song England by Voltaire Letter 4 on the Quakers About this time William arose the illustrious William Penn who established the power of the Quakers in America and would have made them appear venerable in the eyes of the Europeans where it possible for mankind to respect virtue when revealed in a ridiculous light He was the only son of Vice Admiral Penn favourite of the Duke of York afterwards King James II William Penn at a 20 years of age happening to meet with a Quaker in Cork whom he had known at Oxford This man made a proselyte of him and William being a spritely youth and naturally eloquent having a winning aspect he soon gained over some of his intimates He carried matters so far that he formed by insensible degrees a society of young Quakers who met at his house so that he was ahead of a sect when a little above 20 Being returned after his leaving Cork to device Admiral his father instead of falling upon his knees to ask his blessing he went up to him with his hat on and said friend I am very glad to see thee in good health Device Admiral imagined his son to be crazy but soon finding he was turned Quaker He employed all the methods that prudence could suggest to engage him to behave and act like other people The youth made no other answer to his father than by exhorting him to term Quaker also at last his father confined himself to a request namely that he should wait upon the king and the Duke of York with his hat under his arm and should not thee endow them William answered that he could not do these things for conscience's sake which exasperated his father to such a degree that he turned him out of doors young Penn gave God thanks for permitting him to suffer so early in his cause after which he went into the city where he held forth and made a greater number of converts The Church of England clergy found their congregations dwindle away daily and the Penn being young, handsome and of a graceful stature the court as well as the city ladies flocked very devoutly to his meeting The Patriarch George Fox hearing of his great repetition came to London though the journey was very long purely to see and converse with him both resolved to go upon missions into foreign countries and accordingly they embarked for Holland after having left labourers sufficient to take care of the London vineyard Their labourers were crowned with success in Amsterdam but a circumstance which reflected the greatest honour on them and at the same time put their humility to the greatest trial was the reception they met with from Elizabeth the Princess Palatine and to George I of Great Britain a lady conspicuous for her genius and knowledge and to whom Descartes had dedicated his philosophical romance She was then retired to The Hague where she received these friends for so the Quakers were at that time called in Holland This princess had several conferences with them in her palace and she had last entertained a so favourable an opinion of Quakerism that they confessed she was not far from the kingdom of heaven The friends sold likewise the good seed in Germany but reaped very little fruit Seeing and Thowing was not approved of in a country where a man is perpetually obliged to employ the titles of Highness and Excellency William Penn returned soon to England upon hearing of his father's sickness in order to see him before he died The Vice Admiral was reconciled to his son and though of a different persuasion embraced him tenderly William made a fruitless exhortation to his father not to receive the sacrament and a good old man entreated his son William to wear buttons on his sleeves and a crepe hatband in his beaver but all to no purpose William Penn inherited very large possessions part of which consisted in crowned debts due to the Vice Admiral for sums he had advanced for the sea service No money were at that time more insecure than those owning from the King Penn was obliged to go more than once and thee and thou King Charles were ministers in order to recover the debt and at the last instead of a species the government invested him with the right and sovereignty of a province of America to the south of Maryland thus was a Quaker raised to sovereign power Penn set sail for his new dominions with two ships freighted with Quakers who followed his fortune the country was then called Pennsylvania from William Penn who there founded Philadelphia in that country the first step he took was to enter into an alliance with his American neighbors and this is the only treaty between those people and the Christians that was not ratified by Reynolds and was never infringed the new sovereign was at the same time the legislator of Pennsylvania and enacted very wise and prudent laws none of which have ever been changed since his time the first is to injure a no person upon a religious account as brethren all those who believe in one God he had no sooner settled his government but several American merchants came and peep-holed this colony the natives of the country instead of lying into the woods cultivated by insensible degrees a friendship with the peaceable Quakers they loved those foreigners as much as they detested the other Christians who had conquered and laid waste America in a little time a greater number of those savages charmed with the mild and gentle disposition of their neighbors came in crowds to William Penn and besought him to admit them into the number of his vassals it was very rare and uncommon for a soul ring to be lead and avowed by the meanest of his subjects who never took their hats off when they came into his presence and as singular for a government to be without one priest in it and for a people to be without arms either offensive or defensive it was the duty of citizens to be absolutely undistinguished but by the public employment and for neighbors not to entertain the least jealousy one against the other William Penn might glory in having brought down upon earth the so much boasted golden age which in all probability never existed but in Pennsylvania he returned to England to settle some affairs relating to his new dominance after the death of King Charles II King James who had loved the father indulged the same affection to the son and no longer considered him as an obscure secretary but as a very great man the King's politics on this occasion agreed with his inclinations he was desirous of pleasing the Quakers by annulling the laws made against the non-conformists in order to have an opportunity by this universal toleration of establishing the Romish religion all the sectorists in England saw the snare that was laid for them but did not give into it they never failing to unite when the Romish religion, their common enemy is to be opposed but Penn did not think himself bound in any manner to renounce his principles merely to favour a protestant to whom he was odious in opposition to a king who loved him he had established a universal toleration with regard to conscience in America and would not have it thought that he intended to destroy it in Europe for which reason he adhered so inviably to King James that a report prevailed universally of his being a Jesuit this columnary affected him very strongly and he was obliged to justify himself in print however, the unfortunate King James II in whom as in most the princess of the Stuart family grandeur and weakness were equally blended and who, like them, as much overdid some things as he was short in others lost his kingdom in a manner that is hardly to be accounted for all the English sectorists accepted from William III and his parliament the toleration in indulgence which they had refused when offered by King James it was then the Quakers began to enjoy by virtue of the laws the several privileges they possessed at this time Penn, having at last seen Quakerism firmly established in his native country went back to Pennsylvania his own people and the Americans came with tears of joy as though he had been a father who was returned to visit his children all the laws had been religiously observed in his absence a circumstance in which no legislator had ever been happy but himself after having resided some years in Pennsylvania he left it but with great reluctance in order to return to England there to solicit some matters in favour of the commerce of Pennsylvania but he never saw it again he died in Ruscombe in Berkshire in 1718 I am not able to guess what fate Quakerism may have in America but I perceive it dwindles away daily in England in North countries where liberty of conscience is allowed the established religion will at last swallow up all the rest Quakers are disqualified from being members of parliament nor can they enjoy any post or preferment because an oath will always be taken on these occasions and they never swear they are therefore reduced to the necessity of subsisting upon traffic their children whom the industry of their parents has enriched are desirous of enjoying honours of wearing buttons and the ruffles and quite ashamed of being called Quakers they became converts to the church of England merely to be in the fashion End of Letter 4 Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter 5 of Letters on England by Voltaire edited by Henry Moley this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letters on England by Voltaire Letter 5 on the Church of England England is properly the country of secretaries Multisunt Magsionis in Domo Partilis May in my father's house are many mentions an Englishman as one to whom liberty is natural may go to heaven his own way nevertheless though everyone is permitted to serve God in whatever mode of fashion he thinks proper yet their true religion is the sect of Episcopalians or Churchmen called the Church of England or simply the Church by way of eminence no person can possess an employment either in England or Ireland unless he be ranked among the faithful that is possesses himself a member of the Church of England this reason which carries mathematical evidence with it has converted such numbers of dissenters of all persuasions that not a 20th part of the nation is out of the pale of the established church the English clergy have retained a greater number of the Romish ceremonies and especially that of receiving with a most scrupulous attention their tithes they also have the pious ambition to aim at superiority moreover they inspire very religiously their flock with a holy seal against the dissenters of all denominations this seal was pretty violent under the Tories in the four last years of Queen Anne but was productive of no greater mischief than breaking the windows of some meeting houses and demolishing of a few of them more religious rage seized in England with the civil wars and was no more under Queen Anne than the hollow noise of a sea which below still heaved though so long after the storm when the Wicks and the Tories laid a waste to their native country in the same manner as the Guavs and the Giebelins formally did theirs it was absolutely necessary for both parties to call in religion on this occasion the Tories declared for episcopacy and the Wicks as some imagined were for abolishing it however after these had got the upper hand they contented themselves with only abridging it at the time when the Earl of Oxford and the Lord Bolingbroke used to drink a health to the Tories the Church of England considered those noblemen as the defenders of its holy privilege the lower house of convocation a kind of house of commons composed the holy of the clergy was in some credit at that time at least the members of it had a liberty to meet to dispute on ecclesiastical matters to sentence impious books from time to time to deflate that is books written against themselves the ministry which is now composed of Wicks does not so much as allow these gentlemen to assemble so that they are at this time reduced in the obscurity of their respective parishes to the melancholy occupation of preying for the prosperity of the government whose tranquility they would willingly disturb with regard to the bishops who are 26 in all they still have seats in house of lords in spite of the Wicks because the ancient abuse of considering them as barons subsists to this day there is a clause however in the oath which the government requires from these gentlemen that puts their Christian patients to a very great trial namely that they shall be of the Church of England as by law established there are few bishops deans or other dignitaries but imagine they are so eurydivinal it is consequently a great mortification to them to be obliged to confess that they owe their dignity to a pitiful law enacted by a settled profane layman I learned Monk, father Kuhayi wrote a book lately to prove the validity and succession of English ordinations this book was forbid in France but do you believe that the English ministry were pleased with it? far from it those wicked Wicks don't care a straw the Episcopal succession among them have been interrupted or not or whether Bishop Parker was consecrated as it is pretended in a tavern or a church for these Wicks are much better pleased that the bishops should derive their authority from the Parliament than from the Apostles the Lord Bollingbroke observed that this notion of divine right would only make so many tyrants in long sleeves but that the laws made so many citizens with the regard to the morals of the English clergy they are more regular than those of France and for this reason all the clergy are very few accepted are educated in universities of Oxford or Cambridge far from the deprivity and corruption which reign in a capital they are not called to dignities to very late at a time of life where men are sensible of no other passion than avarice that is when their ambition craves a supply Employments are here bestowed both in a church and the army as a reward for long services and we never see youngesters made bishops or kernels immediately upon their laying aside the academical gong and besides most of the clergy are married the stiff and awkward air contacted by them at the university and a little familiarity the men of this country have with the ladies commonly oblige a bishop to confine himself to and rest contented with his own clergymen sometimes take a glass at a tavern custom giving them a sanction on the occasion and if they fuddle themselves it is in a very serious manner and without giving the least a scandal that fable mix the kind of mortal not to be defined who is neither of the clergy nor of the laity in a word the thing called abbey in France is a specious quite annoying England or the clergy here are very much upon the reserve and most of them parents when these are told that in France young fellows famous for their disoluteness and raised to the highest dignities of the church by female intrigues address the fair publicly in an amorous way amuse themselves in writing tender love songs entertain their friends very splendidly every night at their own houses and after the banquet is ended withdraw to invoke the assistance of the Holy Ghost and call themselves boldly the successors of the apostles they bless God for their being protestants but these are shameless heretics who deserve to be blown hands through the flames to Old Nick as a harbour lee says and for this reason I do not trouble myself about them and of letter five recording by Cheyenne Arosmith letter six of letters on England by Voltaire edited by Henry Morley this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Cheyenne Arosmith letters on England by Voltaire letter six on the Presbyterians the Church of England is confined almost to the kingdom once it received its name and to Ireland for Presbyterianism is the established religion in Scotland this Presbyterianism is directly the same with Calvinism as it was established in France and is now professed at Geneva as the priests of this sect receive but very inconsiderable stipends from their churches and consequently cannot emulate the splendid luxury of bishops they exclaim very naturally against the honours which they can never attain to figure to yourself the haughty Dagenis trembling underfoot the pride of Plato the scourged Presbyterians are not very unlike that proud oh tattered reasoner Dagenis did not use Alexander half so impertinently as these treated King Charles II for when they took up arms in his cause in opposition to Oliver who had deceived them they forced that poor monarch to undergo the hearing of three or four sermons every day would not suffer him to play reduced him to a state of penitence and mortification so that Charles soon grew sick of these pedants and accordingly eloped from them with as much joy as a youth does from school a Church of England minister appears as another Cato in presence of a juvenile sprightly French graduate who bauls for a whole morning together in the divinity schools and hunts a song in chorus with ladies in evening but this Cato is a very spark when before a scourged Presbyterian the latter affects a series gate puts on a sour look wears a vastly broad brimmed hat and a long cloak over a very short coat preaches through the nose and gives the name of the whore of Babylon to all churches where the ministers are so fortunate as to enjoy an annual revenue of five or six thousand pounds and where the people are weak enough to suffer this and to give them the titles of my lord, your lordship or your eminence these gentlemen who have also some churches in England introduced to there the mode of grave and severe exhortations to them is owning the sanctification of Sunday in the three kingdoms people are there forbidden to work or take any recreation on that day in which the severity is twice as great as that of the Romish church no operas, plays or concerts are allowed in London on Sundays and even cards are so expressly forbidden that numbered persons of quality and those we call the Gentile play on that day the rest of the nation go either to church, to the tavern or to see their mistresses though the Episcopal and Presbyterian sects are the two prevailing ones in Great Britain yet all others are very welcome to come and settle in it and live very sociably together although most of their preachers hate one another almost as cordially as a chancellors to dance a Jesuit take a view of the royal exchange in London a place more venerable than many courts of justice where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind there the Jew, the Mohammed Da and the Christian transact together as though they all profess the same religion and give the name of Infidl to numbered bankrupts there the Presbyterian confines in the Anabaptist and the churchmen depends on the Quaker's word if one religion only were allowed in England the government would very possibly become arbitrary if there were but two the people would cut one another's throats but as there are such a multitude they all live happy and in peace End of Letter 6 Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter 7 of Letters on England by Voltaire edited by Harry Moley this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letters on England by Voltaire Letter 7 on the Sosinians or Aryans or Antitrinitarians There is a little sect here composed of clergymen and offer a few very learned persons among the laity who though they do not call themselves Aryans or Sosinians do yet descend entirely from Athanasius with regard to their notions of the Trinity and declare very frankly that the father is greater than the son Do you remember what is related of a certain Orthodox bishop who in order to convince an emperor of the reality of consubstantiation put his hand under the chin of the monarch's son and took him by the nose in presence of his sacred majesty the emperor was going to order his attendants to throw the bishop out of the window when a good old man gave him this handsome and convincing reason Since your majesty says he is angry when your son has not due respect to show him, what punishment do you think will God the father inflict on those who refuse his son Jesus the title due to him The persons I just now mentioned declare that the holy bishop took a very wrong step that his argument was inconclusive and that the emperor should have answered him thus Know that there are two ways by which men may be wanting in respect to me first in not doing honor sufficient to my son and secondly in paying him the same honor as to me Be this as it will the principle of areas beginning to revive not only in England but in Holland and Poland The celebrated Sir Isaac Newton honored this opinion so far as to continent it This philosopher thought that the Unitarians argued more mathematically than we do But the most disanguine sticker for Arianism is the illustrious Dr. Clark This man is rigidly virtuous and of a milder disposition is more found off his tenets than desirous of propagating them and absorb the so entiling problems and calculations that he is a mere reasoning machine It is he who wrote a book which is much esteemed and little understood on the existence of God and another more intelligible but pretty much contempt on the truth of the Christian religion He never engaged in scholastic disputes which our friend calls venerable trifles He only published a work containing all the testimonies of the primitive ages for and again is the Unitarians and leaves to the reader the counting of the voices and the liberty of forming a judgment This book won the doctor a great number of partisans and lost to him the sea of Canterbury But in my humble opinion he was out in his calculation and had better have been primate of all England than merely an Aryan parcel You see that opinions are subject to revolutions as empires. Aryanism after having triumphed during 3 centuries and being forgot 12 rises at last out of its own ashes But it has chosen a very improper season to make its appearance in the present age being quite cloyed with disputes and sects The members of this sect are besides too few to be indulged the liberty of holding public assemblies which however they will doubtless be permitted to do in case they spread considerably But people are now so very cold with respect to all things of this kind that there is little probability any new religion or old one that may be revived will meet with favour Is it not whimsical enough that Luther, Carvin and Swingless all of them wretched authors should have founded sects which are now spread over a great part of Europe that Mohammed though so ignorant should have given a religion to Asia and Africa at that Sir Isaac Newton Dr Clarke Mr Locke Mr Luclerque etc. the greatest philosophers as well as the ableist writers of their ages should scarcely have been able to raise a little flock which even decreases daily This it is to be born at a proper period of time Were Cardinal de Gess to return again into the world neither his eloquence nor his intrigues would draw together 10 women in Paris Were Oliver Cromwell he who beheaded his sovereign and seized upon the kingly dignity to rise from the dead he would be a wealthy city trader and no more End of Letter 7 Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter 8 of Letter Song England by Voltaire edited by Harry Moley This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in a public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter Song England by Voltaire Letter 8 on the Parliament The members of the English Parliament have found out of comparing themselves to the old Romans Not long since Mr Shippen opened a speech in the House of Commons with these words The Majesty of the People of England would be wounded The singularity of the expression occasioned a loud laugh but this gentleman so far from being disconcerted repeated the same words with a resolute tone of voice In my opinion the Majesty of the People of England has nothing in common with that of the People of Rome much less is there any affinity between their governments There is in London a Senate some of the members were of accused, doubtless, very unjustly of selling their voices on certain occasions as was done in Rome This is the only resemblance Besides, the two nations appear to me quite opposite in character with regard both to good and evil The Romans never knew the dreadful folly of religious wars and abomination reserved for devout preachers or patients and humility Mario Sensula, Cesar Napompe Anthony and Augustus did not draw their swords and set the world in a blaze merely to determine whether the flamen should wear his shirt over his robe or his robe over his shirt or whether the sacred chickens should eat and drink or eat only in order to take the augury and cut one another to pieces in pitched battles for quarrels or for trifling a nature The sects of the Episcopalians and Presbyterians quite distracted these very serious heads for a time But I fancy they will hardly ever be so silly again they seeming to be grown wiser at their own expense and I do not perceive the least inclination in them to murder one another merely about syllogisms as some zillots among them once did a more essential difference between Rome and England which gives the advantage entirely to the letter namely that the civil wars of Rome ended in slavery and those of the English in liberty. The English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of kings by resisting them and who by a series of struggles have at last established that wise government where the prince is all powerful to do good and at the same time is restrained from committing evil, where the nobos are great without insolence though there are no vassals and where the people share in a government without confusion. The House of Lords and that of the commons divide the legislative power under the king but the Romans had no such balance The patricians and plebeians in Rome were perpetually at variance and there was no intermediate power to reconcile them. The Roman Senate who was so unjustly, so criminally proud as not to suffer the plebeians to share with them in anything could find no other artifice to keep the letter out of the administration then by employing them in foreign wars. They considered the plebeians as a wild beast whom it behoved to them to let loose upon the neighbors for fear they should devour their masters thus the greatest defect in the government of the Romans raised them to be conquerors. By being unhappy at home they triumphed over and possessed themselves of the world till at last their divisions sunk them to slavery. The government of England will never rise to so exalted a picture of glory nor will its end be so fatal The English are not fired with splendid folly of making conquests but would only prevent their neighbors from conquering. They are not only jealous of their own liberty but even of that of other nations The English were exasperated against the reader 14th for no other reason but because he was ambitious and declared war against the minister him merely out of levity not from any interested motives The English have doubtless purchased their liberties at a very high price and waded through seas of blood to draw on the idol of arbitrary power. Other nations have been involved in as great calamities and have shared as much blood but then the blood they spilled in defence of their liberties only enslaved them the more That which rises to a revolution in England was no more than a sedition in other countries A sitting Spain in Barbary or in Turkey takes up arms in defence of its privilege when immediately it is stormed by mercenary troops it is punished by executioners and the rest of the nations kiss the chains they are loaded with. The French are of opinion that the government of this island is more tempestuous than the sea which surrounds it which indeed is true but then it is never so but when the king raises a storm when he attempts to seize the ship of which he is only the chief pilot the civil wars of France lasted longer were more cruel and productive of greater evils than those of England but none of these civil wars had a wise and prudent liberty for their object In the detestable reigns of Charles IX and Henry III the whole affair was only whether the people should be slaves to the geeses with regard to the last war of Paris it deserves only to be hooted at because I see a crowd of schoolboys rising up in arms against their master and afterwards whipped for it Cardinal de Hretz who was witty and brave but to no purpose rebellious without a cause factious without design and ahead of a defenceless party caballed for caballing sake and seemed to forment the civil war merely out of diversion the parliament did not know what he intended nor what he did not intend he levied troops by act or parliament and the next moment cashured them he threatened, he begged pardon he set a price upon Cardinal Monson's head and afterwards congratulated him in a public manner our civil wars under Charles VI were bloody and cruel those of the League exquerable and that of the frondeurs ridiculers that for which the French chiefly reproach the English nation is the murder of King Charles I whom his subjects treated exactly as he would have treated them had his reign been prosperous after all consider on one side Charles I defeated in a pitched battle imprisoned, tried, sentenced to die in Westminster Hall and then beheaded and on the other the Emperor Henry VII poisoned by his chaplain at his receiving the sacrament Henry III stabbed by a monk 30 assassinations projected against Henry IV, several of them putting execution and last relieving that great monarch of his life way I say all these wicked attempts and then judge End of Letter VIII Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter IX of Letter Song England by Voltaire edited by Harry Moley this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in a public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter Song England by Voltaire Letter IX on the Government that mixture in the English Government that harmony between King Lords and Commons did not always subsist England was enslaved for a long series of years by the Romans the Saxons, the Danes and French successively William the Conqueror particularly ruled them with a rod of iron he disposed as absolutely of the lives and fortunes of his conquered subjects as an eastern monarch and forbade upon pain of earth the English either fire or candle in their houses after eight o'clock whether was this to prevent their nocturnal meetings or only to try by an odd and whimsical prohibition how far it was possible for one man to extend his power over his fellow creatures it is true indeed that the English had a parliament before and after William the Conqueror as though these assemblies then called parliaments composed of ecclesiastical tyrants and of plunderers entitled barons had been the guardians of the public liberty and happiness the Biberians who came from the shores of the Baltic and settled in the rest of Europe brought with them the form of government called states or parliaments about which so much noise is made and which are so little understood Kings indeed were not absolute in those days people were more wretched upon that very account and more completely enslaved the chiefs of these sabbages who had laid waste France, Italy, Spain and England made themselves monarchs their generals divided among themselves the several countries they had conquered when sprung those margraves those peers, those barons those petty tyrants who often contested with their sovereigns for the spoils of whole nations these were birds of prey fighting with an eagle for doves whose blood the victorious was to suck every nation instead of being governed by one master was trampled upon by a hundred tyrants the priests soon played a part among them before this it had been the fate of the Gauls the Germans and the Britons to be always governed by their druids and the chiefs of their villages an ancient kind of barons not so tyrannical as their successors these druids pretended to mediate us between God and the men they enacted laws they fominated their ex-communications and sentenced to death the bishop succeeded by insensible degrees to their temporal authority in the Gauls and the vandal government the popes set themselves at their head and armed with their briefs, their bulls and reinforced by monks they made even kings tremble deposed and assassinated them at pleasure and employed every artifice to draw into their own purses money from all parts of Europe the weak Ena one of the tyrants of the Saxon Habitaki in England was the first monarch who submitted in his pilgrimage to Rome to pay Saint Peter's penny equivalent very near to a French crown for every house in his dominions the whole island soon followed his example England became insensibly one of the Pope's provinces and the Holy Father used to send from time to time to the gates to levy exorbitant taxes at last the King John delivered up by a public instrument the Kingdom of England to the Pope who had excommunicated him but the barons not finding their account in this resignation they thrown the wretch the King John and seated Louis father to Saint Louis King of France in his place however they were so wary of their new monarch and accordingly obliged him to return to France the Pope's all laid waste England where all were for ruling the most numerous the most useful even the most virtuous and consequently the most venerable part of mankind consisting of those who study the laws and sciences of traders of artificers in a word of all who were not tyrants that is those who are called the people these I say were by them looked upon as so many animals beneath the dignity of the human species the commons in those ages were far from sharing in the government they being villains or peasants whose labour, whose blood were the property of their masters who entitled themselves to nobility the major part of man in Europe were at that time where they are to this day in several parts of the world they were villains or bondsmen of lords that is a kind of cattle bought and sold with the land many ages passed away before justice could be done to human nature that it was abominable for many to sow and but few reap and was not France very happy when the power and authority of those petty robbers was abolished by the law for authority of kin and of the people happily in the violent shocks which the divisions between kings and nobles gave to empires the chains of nations were more or less heavy liberty in England sprung from the quarrels of a tyrant the barons forced the king John and King Henry III to ground the famous Magnicata the chief design of which was indeed to make kings dependent on the lords but then the rest of the nation were a little favoured in it in order that they might join on proper occasions with their pretended masters this great charter which is considered as the sacred origin of the English liberties shows in itself how little liberty was known the title alone proves that the king thought he had a just right to be absolute and that the barons and even the clergy forced him to give up the pretended right for no other reason but because they were the most powerful Magnicata begins in this style we ground of our own free will the following privilege to the archbishops bishops priors and barons of our kingdom etc the House of Commons is not once mentioned in the articles of this charter a proof that it did not yet exist or that it existed without power mention is there in made by name of the freemen of England a melancholy proof that some were not so it appears by article 32 that these pretended freemen old service to their lords such liberty as this was not many removes from slavery by article 21 the king ordains that his officers should not henceforth seize upon unless they pay for them the horses and carts of freemen the people consider the this ordinance as a real liberty though it was a greater tyranny that happy usurper and a great politician who pretended to love the barons though he in reality hated and feared them got their lands alienated by this means the villains afterwards acquiring riches by their industry purchase the estates and country seats of the illustrious peers who had ruined themselves by their folly and extravagance and degrees into other hands the power of the House of Commons increased every day the families of the ancient peers were at last extinct and as peers only are properly noble in England there would be no such thing in strictness of law as nobility in that island had not the king created new barons from time to time and preserved body of peers once a terror to them to oppose them to the commons since becomes so formidable all these new peers who composed receive nothing but their titles from the king and very few of them have estates in those places when they take their titles one shall be Duke of D though he has not a foot of land in Dorsetshire and another is Earl of a village though his gas knows where it is situated the peers have power but it is only in the Parliament House there is no such thing here as oud, moyen and barse justices that is a power to judge in all matters civil and criminal nor a right or privilege of hunting the grounds of a citizen who at the same time is not permitted to fire a gun in his own field no one is exempted in this country from paying certain taxes because he's a noble man or a priest all duties and taxes are settled by the House of Commons whose power is greater than that of the peers though inferior to it in dignity the spiritual as well as temporal lords have the liberty to reject a money bill brought in by the Commons but they are not allowed to alter anything in it and must either pass or throw it out without a restriction when the bill has passed the Lord and is signed by the King then the whole nation pays every man in proportion to his revenue or estate not according to his title which would be absurd there is no such thing as an arbitrary subsidy or poll tax but a real tax on the lands of all which the estimate was made in a ring of the famous King William III the land tax continues still upon the same foot though the revenue of the lands is increased thus no one is tyrannized silver and everyone is easy the feet of the peasants are not bruised by wooden shoes they eat white bread are well clothed and are not afraid of increasing their stock of cattle nor of tiling their houses from any apprehension that their taxes would be raised to the year following the annual income of the estate of a great many commoners in England amounts to 200,000 livres and yet these do not think it beneath them to plow the lands which enrich them and on which they enjoy their liberty End of Letter 9 Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter 10 of Letters on England by Voltaire edited by Harry Moley this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain if you have any information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter on England by Voltaire Letter 10 on Trade As trade enriched the citizens in England so it contributed to their freedom and this freedom on the other side extended their commerce whence arose the groundure of the state Trade raised by insensible degrees the naval power which gives the English a superiority over the seas and they now are masters of very near 200 ships of war posterity will very probably be surprised to hear that an island whose only produce is a little tin, fuller earth and coarse wool would become so powerful by its commerce as to be able to send in 1723 three fleets at the same time to three different and far distanced parts of the globe. One before Gibraltar conquered and still possessed by the English a second to Port Bélo to dispossess the king of Spain of the treasures of the West Indies and a third into the Baltic to prevent the northern powers from coming to an engagement at a time when Louis XIV made all Italy tremble and that his armies which had already possessed themselves of Savoy and Pierdemont were upon the point of taking to ring. Prince Eugene was obliged to march from the middle of Germany in order to destroy. Having no money without which cities cannot be either taken or defended he addressed himself to some English merchants. These at an hour and a half's warning lent him five millions whereby he was enabled to deliver Turin and to be the French after which he wrote the following short letter to the persons who had dispersed him the above mentioned sums Gentlemen, I have received your money and flatter myself that I have laid it out to your satisfaction. Such a circumstance as this races are just a pride in an English merchant and makes him presume not without some reason to compare himself to a Roman citizen and indeed a pierce brother does not think traffic beneath him when the Lord Townsend was Minister of State a brother of his was content to be a city merchant and at a time that the Earl of Oxford governed Great Britain a younger brother was no more than a factor in Aleppo where he lived and where he died. This custom which begins however to be laid aside appears monstrous to Germans vainly puffed up with their extraction these think it's morally impossible that the son of an English peer should be no more than a rich and powerful citizen for all a princess in Germany. There have been 30 Highnesses of the same name and whose petrimony consisted only in their escutcheons and their pride. In France the title of Marquis is given gratis to anyone who will accept of it and whosoever arrives at Paris from the midst of the most remote provinces with money in his purse and a name terminating in A.C. or Il may strut about and cry such a man as I a man of my rank and a figure and may look down upon a trader with sobering contempt while is the trader on the other side by thus often hearing his profession treated so disdainfully is full enough to blush at it. However I need not say which is most useful to a nation. A lord powered in the tip of the mold who knows exactly at what o'clock the king rises and goes to bid and who gives himself heirs of grandeur and state at the same time that he's acting the slave in the end chamber of a prime minister or a merchant who enriches his country dispatches orders from his counting house to so far and around the Cairo and contributes to the well-being of the world. Inoculation. It is inadvertently affirmed in the Christian countries of Europe that English are fools and madmen. Fools because they give their children the smallpox to prevent their catching it at madmen because they wantonly communicate a certain and dreadful distemper to their children merely to prevent an uncertain evil. The English on the other side call the rest of the Europeans cowardly and unnatural. Cowardly because they are afraid of putting their children to a little pain unnatural because they expose them to die one time or other of the smallpox but that the reader may be able to judge whether the English or those who differ from them in opinion are in the right here follows the history of the famed inoculation which is mentioned with so much dread in France. The Circassian women have from time immemorial communicated the smallpox to their children when not above six months old by making an incision in the arm and by putting into this incision a pustule taken carefully from the body of another child. This pustule produces the same effect in the arm it is laid in as a yeast in a piece of dough it ferments and diffuses through the whole mass of blood the qualities with which it is impregnated. The pustules of the child in whom the artificial smallpox has been thus inoculated are employed to communicate the same distemper to others. There is an almost perpetual circulation of it in Circassia and when unhappily the smallpox has quite left to the country the inhabitants of it are in as great trouble and perplexity as other nations when their harvest has fallen short. The circumstance that introduced a custom in Circassia which appears so singular to others is nevertheless a cause common to all nations i.e. maternal tenderness and interest. The Circassians are poor and their daughters are beautiful and indeed it is in them they chiefly trade they furnish with beauties the Sahalios of the Turkish Sultan of the Persian Sulfi and of all those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such pressures merchandise. These maidens are very honourably accepted to fondle and caress men are taught dances of a very polite and infeminate kind and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed. These unhappy creatures repeat their lesson to their mothers in the same manner as little girls among us repeat their catechism without understanding one word they say. Now it often happened that after a father and mother had taken care of the education of their children they were frustrated of all their hopes in an instant. The smallpox getting into the family one daughter died of it another lost an eye, a third had a great nose at her recovery and the unhappy parents were completely ruined even frequently when the smallpox became epidemical trade was suspended for several years which thinned very considerably the Sahalios of Persia and Turkey. A trading nation is always watchful over its own interests and grasps at every discovery that may be of advantage to its commerce. The Circassians observed that scarce one person in a thousand was ever attacked by a smallpox of a violent kind that some indeed had this distemper very favorably three or four times but never twice so as to prove fatal in a word that no one ever had it in a violent degree twice in his life. They observed a father that when the smallpox is of the milder sort and the pastures have only a tender delicate skin to break through they never leave the leased scar in the face. From these natural observations they concluded that in case an infant of six months or a year old should have a milder sort of smallpox he would not die of it would not be marked nor be ever afflicted with it again. In order therefore to preserve the life and the beauty of their children the only thing remaining was to give them the smallpox in their infant years. This they did by inoculating in the body of a child a pasture taken from the most irregular and at the same time the most favorable sort of a smallpox that could be procured. The experiment could not possibly fail. The Turks who are people of good sense soon adopted this custom in so much that at this time there is not a bazaar constantly noepo but communicates the smallpox to his children of both sexes immediately upon their being weaned. Some pretend that the Circassians borrowed this custom anciently from the Arabians but we shall leave the clearing up of this point of history to some learned Benedictines who will not fail to compile a great many folios on this subject with the several proofs or authorities. All I have to say upon it is that in the beginning of the reign of King George I the lady wordly Montagu a woman of as fine a genus and in due to with as great a strength of mind as any of her sexes in the British kingdoms being with her husband who was ambassador at the port made no scruple to communicate the smallpox to an infant of which she was delivered in conceding noepo. The chaplain represented to his lady but to no purpose that this was an un-christian operation and therefore that it could succeed with none but infidels however it had the most a happy fact upon the son of the lady wordly Montagu who at her return to England communicated experiment to the princess of Wales now queen of England it must be confessed that this princess abstracted from her crown and the title was born to encourage the whole circle of arts and to do good to mankind. She appears as an amiable philosopher on the throne having never let slip one opportunity of improving the great talents she received from nature nor of exerting her beneficence. It is she who being formed that a daughter of Milton was living but in miserable circumstances immediately sent her a considerable present it is she who protects the learned father Courier. It is she who condescended to attempt a reconciliation between Dr Clark and Mr Leibniz. The moment this princess heard of inoculation she caused an experiment of it to be made on four criminals sentenced to die and by that means preserved their lives doubly for she not only saved them from the gallows but by means of this artificial smallpox prevented there ever having that distemper in a natural way with which they would very probably have been attacked one time or other and might have died off at a more advanced age. The princess being assured of the usefulness of this operation caused her own children to be inoculated a great part of the kingdom followed her example and since that time ten thousand children at least of persons of condition owe in this manner their lives to Her Majesty and to the lady Whitley Montague and as many of the fair sex are obliged to them for their beauty. Upon the general calculation four persons in every hundred have the smallpox. Of these three score twenty die of it in a most favourable season of life and as many more where the disagreeable remains of it in their faces so long as they live. Thus a fifth part of mankind either die or are disfigured by this distemper but it does not prove fatal to so much as one among those who are inoculated in Turkey or in England unless the patient be infirm or would have died had not the experiment be made upon him. Besides no one is disfigured no one has the smallpox a second time if the inoculation was perfect. It is there for certain that had the lady of some French ambassador brought this secret from Constantine Nopoul to Paris the nation would have been forever obliged to her then the Duke de Villacier fathered to the Duke Dormont who enjoys the most vigorous constitution and is the healthiest man in France would not have been cut off in the flower of his age. The Prince of Soubis happy in the finest flesh of health would not have been snatched away at 5 and 20 nor the Dauphin grandfather to Louis the 15th had been laid in his grave in his 50th year 20,000 persons whom the smallpox swept away at Paris in 1723 would have been alive at this time but are not the French found of life and is beauty so inconsiderable and advantage as to be disregarded by the ladies it must be confessed that we are an odd kind of people perhaps our nation will imitate ten years hence this practice of the English if the clergy and physicians will but give them leave to do it or possibly our country man may introduce inoculation three months hence in France out of mere whim in case the English should discontinue it through fickleness. I am informed that the Chinese have practiced inoculation these hundred years a circumstance that argues very much in its favor since they are thought to be the wisest and the best to govern the people in the world the Chinese indeed do not communicate this distemper by inoculation but at the nose in the same manner as we take snuff this is a more agreeable way but then it produces the like effect and proves at the same time that had inoculation being practised hence it would have saved the lives of thousands. End of Letter 11 Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter 12 of Letters on England by Voltaire edited by Harry Molly this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letters on England by Voltaire Letter 12 on the Lord Bacon Not long since the Triton Frivoler's question following was debated in a very polite and learned company namely who was the greatest man Caesar, Alexander, Tameleung Cromwell, etc. Somebody answered that Sir Isaac Newton excelled the more the gentleman's assertion was very just for if true greatness consists in having received from heaven a mighty genius and in having employed it to enlighten our mind and that of others a man like Sir Isaac Newton whose equal is hardly found in a thousand years is the truly great man and those politicians and conquerors and all ages produced some were generally so many illustrious wicked man that man claims our respect who commands over the minds of the rest of the world by the force of truth not those who enslave their fellow creatures he who is acquainted with the universe not they who deface it Things therefore you desire me to give you an account of the famous personages whom England has given birth to I shall begin with Lord Bacon Mr Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, etc. Afterwards the warriors and ministers of state shall come in their order I must begin with the celebrated Viscount Generalum, known in Europe by the name of Bacon which was that of his family his father had been Lord Keeper and himself was a great many years Lord Chancellor under King James I Nevertheless amidst the intrigues of a court and the affairs of his exhorted employment which alone were enough to engross his whole time he yet found so much leisure for study as to make himself a great philosopher a good historian and an elegant writer and a still more surprising circumstance is that he lived in an age in which the art of writing justly and elegantly was little known much less true philosophy Lord Bacon, as is the fate of man, was more esteemed after his death than in his lifetime. His enemies were in a British court and his admirers were foreigners When the Marquis Defia attended in England upon the Princess Maria, daughter to Henry IV whom King Charles I had married that minister went and visited the Lord Bacon who being at that time sicking his bed received him with the curtains shut closed You resemble the angels said the Marquis to him We hear those beings spoken of perpetually and we believe them superior to man but are never allowed the consolation to see them You know that this great man over a crime very unbecoming a philosopher I mean bribery and extortion You know that he was sentenced by the House of Lords to pay a fine of about 400,000 French livre to lose his peerage and his dignity of chanceller but in the present age the English revere his memory to such a degree that they will scarce allow him to have been guilty In case you should ask what are my thoughts on this head in the words which I heard the Lord Bollingbroke use on another occasion several gentlemen were speaking in his company of the avarice with which the late Duke of Marlborough had been charged some examples were of being given the Lord Bollingbroke was appealed to who having been in the opposite party might perhaps without the imputation of indecency have been allowed to clear up that matter He was so great a man that he replied his lordship that I have forgotten his vices I should therefore confine myself to those things which so justly gained the Lord Bacon the esteem of all Europe The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which at this time is the most useless and the least read I mean his Nauvus Chantiarum Organum This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised and when the edifice was built part of it at least the scaffold was no longer of service The Lord Bacon was not yet acquainted with nature but then he knew and pointed out the several paths that lead to it He had it despised in his younger years the thing called philosophy in the universities and did all that lay in his power to prevent those societies of man instituted to improve human reason from depraving it by the equities, their horrors of the vacuum their substantial forms and all those impertinent terms which not only ignorance had rendered a venerable but which had been made sacred by their being ridiculously blended with religion He is the father of experimental philosophy It must indeed be confessed that very surprising secrets had been found out before his time the sea compass, printing, engraving on copper plates, oil painting looking glasses the art of restoring in some measure old men to their sight by spectacles gunpowder etc had been discovered A new world had been fought for found and conquered Would not one suppose that these sublime discoveries had been made by the greatest philosophers and in age so much more enlightened than the present but it was far otherwise all these great changes happened in the most stupid and barbarous times chance only gave birth to most of those inventions and it is very probable that what is called chance contributed very much to the discovery of America at least it has been always thought that Christopher Columbus undertook his voyage merely on the relation of a captain, of a ship which a storm had driven as far westward as the Caribbean island Be this as it will men had sailed around the world and could destroy cities by an artificial thunder more dreadful than the real one then they were not acquainted with the circulation of the blood the weight of the air the laws of motion, light the number of our planets etc and a man who maintained a thesis on Aristotle's categories on the universals apartheid or such like nonsense was looked upon as a prodigy the most astonishing the most useful inventions but not those which reflect the greatest honour on the human mind it is to a mechanical instinct which is a founding many man and a not to true philosophy that most arts own their origin the discovery of fire the art of making bread of melting and preparing metals of building houses an invention of the shuttle to mankind then printing or the sea compass and yet these arts were invented by uncultivated savage man what are prodigy's use the Greeks and Romans made afterwards of mechanics nevertheless they believed that there were crystal heavens that the stars were small lamps which sometimes fell into the sea and one of their greatest philosophers after long research found that the stars were so many flints hatched from the earth in a word no one before the Lord Bacon was acquainted with the experimental philosophy nor with the several physical experiments which had been made since his time scarce one of them but is hinted at in his work and he himself had made several he made a kind of pneumatic engine by which he guessed the elasticity of the air he approached on all sides as it were to the discovery of his weight and had very near attained it but some time after Torricelli seized upon this truth in a little time experimental philosophy began to be cultivated all of a sudden in most parts of Europe it was a hidden treasure which the Lord Bacon had some notion of and which all the philosophers encouraged by his promises endeavoured to dig up but that which surprised me most was to reading his work in express terms the new attraction the invention of which is ascribed to Sir Isaac Newton we must search says Lord Bacon whether there may not be a kind of magnetic power which operates between the earth and the heavy bodies between the moon and the ocean between the planets etc in another place he says either heavy bodies must be carried towards the centre of the earth whether they are attracted by it and in the latter case it is evident that the nearer bodies in their falling draw towards the earth the stronger they will attract one another we must says he make an experiment to see whether the same clock will go faster on the top of a mountain where the bottom of a mine whether the strength of the weights decreases on the mountain increases in a mine where the earth has a true attractive power this forerunner in philosophy was also an elegant writer and historian and a wit his moral essays are greatly esteemed but they were drawn up in the view of instructing rather than of pleasing and as they are not a satire upon mankind like Hoshford calls the maxims nor written upon a skeptical plan like montaigne's essays they are not so much read by the new ingenious authors his history of Harry the 7th was looked upon as a masterpiece but how is it possible that some persons can presume to compare so little of work with the history of our illustrious Chew and Euse speaking about the famous imposter Perkin son to a converted Jew who assumed boldly the name and the title of Richard the 4th King of England and the instigation of the Duchess of Urgandy who executed the crown with Harry the 7th the Lord Bacon writes as follows at this time the king began again to be haunted with sprites by the magic and curious arts of the Lady Margaret who raised up the ghost of Richard Duke of York second son to King Edward the 4th to walk and vex the king after such time as she Margaret of Burgundy thought he Perkin wore back was perfecting his lesson she began to cast with herself from what ghost this blazing star should first appear and at what time it must be upon the horizon of Ireland for there had the like meteor strong inference before we think our sagacious Chew and Euse does not give in to such fustion which formerly was looked upon as sublime but in this age is just record nonsense End of Letter 12 Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter 13 of Letter Song England by Voltaire edited by Harry Molly this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter Song England by Voltaire Letter 13 on Mr Locke Perhaps no man ever had a more judicious or more methodical genus or was a more acute logician than Mr Locke and yet he was not deeply skilled in the mathematics this great man could never subject himself to the tedious fatigue of calculations nor to the dry pursuit of mathematical truth which do not at first present any sensible objects to the mind and no one has given better proofs than he that it is possible for a man to have a geometrical head without the assistance of geometry Before his time several great philosophers had declared in the most positive terms what the soul of man is but as these absolutely knew nothing about it they might very well be allowed to differ entirely opinion from one another In Greece the infant seat of arts and of eras are aware the grandeur as well as fully of the human mind when such prodigious lengths the people used to reason about the soul in a very same manner as we do the divine Anazagoras in whose order an altar was erected for his having taught mankind that the sun was greater than polyponises that snow was black and that the heavens were of stone affirmed that the soul was an aerial spirit but at the same time immortal. Diogenes not he who was a cynical philosopher after having coined base money declared that the soul was a portion of the substance of God an idea which we must confess was very sublime Epicurus maintained that it was composed of parts in the same manner as the body Aristotle who has been explained a thousand ways because he's an intelligible was of Apinia according to some of his disciples that the understanding in all man is one and the same substance the divine Plato master of the divine Aristotle and the divine Socrates master of the divine Plato used to say that the soul was corporeal and eternal no doubt but the divine of Socrates had instructed him in the nature of it some people indeed pretend that a man who boasted is being attended by a familiar genius must infallibly be either a naive or a mad man but this kind of people are seldom satisfied with anything but reason with regard to the fathers of the church several in a primitive age believed that the soul was human and the angels and the god corporeal. Man naturally improve upon every system Saint Bernard as father Marbion confesses taught that the soul after death does not see God in the celestial regions but converses with Christ's human nature only. However he was not believed at this time on his bare word the adventure of the crusade having a little sunk the credit of his oracles afterwards a thousand schoolmen arose such as the irreverable doctor the subtle doctor the angelic doctor the seraphic doctor and the cherubic doctor who were all sure that they had a very clear and distinct idea of the soul and yet wrote in such a manner that one would conclude they were resolved no one should understand a word in their writings. Our Descartes born to discover the eras of antiquity and at the same time to substitute his own and hurried away by that dramatic spirit which throws a cloud over the minds of the greatest man thought he had demonstrated that the soul is the same thing as thought in the same manner as matter in his opinion is the same as extension he asserted that man thinks eternally and that the soul at its coming into the body is informed with the whole series of mental physical notions knowing God infinite space possessing all abstract ideas in a word completely endued with the most sublime light which it unhappily forgets and it's issuing from the whoop Father Malbranche in his sublime illusions not only admitted innate ideas but did not doubt of our living holy in God and that God is as it were our soul such a multitude of reasoners having written the romance of the soul a sage at last arose who gave with an air of the greatest modesty the history of it Mr. Locke has displayed the human soul in the same manner as an excellent anatomist explains the springs of the human body he everywhere takes the light of physics for his guide he sometimes presumes to speak affirmatively but then he presumes also to doubt instead of concluding at once what we know not he examines gradually what we would know he takes an infant at the instant of his birth he traces step by step the progress of his understanding examines what things he has in common with beasts and what he possesses above them above all he consults himself the being conscious that he himself thinks I shall leave says he to those who know more of this matter than myself the examining whether the soul exists before or after the organisation of our bodies but I confess that it is my lot to be animated with one of those heavy souls which do not think always and I'm even so unhappy as not to conceive that it is more necessary the soul should think perpetually than that body should be forever in motion with regard to myself I shall boast that I have the honour to be a stupid in this particular as Mr. Locke no one shall ever make me believe that I think always and I am as little inclined as he could be to fancy that some weeks after I was conceived I was a very learned soul knowing at that time a thousand things which I forgot at my birth and possessing when in the womb though to no men our purpose knowledge which I lost the instant I had occasion for it and which I have never since been able to recover perfectly Mr. Locke after having destroyed innate ideas after having fully renounced the of believing that we think always after having laid down from the most solid principles that ideas enter the mind through the senses having examined our simple and complex ideas having traced the human mind through its several operations having shown that all the languages in the world are imperfect and the great abuse that is made of words every moment he at last comes to consider the extent or rather the narrow limits of human knowledge it was in this chapter he presumed to advance but very modestly the following words we shall perhaps never be capable of knowing whether a being purely a material thinks or not this sage assertion was by more devines than one looked upon as a scandalous declaration that the soul is material and mortal some Englishman devout after their way sounded an alarm the superstitious are the same in society as cowards in an army they themselves are seized with a panic fear and communicate it to others it was loudly exclaimed that Mr. Locke intended to destroy religion nevertheless religion had nothing to do in the affair it being a question purely philosophical altogether independent of faith and revelation Mr. Locke's opponents needed but to examine calmly and impartially whether the declaring that matter can think implies a contradiction and whether God is able to communicate thought to matter but deviles are too apt to begin their decorations with saying that God is offended when people differ from them in opinion in which they too much resemble the bad poets who used to declare publicly that Boilu spake irreverently of Louis XIV because he ridiculed their stupid productions Bishop Stillingfleet got the repetition of a calm and unprojudiced divine because he did not expressly make use of injurious terms in his dispute with Mr. Locke that divine entered the lists against him but was defeated for he argued as a schoolman at Locke as a philosopher who was perfectly acquainted with the strong as well as the weak side of the human mind and who fought with weapons whose temper he knew if I might presume to give my opinion are so delicate a subject after Mr. Locke I would say that man had long disputed on the nature and the immortality of the soul with regard to its immortality it is impossible to give a demonstration of it since its nature is still the subject of controversy which however must be thoroughly understood before a person can be able to determine whether it be immortal or not human reason is so little able merely by its own strength to demonstrate the immortality of the soul that it was absolutely necessary religion should review it to us it is of advantage to society in general that mankind should believe the soul to be immortal faith commands us to do this nothing more is required and a matter is clear to our pet once but it is otherwise with respect to its nature it is of little importance to religion which only requires the soul to be virtuous whatever substance it may be made of it is a clock which is given us to regulate but the artist has not told us of what materials the spring of this clock is composed I am a body and I think that's all I know of the matter shall I ascribe to an unknown cause what I can so easily impute to the only second cause I am acquainted with here all the school philosophers interrupt me with their arguments and declare that there is only extension and solidity in bodies and that there can have nothing but motion and figure now motion, figure, extension and solidity cannot form a thought and consequently the soul cannot be matter all this so often repeated mighty series of reasoning amounts to no more than this I am absolutely ignorant what matter is I guess but imperfectly some properties of it now I absolutely cannot tell whether these properties may be joined to thought as I therefore know nothing I maintain positively that matter cannot think in this manner do the school's reason Mr. Locke addressed these gentlemen in the candid sincere manner following at least confess yourself to be as ignorant as I neither your imaginations or mine are able to comprehend in what manner a body is susceptible of ideas and do you conceive better a substance of what kind so ever is susceptible of them as you cannot comprehend either matter or spirit why would you presume to assert anything the superstitious bang comes afterwards and declares that all those must be burnt for the good of their souls who so much as suspect that it is possible for the body to think without any foreign assistance but what would these people say should they themselves be proved irreligious and indeed what man can presume to assert without being guilty at the same time of the greatest impiety that it is impossible for the creator to form matter with thought and sensation consider only I beg you what a dilemma you bring yourself into you who confine this manner the power of the creator these have the same organs the same sensations the same perceptions as we they have memory and combine certain ideas in case it was not in the power of God to animate matter and inform it with sensation the consequence would be either that bees are mere machines or that they have a spiritual soul me thinks it is clearly evident that bees cannot be mere machines which I prove this God has given to them the very same organs of sensation as to us if therefore they have no sensation God has created a useless thing now according to your own confession God does nothing in vain he therefore did not create so many organs of sensation merely for them to be uninformed with this faculty consequently beasts are not mere machines beasts according to your assertion cannot be animated with a spiritual soul you will therefore in spite of yourself be reduced to this only assertion namely that God has endured the organs of beasts who are no matter with the faculties of sensation and perception which you call instinct in them but why may not God if he pleases communicate to our more delicate organs that faculty of feeling perceiving and thinking which we call human reason to whatever side you turn you are forced to acknowledge your own ignorance and the boundness power of the creator exclaimed therefore no more against the modest the philosopher of Mr. Locke which so far from interfering with religion would be of use to demonstrate the truth of it in case religion wanted any such support for what philosophy can be of a more religious nature than that which affirming nothing but what it conceives clearly and conscious of its own weakness declares that we must always have recalls to God in our examining of the first the principles besides we must not be apprehensive that any philosophical opinion will ever prejudiced the religion of a country though our demonstrations clash directly with our mysteries that is nothing to the purpose for the letter are not less revered upon that account by our Christian philosophers who know very well that the objects of reason and those of faith are of very different nature philosophers will never form a religious sect the reason is their writings are not calculated for the vulgar and they themselves are free from enthusiasm if we divide mankind into 20 parts it will be found that 19 of these consist of persons employed in manual labour who will never know that such a man as Mr. Locke existed in a remaining 20th part how few are readers and among such as are so 20 amuse themselves with commences to one who studies philosophy the thinking part of mankind is confined to a very small number and these will never disturb the peace and tranquility of the world neither Montaigne, Locke, Bell Spinoza, Hobbes, the Lord Shaftesbury, Collings, North Holland, lighted up the firebrand of discord in their countries this has generally been the work of devines who being at first a puffed up with the ambition of becoming chiefs of a sect soon grew very desirous of being the head of a party but what do I say all the works of the modern philosophers put together will never make so much noise as even the dispute which arose among the Franciscans merely about the fashion of their sleeves and of their cows. End of letter 13 recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter 14 of Letter So-England by Voltaire edited by Henry Morley this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter So-England by Voltaire Letter 14 on Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton A Frenchman who arrives in London will find philosophy like everything else very much changed there he had left the world a plenum and he now finds it a vacuum. At Paris the universe is seen composed of vortices of sutile meta but nothing like it is seen in London in France it is the pressure of the moon that caused the tides but in England it is the sea that gravitates towards the moon so that when you think that the moon should make it flood with us those gentlemen fancy it should be ebb which very unluckily cannot be proved for to be able to do this it is necessary the moon and the tides should have been inquired into at the very instant of the creation you will observe father that the son which in France is said to have nothing to do in the affair comes in here for very near a quarter of its assistance according to your catechons everything is performed by an impulsion of which we have very little notion and according to Sir Isaac Newton it is by an attraction the cause of which is as much unknown to us at Paris you imagine that the earth is shaped by a melon or of an oblique figure at London it has an oblique one a catechon declares that light exists in the air but a Newtonia asserts that it comes from the sun in six minutes and a half the several operations of your chemistry are performed by acids alkalines and sutile matter but attraction prevails even in chemistry among the English the very essence of things is totally changed you neither agreed upon the definition of the law on that of matter Descartes as I observed in my last maintains that the soul is the same thing with thought and Mr Locke has given a pretty good proof of the contrary Descartes asserts father that extension alone constitutes matter but Sir Isaac adds solidity to it how furiously contradictory are these opinions no nostrum mintel voestant has component lits Virgil egg log 3 it is not for us to end such great disputes this famous Newton this destroyer of the Cartesian system died in March and all 1727 his countrymen honoured him in his lifetime and interred him as though he had been a king who had made his people happy the English read with the highest satisfaction and translated into their tongue the elogium of Sir Isaac Newton which Monsieur de Fontenelle spoke in the Academy of Sciences Monsieur de Fontenelle presides as judge over philosophers and the English expected his decision as a solemn declaration of the superiority of the English philosophy over that of the French but when it was found that this gentleman had compared Descartes to Sir Isaac the whole Royal Society in London rose up in arms so far from Marquessing with Monsieur de Fontenelle's judgment they criticised his discourse and even several who however were not the ableist philosophers were offended at the comparison and for no other reason but because Descartes was a Frenchman it must be confessed that these two great men differed very much in conduct in fortune and in philosophy nature had indulged Descartes with a shining and strong imagination whence he became a very singular person both in private life and in his manner of reasoning this imagination could not conceal itself even in his philosophical works which are everywhere adorned with Chinese ingenious metaphors and figures nature had almost made him a poet and indeed he wrote a piece of poetry for the entertainment of Christina Queen of Sweden which however was suppressed in honour to his memory he embraced a military life for some time and afterwards becoming a complete philosopher he did not think the passion of love derogatory to his character he had by his mistress a daughter called Francine who died young and was very much regretted for him thus he experienced every passion incident to mankind he was a long time of opinion that it would be necessary for him to fly from the society of his fellow creators and especially from his native country in order to enjoy the happiness of cultivating his philosophical studies in full liberty Descartes was very right for his contemporaries were not knowing enough to improve and enlighten his understanding and were capable of little else than of giving him uneasiness after France purely to go in search of truth which was then persecuted by the wretched philosophy of the schools however he found that reason was as much disguised and depraved in the universities of Holland into which he withdrew as in his own country for at the time that the French condemned the only propositions of his philosophy which were true he was persecuted by the pretended philosophers of Holland who understood him no better and who having a nearer view of his glory hated his person the more so that he was obligated to leave Eutect Descartes was injuriously accused of being an atheist the last refuge of religious scandal and he who had employed all the sagacity and penetration of his genius in searching for new proofs of the existence of a god was suspected to believe there was no such being such a persecution from all sides must necessarily suppose a most exhorted merit as well as a very distinguished repetition and indeed he possessed the both reason at that time darted array upon the world through the groom of the schools and prejudices of popular superstition at last his name spread so universally that the French were desirous of bringing him back into his native country by rewards and accordingly offered him an annual pension of a thousand crowns upon these hopes Descartes returned to France pay the fees of his patent sold at that time but no pension was settled upon him thus disappointed he returned to his solitude in North Holland where he again pursued a study of philosophy while as the great Galileo at full score years of age was groaning in the presence of the Inquisition only for having demonstrated the earth's motion. Alas Descartes was snatched from the world in the flower of his age at Stockholm his death was owing to a bad regimen and he expired in the midst of some literati who were his enemies and under the hands of a physician to whom he was odious the progress of the Isaac Newton's life was quite different he lived a happy and very much honoured in his native country to the age of full score and five years it was his peculiar felicity not only to be born in a country of liberty but in an age when all scholastic impertinences were banished from the world the reason alone was cultivated and mankind could only be his pupil not his enemy one very singular difference in the lives of these two great men is that Sir Isaac during the long course of years he enjoyed was never sensible to any passion was not subject to the common realities of mankind nor ever had any commerce with women a circumstance which was assured me by the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments we may admire Sir Isaac Newton on this occasion but then we must not censure Descartes the opinion that generally prevails in England with regard to these new philosophers is that the latter was a dreamer and the former a sage very few people in England read Descartes whose works indeed are now useless on the other side but a small number perused those of Sir Isaac because to do this the student must be deeply skilled in mathematics otherwise those works will be unintelligible to him but not withstanding this these great men are the subject of everyone's discourse Sir Isaac Newton is allowed every advantage while as the Descartes is not indulged a single one according to some it is to the former that we own the discovery of a vacuum that the air is a heavy body and the invention of telescopes in a word Sir Isaac Newton is here as the Hercules saw fabulous story to whom the ignorant has scribed all the feats of ancient heroes in a critique that was made in London on Monsieur de Fontenelle's discourse the writer presumed to assert that Descartes was not a great geometrician those who make such a decoration may justly be reproached with flying in their masters face Descartes extended the limits of geometry as far beyond the place where he found them as Sir Isaac did after him the former first talked the method of expressing curves by equations this geometry which thanks to him for it is now grown common was so upstrooth in his time that not so much as one professor would undertake to explain it and shotten in Holland and four men in France were the only man who understood it he applied this geometrical and inventive genius to dioptrics which when treated or by him became a new art and if he was mistaken in some things the reason of that is a man who discovers a new tract of land cannot at once know all the properties of the soil those who come after him and make these land fruitful are at least obliged to him for the discovery I will not deny but that there are innumerable errors in the rest of Descartes works geometry was a guide he himself had in some measure fashion which would have conducted him safely through the several paths of natural philosophy nevertheless he had last abandoned this guide and moved entirely into the humour of forming hypothesis and then philosophy was no more than an ingenious romance fit only to amuse the ignorant he was mistaken in the nature of the soil in the proofs of the existence of a god in matter in the laws of motion and in the nature of light he admitted innate ideas he invented new elements he created a world he made man according to his own fancy he said that the man of Descartes in fact that of Descartes only very different from the real one he pushed his mental physical errors so far as to declare that two and two make four for no other reason but because god would have it so however it will not be making him too great a compliment if we affirm that he was valuable even in his mistakes he deceived himself but then it was at least in a methodical way and all the absurd chimeras with which youth had been infatuated for two thousand years he taught his contemporaries how to reason and enabled them to employ his own weapons against himself if Descartes did not pay in good money he however did great service in crying down that of a base alloy I indeed believe that very few will presume to compare his philosophy in any respect with that of Sir Isaac Newton the former is an essay the letter a masterpiece but then the man who first brought us to the path of truth was perhaps as great a genius as he who afterwards conducted us through it Descartes gave sight to the blind these saw the eras of antiquity and of the sciences the path he struck out is since become boundless poor's little work was during some years a complete system of physics but now all the transactions all academies in Europe put together do not form so much as the beginning of a system in Featherman this abyss no-bottom has been found we are now to examine what discoveries Sir Isaac Newton has made in it End of Letter 14 Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter 15 of Letter Song England by Voltaire edited by Harry Molley this is a LibriVox recording in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter Song England by Voltaire Letter 15 on Attraction the discoveries which gained Sir Isaac Newton's so universal repetition relate to the system of the world to light, to geometrical infinities and lastly to chronology with which he used to amuse himself after the fatigue of his severest studies I will now acquaint you without prolixity if possible with the few things I have been able to comprehend of all these sublime ideas with regard to the system of our world disputes were a long time maintained on the course that turns the planets and keeps them in their orbits and on those courses here below descend towards the surface of the earth the system of Descartes explained and improved since his time seemed to give a plausible reason for all those phenomena and this reason seemed more just as it is simple and intelligible to all capacities but in philosophy a student ought to doubt of the things he fenses he understands too easily as much as of those he does not understand gravity, the falling of accelerated bodies on the earth the revolution of the planets in their orbits their rotations around their axis all this is mere motion now motion cannot perhaps be conceived any otherwise than by impulsion therefore all those bodies must be impaled but by what are they impaled all space is full therefore is filled with a very subtle matter since this is acceptable to us, this matter goes from west to east since all the planets are carried from west to east thus from hypothesis to hypothesis from one appearance to another philosophers have imagined a vast weeple of subtle matter in which the planets are carried around the sun they also have created another particular vortex which floats in the great one and which turns daily round the planets when all this is done it is pretended that gravity depends on this diagonal motion for say these the velocity of the subtle matter that turns round our little vortex must be 17 times more rapid than that of the earth or in case its velocity is 17 times greater than that of the earth its central fugue force must be vastly greater and consequently impale all bodies towards the earth according to the Cartesian system but the theorist before he calculated the central fugue force and velocity of the subtle matter should first have been certain that it existed Zizak Newton seems to have destroyed all these great and little vortices both that which carries the planets round the sun as well as the other which supposes every planet to turn on its own axis first with regard to the pretended little vortex of the earth it is demonstrated that it must lose its motion by insensible degrees it is demonstrated that if the earth swims in a fluid its density must be equal to that of the earth and in case its density be the same all the bodies we endeavor to move must meet with an insuperable resistance with regard to the great vortices they are still more chimerical and it is impossible to make them agree with Kepler's law the truth of which has been demonstrated Zizak shows that the revolution of the fluid in which Jupiter is supposed to be carried is not the same with regard to the revolution of the fluid of the earth as the revolution of Jupiter with respect to that of the earth it proves that the planets make their revolutions in ellipses and consequently being at a much greater distance one from the other in their aphilia and a little nearer in their perihelia the earth's velocity for instance ought to be greater when it is nearer Venus and Mars because the fluid that carries it long being then more pressed ought to have a greater motion and yet it is even then that the earth's motion is slower he proves that there is no such thing as a celestial matter which goes from west to east the comet traverses those spaces sometimes from east to west and at other times from north to south in find a better to resolve if possible every difficulty he proves and even by experiments that it is impossible there should be a plenum and brings back the vacuum which Aristotle and Descartes had banished from the world having by these and several other arguments destroyed the Cartesian vortices and he spared of ever being able to discover whether there is a secret principle in nature which at the same time is the cause of the motion of all celestial bodies and that of gravity on the earth but being retired in 1666 upon the count of the plague to a solitude near Cambridge as he was walking one day in his garden and saw some fruits fall from a tree he fell into a profound meditation the cause of which had so long been sought but in vain by all the philosophers while as the Volga think there is nothing mysterious in it he said to himself that from what height in our hemisphere those bodies might descend therefore would certainly be in the progression discovered by Galileo and spaces they run through would be as the square of the times why may not this power force as heavy bodies to descend and is the same without any sensible diminution at the remotest distance from the centre of the earth or on the summit of the highest mountains why said Sir Isaac may not this power extend as high as the moon and in case its inference reaches so far is it not very probable that this power retains it in its orbit and determines its motion the moon obeys this principle whatever it be may we not conclude very naturally that the rest of the planets are equally subject to it in case this power exists which besides is proved it must increase in an inverse ratio of the squares of the distances or therefore that remains is to examine how far a heavy body which should fall upon the earth from a moderate height would go and how far at that time a body which should fall from the orbit of the moon would descend to find this nothing is wanted but the measure of the earth and the distance of the moon from it thus Sir Isaac Newton reasoned but at that time the English hired but a very imperfect measure of our globe and depended on the uncertain supposition of marinas who computed a degree to contain but 60 English miles whereas it consists of a degree of near 70 as this force computation did not agree with the conclusions which Sir Isaac intended to draw from them he laid aside this pursuit a half-learned philosopher remarkable only for his vanity would have made a measure of the earth agree anyhow with his system Sir Isaac however chose rather to quit the researchers he was then engaged in but after Mr Picard had measured the earth exactly suggesting that Meridian which redound so much to the honour of the French Sir Isaac Newton resumed his former reflections and found his accounting Mr Picard's calculation a circumstance which has always appeared wonderful to me is that such sublime discoveries should have been made by the sole assistance of a quadrant and a little arithmetic the circumference of the earth is 123 million 249,600 feet this among other things is necessary to prove the system of attraction the instance we know the earth's circumference and the distance of the moon we know that of the moon's orbit and the diameter of this orbit the moon performs its revolution in that orbit in 27 days 7 hours 43 minutes it is demonstrated that the moon in its mean motion is 104 score and 7,960 feet of Paris in a minute it is likewise demonstrated by a known theorem that the central force which should make a body fall from the height of the moon would make its velocity no more than 15 Paris feet in a minute of time now if the law by which bodies gravitate and attract one another in an inverse ratio to the squares of the distances if the same power acts according to that law throughout all nature it is evident that as the earth is 60 semi diameters distant from the moon a heavy body must necessarily fall on the earth 15 feet in first a second and 54,000 feet in first a minute now a heavy body falls in reality 15 feet in first a second and goes in first a minute 54,000 feet which number is the square of 60 multiplied by 15 bodies therefore gravitate in an inverse ratio of the squares of the distances consequently what causes gravity on earth and keeps the moon in its orbit is one and same power it being demonstrated that the moon gravitates on the earth which is the centre of its particular motion it is demonstrated that the earth can gravitate on the sun which is the centre of their animal motion the rest of the planets must be subject to this general law and if this law exists these planets must follow the laws which Kepler discovered all these laws all these relations are indeed observed by the planets with the utmost exactness therefore the power of attraction causes all the planets to gravitate towards the sun and the centre as the moon gravitates towards our globe finally as in all bodies reaction is equal to action it is certain that the earth gravitates also towards the moon and that the sun gravitates towards both that every one of the satellites or Saturn gravitates towards the other four and the other four towards it or five towards Saturn and Saturn towards all that it is the same with regard to Jupiter and that all these globes are attracted by the sun which is reciprocally attracted by them this power of gravitation acts proportionably to the quantity of matter in bodies a truth which Sir Isaac has demonstrated by experiments this new discovery has been of use to show that the sun the centre of the planetary system attracts them all in a direct ratio of their quantity of matter combined with their nearness from hence Sir Isaac rising by degrees to discoveries which seemed not to be formed for the human mind is bold enough to compute the quantity of matter contained in the sun and in every planet and in this manner shows from the simple laws of mechanics that every celestial globe ought necessarily to be where it is placed his bare principle of the laws of gravitation accounts for all the apparent inequalities in the course of the celestial globes the variations of the moon are unnecessary consequence of those laws moreover the reason is evidently seeing why the nodes of the moon performed their revolutions in 19 years and those of the earth in about 26,000 the several appearances observed in the tides are also a very simple effect of this attraction the proximity of the moon when at the full and when it is new and its distance in the quadratures or quarters combined with the action of the sun exhibit a sensible reason why the ocean swells and sinks after having shown by his sublime theory the course and the inequalities of the planets his subjects comets to the same law the orbit of these fires unknown for so greater series of years which was the terror of mankind and the rock against the which philosophy split placed by Aristotle below the moon and sent back by Dickhart above the sphere of Saturn is at last placed in its proper seat by Sir Isaac Newton he proves that comets are solid bodies which move in the sphere of the sun's activity and that they describe an ellipsis so very eccentric and so near to parabolus that certain comets must take up 500 years in their revolution the learned Dr Haley is of opinion that the comet seen in 1680 is the same which appeared in Julius Caesar's time this shows more than any other that comets are hard opaque bodies for it descended so near to the sun as to come within a sixth part of the diameter of this planet from it and consequently might have contracted a degree of heat 2,000 times stronger than that of red hot iron and would have been soon dispersed in vapor had it not been a firm dense body the guessing the cause of comet began then to be very much in vogue the celebrated Bernoulli concluded by his system that the famous comet of 1680 would appear again the 17th of May 1719 not a single astronomer in Europe went to bed that night however they needed not to have broke their rest for the famous comet never appeared there is at least a more cunning if not mere certainty in fixing it's return to so remote a distance as 575 years as to Mr Wiston he affirmed very seriously that in a time of the deluge a comet overflowed the terrestrial globe and he was so unreasonable as to wonder that people laughed at him for making such an assertion the ancients were almost in the same way of thinking with Mr Wiston and fenced that comets were always the forerunners of some great calamity which was to befall mankind Cysac Newton on the contrary suspected that they are very beneficent and that vapours exhale from them merely to nourish and vivify the planets which imbibe in their cause the several particles the sun has detached from the comet an opinion which at least is more probable than the former but this is not all if this power of gravitation or attraction acts on all the celestial globes it acts undoubtedly on the several parts of these globes for in case bodies attract one another in proportion to the quantity of matter containing them it can only be in proportion to the quantity of their parts and if this power is found in a whole it is undoubtedly in the half in quarters in the eighth part and so on in infinitum this is attraction the great spring by which all nature is moved so Cysac Newton after having demonstrated the existence of this principle plainly foresaw that its very name would offend and therefore this philosopher in more places than one of his books gives the reader some caution about it he bit him beware of confounding this name with what the ancients called occult qualities but to be satisfied with knowing that there is in all bodies a central force which acts to the utmost limit of the universe according to the invariable laws of mechanics it is surprising after the solemn protestations Cysac made that such eminent man as Mr Soaring and Mr Defontinelle should have imputed to this great philosopher the verbal and chimerical way of reasoning of the Aristotelians Mr Soaring in the memoir of the academy of 1709 and Mr Defontinelle in the very eulogium of Cysac Newton most of the French the learned and others have repeated this reproach these are for ever crying out why did he not employ the word impulsion which is so well understood rather than that of attraction which is unintelligible Cysac might have answered these critiques thus first you have as imperfect an idea of the word impulsion as of that of attraction and in case you cannot conceive how one body tends towards the center of another body neither can you conceive by what power one body can impale another secondly I could not admit of impulsion for to do this I must have known that our celestial meta was the agent but so far from knowing that there is any such meta I have proved it to be merely imaginary thirdly I use the word attraction for no other reason but to express an effect which I discovered in nature a certain and indisputable effect of an unknown principal a quality inherent in meta the force of which persons of greater abilities than I can pretend to may if they care find out what have you then taught us will these people say further and to what purpose are so many calculations to tell us what you yourself do not comprehend I have taught you Mesa Isaac rejoin that all bodies gravitate towards one another in proportion to their quantity of meta that these central forces alone keep the planets and comets in their orbits and cause them to move in the proportion before set down I demonstrate to you that it is impossible there should be any other cause which keeps the planets in their orbits than that general phenomenon of gravity for heavy bodies fall around the earth according to the proportion demonstrated of central forces and the planets finishing their cause according to these same proportions in case there were another power that acted upon all those bodies it would either increase their velocity or to change their direction now not one of those bodies ever has a single degree of motion or velocity or has any direction but what is demonstrated to be the effect of the central forces consequently it is impossible there should be any other principal can you leave once more to introduce the Isaac speaking shall he not be allowed to say my case and that of the ancients is very different these saw for instance water ascended in pumps and said the water rises because it abhors a vacuum but with regard to myself I am in the case of a man who should have first observed that water ascends in pumps and leave others to explain the cause of this effect the anatomist who first declared that the motion of the arm is only to the contraction of the muscles taught mankind an indisputable truth but are they less obliged to him because he did not know the reason why the muscles contract the cause of the elasticity of the air is unknown but he who first discovered this spring performed a very signal service to the philosophy the spring that I discovered was more hidden and more universal and for that very reason mankind ought to thank me more I have discovered a new property of matter one of the secrets of the creator and have calculated and discovered the effects of it after this shall people quarrel with me about the name I give it vortices may be called an occult quality but the existence was never proved attraction on the contrary is a real thing because its effects are demonstrated and the proportions of it are calculated the cause of this cause is among the Athena of the Almighty pletcher des sucs et non na plus thus far shall though go and no farther end of letter 15 recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith letter 16 of letter song england by Voltaire edited by Harry molly this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith letter song england by Voltaire letter 16 answer Isaac Newton's optics the philosophers of the last age found out a new universe in a circumstance which made its discovery more difficult was that no one had so much as suspected its existence the most sage and judicious word of opinion that it was a frantic rashness to dare so much as to imagine that it was possible to guess the laws by which the celestial bodies move and the manner how light acts Galileo by his astronomical discoveries, Kepler by his calculation, Descartes at least in his dioptrics and Sir Isaac Newton in all his works, several saw the mechanism of the springs of the world the geometricians have subjected infinity to the laws of circulation the circulation of the blood in animals and of the sap in vegetables have changed the face of nature with regard to us a new kind of existence has been given to bodies in the air pump by the assistance of telescopes bodies have been brought nearer to one another finally the several discoveries which Sir Isaac Newton has made on light are equal to the boldest things which the curiosity of man could expect after so many philosophical novelties to Antonio de Dominais the ring ball was considered as an inexplicable miracle this philosopher guessed that it was a necessary effect of the sun and the rain Descartes gained immortal fame by his mathematical explication of this so natural a phenomenon he calculated the reflections and the reflections of light in drops of rain and his sagacity on this occasion was at that time looked upon as next to divine but what would he have said had it been proved to him that he was mistaken in the nature of light that he had not the least reason to maintain that it is a globular body that it is forced to assert that this matter spreading itself through the hole waits only to be projected forward by the sun in order to be put in action in like manner as a long staff act at one end when pushed forward by the other that light is certainly darted by the sun in fine that light is transmitted from the sun to the earth in about seven minutes though a cannonball which were not to lose any of its velocity could not go that distance in less than 25 years how great would have been his astonishment had he been told that light does not reflect directly by impinging against the solid parts of bodies that bodies are not transparent when they have large poles and that a man should arise who would demonstrate all these paradoxes and anonymise a single ray of light with more dexterity than the able is the artist dissects a human body this man is come so Isaac Newton has demonstrated to the eye by the bare assistance of the prism that light is a composition of coloured rays which being united form white colour a single ray is by him divided into seven which all fall upon a piece of linen or a sheet of white paper in their order one above the other and at seven equal distances the first is red, the second orange the third yellow, the fourth green the fifth blue, the sixth indigo the seventh of violet purple each of these rays transmitted afterwards by a hundred other prisms will never change the colour it bears in like manner as gold when completely purged from its draws will never change afterwards in the crucible as a super abundant proof that each of these elementary rays inherently in itself that which forms its colour to the eye take a small piece of yellow wood for instance and set it in the ray of a red colour this wood will instantly be tinged red but set it in the ray of a green colour it assumes a green colour and so of all the rest from what course therefore do colours arise in nature it is nothing but the disposition of bodies to reflect a rays of a certain order and to absorb all the rest what then is this secret disposition? Sir Isaac Newton demonstrates that it is nothing more than the density of the small constituent particles of which a body is composed and how is this reflection performed? it was supposed to arise from the rebounding of the rays in the same manner as a ball on the surface of a solid body but this is a mistake for Sir Isaac taught the astonished philosophers that bodies are opaque and still are the reason but because their poles are large that light reflects on our eyes from the very bottom of these poles that the smaller the poles of a body are the more such a body is transparent thus paper which reflects the light when dry transmits it when oiled because the oil by filling its poles makes them much smaller it is there that examining the vast porosity of bodies every particle having its poles and every particle of those particles having its own he shows we are not certain that there is a cubic inch of solid matter in the universe so far are we from concealing what matter is having thus divided as it were light into its elements and carried the sagacity of its discoveries so far as to prove the method of distinguishing compound colours from such as our primitive he shows that these elementary rays separated by the prism are ranged in their order for no other reason but because they are reflected in that very order and it is this property unknown till he discovered it of breaking or splitting in this proportion it is this unequal refraction of rays this power of reflecting the red less than the orange colour etc which he calls the different refrigerability the most flexible rays are the most refrigerable and from hence he evinces that the same power is the cause both of the reflection and the refraction of light but all these wonders are merely but the opening of his discoveries he found out the secret to see the vibrations of fits of light which come and go incessantly and which either transmit light or reflect it according to the density of the parts they meet with he has presumed to calculate the density of the particles of air necessary between two glasses the one flat the other convex on one side set one upon the other in order to operate such a transmission or reflection or to form such and such a colour from all these combinations he discovers the proportion in which light acts on bodies and bodies act on light he saw light so perfectly that he has determined to what degree of perfection the art of increasing it and of assisting our eyes by telescopes can be carried Descartes from a noble confidence that was very excusable considering how strongly he was fired at the first discoveries he made in an art which he almost first found out Descartes I say hope to discover in the stars by the assistance of telescopes objects as small as those we discern upon the earth but Sir Isaac has shown that dioptric telescopes cannot be brought to a greater perfection because of that reflection and of that very refringibility which at the same time that they bring objects nearer to us scatter too much the elementary rays he has calculated in these glasses the proportion of the scattering of the red and of the blue rays and proceeding so far as to demonstrate things which were not supposed even to exist he examines the inequalities which arise from the shape or figure of the glass and that which arises from the refringibility he finds that the object glass of the telescope being convex on one side and flat on the other in case the flat side be turned towards the object the error which arises from the construction and the position of the glass is above 5000 times less than the error which arises from the refringibility and therefore that the shape or figure of the glasses is not the cause why telescopes cannot be carried to a greater perfection but arises wholly from the nature of light for this reason he invented a telescope which discovers objects by reflection and not by reflection telescopes of this new kind are very hard to make and their use is not easy but according to the English the scope of but 5 feet has the same effect as another of 100 feet in length End of Letter 16 Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter 17 of Letter Song England by Voltaire edited by Harry Molly This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter Song England by Voltaire Letter 17 on Infinites in Geometry and Sir Isaac Newton's chronology The labyrinth and abyss of infinity is also a new cause Sir Isaac Newton has gone through and we are obliged to him for the clue by whose assistance we are enabled to trace its various windings Descartes got the start of him also in this astonishing invention He advanced with mighty steps in his geometry and was arrived at the very borders of infinity but went no farther Dr Wallace about the middle of the last century was the first who reduced a fraction by a perpetual division to an infinite series The Lord Broncker employed this series to square the hyperbola Mercator published a demonstration of this quadrature much about which time Sir Isaac Newton being then 23 years of age had invented a general method to perform on all geometrical curves when it had just before been tried on the hyperbola It is to this method of subjecting everywhere infinity to algebraical calculations that the name is given of differential calculations or of flexions and integral calculation It is the art of numbering and measuring exactly a thing whose existence cannot be conceived And indeed, would you not imagine that a man laughed at you who should declare that there are lines infinitely great which form an angle infinitely little that a right line which is our right line so long as it is a finite by changing infinitely little its direction becomes an infinite curve and that a curve may become infinitely less than another curve that there are infinite squares infinite cubes and infinites of infinites all greater than one another and the last one of which is nothing in comparison of the last All these things which at first appear to be the utmost excess of frenzy are in reality an effort of the subtlety and extent of the human mind and the art of finding truths which till then had been a noun This so bold edifice is even founded on simple ideas The business is to measure the diagonal of a square to give the area of a curve to find the square root of a number which has none in common arithmetic After all the imagination ought not to be startled anymore at so many orders of infinites then at so well known proposition namely that curve lines may always be made to pass between a circle and a tangent or at that other namely that matter is divisible in infinitum These two truths have been demonstrated many years and are no less incomprehensible than the things that have been speaking of For many years the invention of this famous calculation was denied to Sir Isaac Newton In Germany Mr Leibniz was considered as the inventor of the differences or moments called Fluxiens and Mr Benui claimed the integral calculus However Sir Isaac is now thought to have first made the discovery and the other two have the glory of having once made a world doubt of them Thus some contested with Dr Harvey the invention of the circulation of the blood and others disputed with Mr Pechel that of the circulation of the sap Hartscher and Leibniz disputed with each other the honour of having first seen the vermicui of which mankind are formed This Hartscher also contested with Huygens the invention of a new method of calculating the distance of a fixed star It is not yet known to what philosopher we own the invention of cycloid Vetus as it will it is by the help of this geometry of infinites that Sir Isaac Newton attained to the most sublime discoveries I am now to speak of another work which though more adapted to the capacity of the human mind does nevertheless displace the marks of that creative genius with which Sir Isaac Newton was informed in all his research The work I mean is a chronology of a new kind For what Provings however he undertook he was sure to change the ideas and opinions received by the rest of man accustomed to unravel and disentangle chaos he was resolved to convey at least some light into that of the fables of antiquity which are blended and confounded with history and fix an uncertain chronology It is true that there is no family city or nation but endeavours to remove its original as far backward as possible Besides the first historians were the most negligent in setting down the eras Books were infinitely less common than they are at this time and consequently authors being not so obnoxious to censure they therefore imposed upon the world with greater impunity and as it is evident that these have related a great number of fictitious particulars it is probable enough that they also gave us several false eras in general to Sir Isaac that the world was 500 years younger than chronologists declared to be he grounds his opinion on the ordinary cause of nature and on the observations which astronomers have made By the course of nature we here understand the time that every generation of man lives upon the earth the Egyptians first employed this vague and uncertain method of calculating when they began to write the beginning of their history 141 generations from Manis to Sethon and having no fixed era they supposed 3 generations to consist of 100 years in this manner they computed 11,340 years from Manis Reign to that of Sethon the Greeks before they counted by Olympiads followed the method of the Egyptians and even gave a little more extent to generations making each to consist of 40 years now here both the Egyptians and the Greeks made an erroneous computation it is true indeed that according to the usual cause of nature 3 generations last about 120 years but 3 reigns are far from taking up so many it is very evident that mankind in general live longer than kings are found to reign so that an author who should write a history in which there were no dates fixed and should know that 9 kings had reigned over a nation such a historian would commit a great error should he allow 300 years to these 9 monarchs every generation takes about 36 years every reign is one with the other about 20 30 kings of England have swayed deceptor from William the Conqueror to George I the years of whose reigns added together amount to 648 years which being divided equally among the 30 kings give to everyone a reign of 21 years and a half very near 63 kings of France have set upon the throne these have one with another reigned about 20 years each this is the usual cause of nature the ancients therefore were mistaken when they supposed the durations in general of reigns to equal that of generations they therefore allowed too great a number of years and consequently some years must be subtracted from their computation astronomical observations seem to have lent a still greater assistance to our philosopher he appears to be stronger when he fights upon his own ground you know that the earth besides its annual motion which carries it round the sun from west to east in the space of a year has also a singular revolution which was quite unknown till within these late years its pose have a very slow retrograde motion from east to west that their position every day does not correspond exactly with the same point of the heavens this difference which is so insensible in a year becomes pretty considerable in time and in 3 score and 12 years the difference is found to be of one degree that is to say the 360th part of the circumference of the whole heaven thus after 72 years the collio of the vernal equinox which passed through a fixed star corresponds with another fixed star hence it is that the sun instead of being in that part of the heavens in which the ram was situated in a time of Hipparchus is found to correspond with that part of the heavens in which the bull was situated and the tweens are placed where the bull then stood all the signs have changed their situation and yet we still retain the same manner of speaking as the ancients did in this age we say that the sun is in the ram in a spring from the same principle of condescension that we say that the sun turns round Hipparchus was the first among the Greeks who observed some change in the constellations with regard to the equinoxes or rather who learnt it from the Egyptians philosophers ascribed this motion to the stars for in those ages people were far from imagining such a revolution in the earth which was supposed to be immovable in every respect they therefore created a heaven in which they fixed the several stars and gave this heaven a particular motion by which it was carried towards the east while it so that all the stars seemed to perform their diurnal revolution from east to west to this era they added a second of much greater consequence by imagining that the pretended heaven of the fixed stars advanced one degree eastward every hundred years in this manner they were no less mistaken in their astronomical calculation than in their system of natural philosophy as for instance an astronomer in that age would have said that the verbal equinox was in a time of such and such an observation in such a sign and in such a star it has advanced two degrees of each since the time that observation was made to the present now two degrees are equivalent to two hundred years consequently the astronomer who made that observation lived just so many years before me it is certain that an astronomer who had argued in this manner would have mistook just the 54 years hence it is that the ancients who were doubly deceived made their greater year of the world that is the revolution of the whole heavens to consist of 36,000 years but the mordans are sensible that this imaginary revolution of the heaven of the stars is nothing else than the revolution of the pose of the earth performed in 25,900 years it may be proper to observe transiently in this place that the Isaac by determining the figure of the earth has very happily explained the cause of this revolution all this being laid down the only thing remaining to settle chronology is to see through what star the collier of the equinoxes passes and where it intersects at this time the ecliptic in the spring and to discover whether some ancient writer does not tell us in what point the ecliptic was intersected in his time by the same collier of the equinoxes Clemens Alexanderus informs us that Kyron who went with the Argonaut observed the constellations at the time of that famous expedition and fixed the vernal equinox to the middle of the ram the autumnal equinox to the middle of Libra our summer solstice to the middle of cancer and our winter solstice to the middle of Capricorn a long time after the expedition of the Argonauts and a year before the Peloponnesian war Methon observed that the point of the summer solstice pass through the 8th degree of cancer now every sign of the zodiac contains 30 degrees in Kyron's time the solstice was arrived at the middle of the sign that is to say to the 15th degree a year before the Peloponnesian war it was at the 8th and therefore it had retarded 7 degrees a degree is equivalent to 72 years consequently from the beginning of the Peloponnesian war to the expedition of the Argonauts there is no more than an interval of 7 times 72 years which make 504 years but not 700 years as the Greeks computed thus in comparing the position of the heavens at this time with their position in that age we find that the expedition of the Argonauts ought to be placed about 900 years before Christ and not about 1400 and consequently that the world is not so old by 500 years as it was generally supposed to be by this calculation all the errors are drawn nearer and several events are found to have happened later than is computed I do not know whether this ingenious system will be favourably received and whether these notions will prevail so far with the learned as to prompt them to reform the chronology of the world perhaps these gentlemen would think it too greater condescension to allow one and the same man the glory of having improved the natural philosophy geometry and history this would be a kind of universal monarchy with which the principle of self-love that is in man will scarce suffer him to indulge his fellow creature and indeed at the same time that some very great philosophers attacked Sir Isaac Newton's attractive principle others fell upon his chronological system time that should discover to which of these the victories do may perhaps only leave the dispute still more undermined End of Letter 17 Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter 18 of Letters on England by Voltaire edited by Harry Moley This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letters on England by Voltaire Letter 18 on Tragedy The English as well as the Spaniards were possessed of theatres at a time when the French had no more than moving itinerant stages Shakespeare who was considered as the Cognizia of the first dimension, the nation was pretty nearly contemporary with Lóbet the Vega and he created as it were the English theatre Shakespeare boasted a strong fruit for genus. He was natural and sublime but had not so much as a single spark of good taste or knew one rule of the drama. I will now hazard a random but at the same time true reflection which is that the great merit of this dramatic poet has been the ruin of the English stage. There are such beautiful, such noble, such dreadful scenes in this writer's monstrous farces to which the name of Tragedy is given that they have always been exhibited with great success. Time which alone gives repetition to writers at last makes their very faults venerable. Most of the whimsical, gigantic images of this poet have through length of time, there being 150 years since they were first drawn, acquired right of passing for sublime. Most of the modern dramatic writers have copied him but the touches and the descriptions which are applauded in Shakespeare are his dad in these writers and you will easily believe that the veneration in which this author is held increases in proportion to the contempt which is shown to the moderns. Dramatic writers don't consider that they should not imitate him and the ill success of Shakespeare's potatoes produces no other effect than to make him be considered as inimitable. You remember that in a tragedy of Othello more of Venice, a most tender piece, a man strangles his wife on the stage and that the poor woman, while as she is strangling, cries aloud that she dies very unjustly. You know that in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, two grave diggers make a grave and are all the time drinking, singing, and making humorous reflections natural indeed enough to persons of their profession on the several skulls they throw up with their spades, but a circumstance which will surprise you is that this ridiculous incident has been imitated. In the Ring of King Charles II which was that of politeness and a golden age of the liberal arts Othway, in his Venice preserved introduces Antonio, the senator and Naki, his courtesan in the midst of the horrors of the Marquis of Bedmar's conspiracy. Antonio, the superannuated senator plays in his mistresses presents all the epictrics of a lewd, impotent debauché who is quite frantic and out of his senses. He mimics a bull and a dog and bites his mistresses' legs who kicks and whips him. However, the players have struck these buffooneries which indeed were calculated merely for the drags of the people out of Othway's tragedy. But they have still left in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar the jokes of the Roman shoemakers and the cobblers who are introduced in the same scene with Brutus and Cassius. You will undoubtedly complain that those who have hitherto discussed with you on the English stage and especially on the celebrated Shakespeare have taken notice only of his eras and that no one has translated any of those strong, those forcible stages which atone for all his thoughts. But to this I will answer that nothing is easier than to exhibit in prose all the silly impotences which a poet may have thrown out, but that it is a very difficult task to translate his fine verses. All your junior academical softs who set up before censors of the eminent writers compile whole volumes, but me thinks two pages which display some of the beauties of great geniuses are of indefinitely more value than all the idle rhapsodists of those commentators and I will join in opinion with all persons of good taste in declaring that greater advantage may be reaped from a dozen verses of a Homer of Virgil then from all the critiques put together which have been made on those two great poets. I have ventured to translate some passages of the most celebrated English poets and shall now give you one from Shakespeare pardon the blemishes of the translation for the sake of the original and remember always that when you see a version you see merely a faint print of a beautiful picture. I have made a choice of part of the celebrated Soliloquy in Hamlet which you may remember is as follows. To be or not to be that is the question whether it is nobler in mind to suffer the slints and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against the sea of troubles and by opposing and them to die, to sleep no more and by the sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that a flash is here to it is a consummation to be wished to die, to sleep to sleep perchance to dream for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause there is the respect that makes calamity of so long life for who would bear the whips and scorns of time the oppressors wrong the poor men's contumely the puns of despised love the laws delay the insolence of office and spurs that patient merit of the unworthily takes when he himself might his quietest make with a bear bodkin who would fiddles bear to grow and sweat under a weary life but that the dread of something after death over the country from whose born no travellers returns puzzles the wheel and makes us rather bear those ills we have then fly to others that we know not of thus conscience thus make cowards of us all and thus the native hue of a resolution is sickled over with the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great a moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action my version of it runs thus demeure il faut choisir et passer à l'instant de la vie à l'amour ou de l'être onion Dieu crêle s'il en est il crairait mon courage faut-il vieillir couper sous la main qui moudrage se porter ou finir mon malheur et mon sort qui sujet, qui m'arrête et qu'est-ce que l'amour c'est la fin de nos mots c'est mon unique asile après de l'an transport c'est un sommier tranquille en son dos et tout meurt mais un navre réveillé doit succéder peut-être au douceur de sommeil on nous menace on dit que cette courte vie de tourment éternel est aussi trop suivie au mort moment fatal a fru s'éternité tu creurs à ton sol nom ce glace est pouvanté et qui pourroient sans troie supporter cette vie de ne prêtre mon terre venir que l'hypocrisie d'une indienne maîtresse en censé les erreurs rampez sous un ministère et ses auteurs et montrez les longueurs de son âme abattue en des amiens cras qui détournent la vue l'amour sera trop douze en ses extrémités mais le scrupule parle et nous crie, arrêtez il devint à nous mains cet heureux homicide et d'un héros guerrier fait un chrétien timide etc Do not imagine that I have translated Shakespeare in a servile manner woe to the writer who gives a literal version who by rendering every word of his original by that very means innervates the sense and extinguishes all the fire of it it is on such an occasion one may justly affirm that the letter kills but the spirit quickens here follows another passage copied from a celebrated a tragic writer among the English it is Strident a poet in the reign of Charles II a writer whose genius was too exuberant and not accompanied with judgment enough had he written only a tenth part of the works he left behind him his character would have been conspicuous in every part but his great thought is his having endeavoured to be universal the passage in question is as follows when I consider life this is all a cheat yet food by hope man favour the deceit trust on and think tomorrow will repay tomorrow's a forcer than the former day lies more and whilst it says we shall be blessed with some new joy cuts off what we possessed strange cozen age known would live past the years again yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain and from the drags of life thing to receive what the first brightly running could not give I am tired with waiting for this kymic gold which forces young and beggars as when old I shall now give you my translation the descent on regret et des rueurs en désir les mortales sans censé promènent leurs folies dont des malheurs représent dont l'espoir des plaisirs dans l'espoir des plaisirs nous ne vivons jamais nous attendons la vie demain, demain ditant va combler tout nos vœux demain vient et ne laisse encore plus malheureux quel est l'erreur hélas du soi qui nous devours nul de nous ne vous doit recommencer son corps de nos premiers moments nous modissant l'horreur de la nuit qui vient nous entendons encore ce qu'on va promis le plus beau de nos jours etc it is in these detached passages that the English have hitherto exiled the dramatic pieces most of which are barbarous and without decorum, order or very similitude darts such resplendent flashes through this gleam as a maze and astonish the stars too much inflated too unnatural too closely copied from the Hebrew writers who are bound so much with the Asiatic fustion but then it must be also confessed that the stills of the figurative style on which the English tone is lifted up raises the genius at the same time very far aloft though with an irregular pace the first English writer who composed a regular tragedy and infused a spirit of elegance through every part of it was the illustrious Mr. Adson his Cato is a masterpiece both with regard to the diction and to the beauty and harmony of the numbers the character of Cato is in my opinion vastly superior to that of Cornelia in the Pompeii of Cornelia for Cato is great without anything like fustion and Cornelia who besides is not a necessary character tends sometimes to combust Mr. Adson's Cato appears to me the greatest character that was ever brought upon any stage but then the rest of them do not correspond to the dignity of it and this dramatic piece so excellently well-written is disfigured by Dao Love plot which spreads a certain langer over the whole that quite murders it the custom of introducing love at random and at any rate passed from Paris to London about 1660 with our ribbons and our peruchs the ladies who adorned the theatrical circle there in like manner as in this city will suffer love only to be the theme of every conversation the judicious Mr. Adson had the effeminate complacence to soften the severity of his dramatic character so as to adapt it to the manners of the age quite ruined a masterpiece in its kind since his time the drama has become more regular the audience more difficult to be pleased and writers more correct and less bowed I have seen some new pieces that were written with great regularity but which at the same time were very flat and insipid one would think that the English had been hitherto formed to produce irregular beauties only the shining monsters of Shakespeare give infinite more delight than the judicious image of the Mordans hitherto the political genius of the English resembles a tufted tree planted by the hand of nature that throws out a thousand branches at random and spreads unequally but with great vigor it dies if you attempt to force its nature and to lop and dress it in the same manner as the trees of the garden of Mali End of letter 18 Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter 19 of Letter Song England by Voltaire edited by Harry Moley This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith Letter Song England by Voltaire Letter 19 on comedy I'm surprised that the judicious and ingenious Mr. de Muort who has published some letters on the English and French nations should have confined himself in treating of comedy merely to censure Shadowwell the comic writer. This author was had in pretty great contempt in Mr. de Muort's time and was not the poet of the polite part of the nation. His dramatic pieces which pleased some time in acting were despised by all persons of taste that might be compared to many plays which I have seen in France that drew crowds to the playhouse at the same time that they were intolerable to read and of which it might be said that the whole city of Paris exploded them and yet all flocked to see them represented on the stage. Me thinks Mr. de Muort should have mentioned an excellent comic writer living where he was in England. I mean Mr. Wichely who was a long time known publicly to be happy in the good graces of the celebrated mistress of King Charles II. This gentleman who passes his life among persons of the highest distinction was perfectly well acquainted with their lives and their bodies and painted them with the strongest pencil and in the truest colours. He has drawn a misanthrope of manhater in imitation of that of Molière. All Wichely's strokes are stronger and bolder than those of our misanthrope but then they are less delicate and the rules of Decorum are not so well observed in this play. The English writer has corrected the only defect that is in Molière's comedy the thinness of the plot which also is so disposed that the characters in it do not enough raise our concern. The English comedy affects us and the contrivance of the plot is very ingenious but at the same time it is too bold for the French menors. The fable is this that the captain of a man of war who is very brave, open-hearted and inflamed with a spirit of contempt for all mankind has a prudent, sincere friend whom he yet is suspicious of and a mistress that loves him with the utmost excess of passion. The captain, so far from returning her love will not even condescend to look upon her that confines entirely in a false friend who is the most worthless wretch living. At the same time he has given his heart to a creature who is the greatest the cocket and the most perfidious of her sex and he is so credulous as to be confident she is a panolope and his false friend a cato. He embarks onboard his ship in order to go and fight the Dutch having left all his money, his jewels and everything he had in the world to this virtuous creature whom at the same time he recommends to the care of his supposed faithful friend nevertheless the real man of honour whom he suspects so unaccountably goes onboard the ship with him and the mistress on whom he would not bestow so much as one glance disguises herself in the habit of a page and is with him the whole voyage without his once knowing that she is of a sex different from that she attempts to pass for which by the way is not over natural. The captain having blown up his own ship in an engagement returns to England abandoned and undone, accompanied by his page and his friend without knowing the friendship of the one or the tender passion of the other. Immediately he goes to the draw among women who he expected had preserved her fidelity to him and the treasure he had left in her hand. He meets with her indeed but married to the honest nave in whom he had reposed so much confidence and finds she had acted as treacherously with regard to the casket he had entrusted her with. The captain can scarce think it possible that a woman of virtue and honour can act so via part but to convince him still more of the reality of it this very worthy lady forcing love with the little page and will force him to her embraces. But as it is a requisite justice to be done and that in a dramatic piece virtue ought to be rewarded and vice punished it is at last found that the captain takes his page's place and lies with his faithless mistress cacoles his treacherous friend thrusts his sword through his body recovers his casket and marries his page. You will observe that this play is also larded with the pertulent, litigious old woman a relation of the captain who is the most comical character that was ever brought upon the stage. Witchley has also copied from Molière another play of a singular and bold cast which is a kind of a called defam or school for married women. The principal character in this comedy is one Homer, a sly fortune hunter and a terror of all the city husbands. This fellow in order to play a sureer game causes a report to be spread that in his last illness the surgeons had found it necessary to have him made a unique. Upon his appearing in his noble character all the husbands in town flocked to him with their wives and now poor Homer is only puzzled about his choice. However he gives the preference particularly to a little female peasant, a very harmless innocent creature who enjoys a fine flush of health and co-colds her husband with a simplicity that is infinitely more married than the witty malice of the most experienced ladies. This play cannot indeed be called the school of good morals but it's certainly the school of wit and true humour. Sir John Vembra has written several comedies which are more humorous than those of Mr Witchley but not so ingenious. Sir John was a man of pleasure and likewise a poet and an architect. The general opinion is that he is as sprightly in his writings as he is heavy in his buildings. It is he who raised the famous castle of Blenheim, a ponderous and lasting monument of our unfortunate battle of Hoshstead. Worthy apartments but as spacious as the walls are thick this castle would be commodious enough. Some wag in an epitaph he made on Sir John Vembra has these lines Earth lie light on him for he laid many a heavy load on thee. Sir John having taken a tour into France before the glorious war that broke out in 1701 was thrown into the Bastille and detained there for some time without being ever able to discover the motive which had prompted our ministry to indulge him with this mark of their distinction. He wrote a comedy during his confinement and the circumstance which appears to me very extraordinary is that we don't meet with so much as a single satirical stroke against the country in which he had been so injuriously treated. The late Mr Congreve raised the glory of comedy to a greater height than any English writer before or since his time. He wrote only a few plays but they are all excellent in their kind. The laws of the drama strictly observed in them. They are bound with characters which are shadowed with the utmost delicacy and we don't meet with so much as one low or coarse jest. The language is everywhere that of men of honour but their actions are those of naives a proof that he was perfectly well acquainted with human nature and frequented what we call polite company. He was infirm and contoured a verge of life when I knew him. Mr Congreve had one defect which was his entertaining to mean an idea of his profession that of a writer though it was to this he owed his fame and fortune. He spoke of his works as of trifles that were beneath him and hinted to me in our first conversation that I should visit him upon no other footing than that of a gentleman who led a life for plainness and simplicity. I answered that had he been so unfortunate as to be a mere gentleman I should never have come to see him and I was very much disgusted at so unseasonable a piece of vanity. Mr Congreve's the comedies are the most witty and regular and those of Sir John Vembra most gay and humorous and those of Mr Wichely have the greatest force in spirit. It may be proper to observe that these fine geniuses never spoke disadvantageously of Molière and that none but the contemptible writers among the English have endeavoured to lessen the character of that great comic poet. Such Italian musicians as despite Luli are themselves persons of no character or ability but a bonaccini esteems that great artist and does justice to his merit. The English have some other good comic writers living such as Sir Richard Steele and Mr Thibba who is an excellent player and also poet Laureate, a title which how ridiculous so ever it may be thought is yet worth a thousand crowns a year besides some considerable privilege for the person who enjoys it. Our illustrious Cournier had not so much. To conclude don't desire me to descend to particulars with regard to these English comedies which I am so fond of applauding nor to give you a single smart saying or humorous stroke from Wichely or Congrive. We don't laugh in rending a translation if you have a mind to understand the English comedy the only way to do this will be for you to go to England to spend three hours to make yourself master of the English tongue and to frequent the playhouse every night. I receive but little pleasure from the perusal of Aristophanie and Protas and for this reason because I am neither a Greek nor a Roman the delicacy of the humour, the allusion, the apropos all these are lost to a foreigner but it is different with respect to tragedy this treating only of exhorted passions and heroical follies and the antiquated errors of fable or history have made a secret Oedipus, Electra and such like characters may with as much propriety be treated of by the Spaniards, the English or us as by the Greeks but true comedy is the speaking picture of the follies and ridiculous foibles of a nation so that he only is able to judge of the painting who is perfectly acquainted with the people it represents. Letter 19 by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter 20 by Voltaire by Harry Morley this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter 20 by Voltaire letter 20 on such of the nobility the courtiers cultivate the bell letter there once was a time in France when the polite arts were cultivated by persons of the highest rank in a state the courtiers particularly were conversant in them although indolence, a taste for trifles and a passion for intrigue were the divinities of the country the court me thinks at this time seems to have given into a taste quite opposite to that of polite literature but perhaps the mode of thinking may be revived in a little time the French are of so flexible disposition may be molded into such a variety of shapes that the monarch needs but command that he is immediately obeyed the English generally think and learning is a had in greater honour among them than in our country an advantage that results naturally from the form of their government there are about 800 persons in England who have a right to speak in public and to support the interest of the kingdom 5 or 6 thousand may in their turns aspire to the same honour the whole nation set themselves up as judges over these and every man has the liberty of publishing his thoughts with regard to public affairs which shows that all the people in general are indispensably obliged to cultivate their understandings in England the governments of Greece and Rome are the subject of every conversation so that every man is under the necessity of perusing such as treat of them how disagreeable so ever it may be to him and this study leads naturally to that of polite literature mankind in general speak well in their respective professions what is the reason why our magistrates our lawyers our physicians and a great number of the clergy our able scholars have a finer taste and more wit than persons of all other professions the reason is because their condition of life requires a cultivated and enlightened mind in a same manner as a merchant is obliged to be acquainted with his traffic not long since an English nobleman who was very young came to see me at Paris on his return from Italy he had written a poetical description of that country which for delicacy and politeness may vary with anything we meet with in the era of a Rochester or in our chalet our sahazan or chapel the translation I have given of it is so inexpressive of the strength and delicate humor of the original that I am obliged to seriously to ask a pardon of the author and of all who understand English however as this is the only method I have to make his dorships versus none I shall here present you with them in our turn LATTER 21 of letters on England by Voltaire edited by Harry Molly this is a LibriVox recording by Harry Molly this is a LibriVox recording by Harry Molly this is a LibriVox recording by Harry Molly this is a LibriVox This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Cheyenne Arrowsmith. Letters on England by Voltaire. Letter 21 on the Earl of Rochester and Mr. Waller. The Earl of Rochester's name is universally known. Mr. de Saint-Evremont has made very frequent mention of him, but then he has represented this famous nobleman in no other light than as the man of pleasure as one who was the idol of the fair. But with regard to myself, I would willingly describe him the man of genius, the great poet. Among other pieces which displayed a shining imagination, his lordship only could boast he wrote some setires on the same subjects as those are celebrated Boiloume choice of. I do not know any better method of improving the taste than to compare the productions of such great geniuses as I have exercised their talent on the same subject. Boiloume declaims as follows against the human reason in his setire on man. Cependant, à le voie plan de vapeur légère, soi-même se bercer de ses propres chimères, Louis-Sol de la nature est la base et la buie, et le dixième ciel ne tourne que pour lui. De tous les animaux, il est ici le maître, qui pourra le nier pour ce tue, moi peut-être, ce maître prétendu qui lui ordonne des lois. Ce roi des animaux, combien as-t-il de roi? Yet pleased with idle whimsies of his brain and puffed with pride, this haughty thing would feign, bethink himself the only stay and prop that holds the mighty frame of nature up. The skies and stars, his properties must seem. Of all the creatures, he is the Lord, he cries. And who is there, say you, that theirs denies so old a truth? That may be, sir, do I. This boasted monarch of the world who oars, the creatures here and with his nought gives laws. This self-named king who thus pretends to be the Lord of all. How many Lords has he? O damn, a little altered. The Lord of Rochester expresses himself in his set-eye against a man in pretty near the following manner, but I must first desire you always to remember that the versions I give you from the English poets are written with freedom and latitude, and that the restraint of our versification and the delicacies of the French tongue will not allow a translator to convene to it the licentious impetuousity and fire of the English numbers. C'est d'esprit que je suis, c'est d'esprit plein d'erreur. Ce n'est pas ma raison, c'est la tienne, docteur. C'est la raison frivole, inquiète, orgueilleuse, des sages animaux qui valent des dénieuses, qui croient entre eux et l'ange, occupés le milieu, et pensent être ici-bas l'image de son Dieu. Ville l'atome en parfait, qui croit, doute, dispute, rampe, s'élèvent, tombent, et ni encore s'achute. Qui nous dit je suis libre en nous montrant ses fères, et dont l'oeil trouble et faut qu'on a passé l'univers. Allez, rêver en fou, bien heureux, fanatique, compilé bien l'âme de vos riens, scholastique, perte de vision et d'inigma sacré, hauteur de l'abirante où vous vous égarer. Allez, obscurément, éclaircir vos mestières, et courer dans l'école adorer vos chimières. Il est d'autres erreurs, il est d'essai de vous, condamné par eux-mêmes à l'ennui du repos. Ce mystique encloîtrait fier de son indolence, tranquille au sang de Dieu. Que peut-il faire? Il pense. Non, tu ne prends pas misérable. Tu dors. Inutile la terre et mise au rang des morts. Ton esprit est nervé, groppi dans la molesse. Réveille-toi, sois homme, et sors de ton ivresse. L'homme est né pour agir, et tu prétends penser, et cetera. The original runs thus. Hold, mighty man, I cry all this we know, and this, this very reason I despise. This supernatural gift that makes a might think he is the image of the infinite, comparing his short life, void of all rest, to the eternal and the ever-blessed. This busy puzzling stir our up of doubt, that frames deep mysterious, then finds them out. Filling with frantic crowds of thinking fools, those reverent bed lumps, collages and scores, born on whose wings each heavy sword can pierce the limits of the boundless universe. So charming ointments make an old witch fly, and bear a crippled carcass through the sky. Tis this exhorted power, whose business lies in nonsense and impossibilities. This made a whimsical philosopher, before the spacious world his top prefer, and we have modern cloistered coxcombs, who retire to think, because they have not to do. The thoughts are given for action's government, where action ceases thoughts impertinent. Whether these ideas are true or false, it is certain they are expressed with an energy and fire, which form the poet. I shall be very far from attempting to examine philosophically into these verses, to lay down the pencil and take up the rule and compass on this occasion. My only desire in this letter being, to display the genius of the English poets, and therefore I shall continue in the same view. The celebrated Mr Waller has been very much talked of in France. And Mr De La Fontaine, Santef Bémol and Baileu have written his eulogium, but still his name only is known. He had the much the same repetition in London, as Watiere had in Paris, and in my opinion deserved it better. Watiere was born in an age that was just emerging from viberity, an age that was still rude and ignorant, the people of which aimed at wit, though they had not leased the pretensions to it, and sought for points and concedes instead of sentiments. Bristol's stones are more easily found than diamonds. Watiere, born with an easy and frivolous genius, was the first to gush on in this aurora of French literature. Had he come into the world after those great geniuses who spread such a glory over the age of Louis XIV, he would either have been unknown, would have been despised, or would have corrected his style. Baileu applauded him, but it was in his first acetyles, at a time when a taste of that great poet was not yet formed. He was young and in an age when persons from a judgment of man from their repetition and not from their writings. Besides, Baileu was very partial, both in his incomiums and in his censures. He applauded Sergei, whose works nobody reads, he abused the quino, whose poetic pieces everyone has got by heart, and is wholly silent upon La Fontaine. Waller, though a better poet than Watiere, was not yet a finished poet. The graces breathe in such of Waller's works as are writ in a tender strain, but then they are languid through negligence, and often disfigured with false thoughts. The English had not in his time attained the art of correct writing, but his serious compositions exhibited a strength and vigor, which could not have been expected from the softness and effeminacy of his other pieces. He wrote an elegy on Oliver Cromwell, which, with all its faults, is nevertheless looked upon as a masterpiece. To understand this copy of verses, you are to know that the day Oliver died was remarkable for a great storm. His poem begins in this manner. La tête de croix est soumettroie ton peuple à son jou sur le docile. Mère, tu t'en es doublée, ou mère, tes flots émus semblant dire en grondant aux plus lointains rêvages que les froies de la terre et ton maître n'est plus. Tell au ciel, au très-fois, s'en voilà Romulus, tell il quitta la terre au milieu des orages, tell d'un peuple qui arrière il reçut les hommages. Au pays, dans sa vie, sa mort adorée, son palais fut ademble. Et etc. We must resign. Heaven, his great soul, does claim, in storms as loud as his immortal fame. His dying grounds, his last breath shakes our isle, and trees uncut fall for his funeral pile About his palace, their broad roots are tossed into the air, so Romulus was lost. New Rome in such a tempest missed her king, and from obeying fell to worshipping. Our ita stop, thus Heraclis lay dead, with ruined oaks and pines about him spread. Nature herself took notice of his death, and sighing swelled the sea with such a breath that to remotice the shores the billows rode the approaching fate of his great ruler toad, Waller. It was this elogium that gave occasion to the reply, taken notice of in Baylor's dictionary, which Waller made to King Charles II, this king to whom Waller had a little before, as is usual with bars and monarchs, presented a copy of verses embroidered with praises, reproached the poet for not writing with so much energy and fire, as when he had apported the usurper, meaning Oliver. Sir, replied Waller to the king, we poets succeed better in fiction than in truth. This answer was not so sincere as that which a Dutch ambassador made, who, when the same monarch complained that his masters paid less regard to him than they had done to Cromwell. Ah, sir, says the ambassador, Oliver was quite under the man. It is not my intent to give a commentary on Waller's character, nor on that of any other person, for I consider men after their death in no other light than as they were writers, and wholly disregard everything else. I shall only observe that Waller, though born in a court and to an estate of five or six thousand pounds stood in a year, was never so proud or so indolent as to lay aside the happy talent which nature had indulged him. The earls of Dorset and Roscommon, the two dukes of Buckingham, the Lord Halifax, and so many other noblemen, did not think the repetition they obtained of very great poets and illustrious writers anyway derogatory to their quality. They are more glorious for their works than for their titles. These cultivated the polite art with as much assiduity as though they had been their whole dependence. They also have made learning appear venerable in the eyes of the vulgar, who have needed to be led in all things by the great, and who nevertheless fashion their manners less after those of the nobility in England I mean than in any other country in the world. End of Letter 21, Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter 22 of Letter Zoningland by Voltaire, edited by Harry Morley. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith. Letter Zoningland by Voltaire. Letter 22 of Mr Pope and some other famous poets. I intended to treat of Mr Pryor, one of the most amiable English poets, whom you saw plenty potentiary and invoy extraordinary at Paris in 1712. I also designed to have given you some idea of the Lord Rose Commons and Lord Dorset's Muse. But I find that to do this I should be obliged to write a large volume, and that after much pangs and trouble you would have but an imperfect idea of all those works. Poetry is a kind of music in which a man should have some knowledge before he pretends to judge of it. When I give you a translation of some passages from those foreign poets, I only prick down, and they are imperfectly their music, but then I cannot express the taste of their harmony. There is one English poem especially which I should despair of ever making you understand, the title whereof is Hudibras. The subject of it is the Civil War in the time of the ground rebellion, and the principles and practice of the Puritans are therein ridiculed. It is Don Quixote, it is our satire and monibé blended together. I never found so much wit in one single book as in that, which at the same time is the most difficult to be translated. Who would believe that a work which paints in such lively and natural colours the several foibles and follies of mankind, and where we meet with more sentiments than words, should baffle the endeavours of the ableist translator. But the reason of this is almost every part of it alludes to a particular incident. The clergy are there made the principal object of ridicule, which is understood but by few among the leotid. To explain this a commentary would be requested, and humour when explained is no longer humour. Whoever sets up for a commentator of smart sayings and repartees is himself a blockhead. This is the reason why the works of the ingenious Dean Swift, who has been called the English Haberley, will never be well understood in France. This gentleman has the honour, in common with Haberley, of being a priest, and like him, laughs at everything. But in my humble opinion, the title of the English Haberley, which is given the Dean, is highly derogatory to his genius. The former has interspersed his unaccountably fantastic and unintelligible book with the most gay strokes of humour, but which at the same time has a greater proportion of impertinence. He has been vastly lavish of erudition, of smut, and insipid relery. An agreeable tale of two pages is purchased at the expense of whole volumes of nonsense. There are but few persons and those of a grotesque taste who pretend to understand and to esteem this work. For as to the rest of the nation, they laugh at the pleasant and diverting touches which are found in Haberley and despise his book. He is looked upon as the prince of buffoons. The readers are vexed to think that America was master of so much wit, should have made so wretched a use of it. He is an intoxicated philosopher who never wrote, but when he was in liquor. Dean Swift is Haberley in his senses and frequenting the politest company. The former indeed is not so gay as the latter, but then he possesses all the delicacy, the justness, the choice, the good taste, in all which particulars our giggling, rural, vexed, Haberley is wanting. The political numbers of Dean Swift are of a singular and almost inimitable taste. True humour, whether in prose or verse, seems to be his peculiar talent. But whoever is desirous of understanding him perfectly must visit the island in which he was born. It will be much easier for you to form an idea of Mr Pope's work. He is, in my opinion, the most elegant, the most correct poet, and at the same time the most harmonious. A circumstance which redounds very much to the honour of this news that England ever gave birth to. He has mellowed the harsh sounds of the English trumpet to the soft accent of the fruit. His compositions may be easily translated because they are vastly clear and perspicuous. Besides, most of his subjects are general and relative to all nations. His essay on criticism was soon ben known in France by the translation which Labid Hanel has made of it. Here's an extract from his poem entitled The Rape of the Lock, which I just now translated with the latitude I usually take on these occasions. For once again, nothing can be more ridiculous than to translate a poet literally. Oum Brielle, à l'instant, vieil gnome réchiné, va d'une elle pesante et dernière renfronnée, chercheront murmurant la cavienne profonde, ou loin des deux raisons crêpant l'oeil de du monde, la dièse aux vapeurs a choisi son séjour, les traces à qui l'on siffle à l'entour et le souffle malsain de l'heure à qui d'allerne, il porte aux environs la fièvre et la migraine, sur un riche sofa derrière un paravent, loin des flambos, du bruit, des parleurs et du vent, la quatorze déesse incessant monde repose le coeur gros de chaque grain sans en savoir la cause. Ni on pensait jamais l'esprit toujours troublé, l'oeil chargé, le trompin et l'hypoconde renflé, la médicente envie est assise auprès d'elle, vieille spectre féminin d'écrépite pucelle, avec un air de vous dégirant son prochain et chanson non légende l'évangile à la main. Sur un lit plein de fleurs néglige m'embrancher une jeune boutée non loin d'elle écoucher, c'est l'affectation qui gaseillons parlant, écoutent sans entendre et l'orgne en regardant. Qui aux rougis sans pudeur, héritent tout son joie, de son mot différent, prétend qu'elle est la peau, et plein de santé, sous le rouge et le vart, se plantent avec molesse et se bamment avec art. Umbria, a dusky, melancholy sprite, as ever a solid the fair face of light, down to the central earth, his prophecy repairs to search the gloomy cave of spleen. Swift onk his sooty pignons flits the gnome, and in a vapour reached the dismal dome. No cheerful breeze this sullen region knows, the dreaded east is all the wind that blows. Here in a grotto sheltered close from air, and screamed in shades from days detested glare, she sighs forever on repensive bed, paying at her side and megrim at her head. Two handmaids weighed the throne, alike in place, but differing far in figure and in face, here stood ill nature like an ancient maid, her wrinkled form in black and white arrayed. With store of prayers for mornings, nights and noons, her hand is afield, her bosom with lampoons, there a factation with a sickly mean shows in her cheek the roses of 18, practiced to lisp and hand ahead aside, feints into airs and languishes with pride. On the ridge quilt sinks with, becoming wool, wrapped in a gown for sickness and for show. This exact, in the original, not in the faint translation I have given you of it, may be compared to the description of la mouleuse, softness or effeminacy in Boilou's Lutron. Methinks I now have given you specimens enough from the English poets. I have made some transient mention of their philosophers, but as for good historians among them, I don't know of any. And indeed, a Frenchman was forced to write their history. Possibly the English genius, which is either languid or impetuous, has not yet acquired that unaffected eloquence, that plain but majestic air which history requires. Possibly too, the spirit of party which exhibits objects in a dim and confused light may have sunk the credit of their historians. One half of the nation is always at variance with the other half. I have met with people who assured me that the Duke of Marlborough was a coward and that Mr Pope was a fool, just as some Jesuits in France declare Pascal to have been a man of little or no genius and some Johnsonists affirm Father Bois de Lou to have been a mere babla. The Jacobites consider Mary Queen of Scots as a pious heroine but those of an opposite party look upon her as a prostitute and adulterous murderer. Thus the English have memorials of the several reigns, but no such thing as a history. There is indeed now living one Mr Gordon. The public are obliged to him for the translation of Tacitus, who is very capable of writing history of his own country, but Haban the Tuatha got the start of him. To conclude, in my opinion, the English have not such good historians as the French, have no such thing as a real tragedy, have several delightful comedies, some wonderful passages in certain of their poems, and boast of philosophers that are worthy of instructing mankind. The English have reaped very great benefit from the writers of our nation, and therefore we ought, since they have not scrupled to be in our debt, to borrow from them. Both the English and we came after the Italians, who have been our instructors in all the odds and whom we have surpassed in some. I cannot determine which of the three nations ought to be honoured with the poem, but Habi the writer who could display the various merits. End of Letter 22, Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter 23 of Letter Song England by Voltaire, edited by Henry Moly. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Cheyenne Arosmith Letter Song England by Voltaire, Letter 23, on the regard that ought to be shown to men of letters. Neither the English nor any other people have foundations established in favour of the polite arts like those in France. There are universities in most countries, but it is in France only, that we meet with so beneficial an encouragement for astronomy and all parts of mathematics, for physics, for research into antiquity, for painting, sculpture and architecture. Louis XIV has immortalised his name by these several foundations, and this immortality did not cost him 200,000 livres a year. I must confess that one of the things I very much wonder at is, that as the Parliament of Great Britain have promised a reward of £20,000 sterling to any person who may discover the longitude, they should never have once thought to imitate Louis XIV, in his munificence with regard to the arts and science. Merit, indeed, meets England with rewards of another kind, which redound more to the honour of the nation. The English have so great a veneration for exotic talents that a man of merit, in their country, is always sure of making his fortune. Mr Addison in France would have been elected a member of one of the academies, and by the credit of some women, might have obtained a yearly pension of 1200 livres. Wales might have been imprisoned in the Bastille, upon pretence that certain strokes in his tragedy of Cato had been discovered which glanced at the porter of some man in power. Mr Addison was raised to the post of Secretary of State in England. Sir Isaac Newton was made Master of the Royal Mint. Mr Congreve had a considerable employment. Mr Pryor was planning potentiary. Dr Swift is Dean of St Patrick in Dublin, and is more revered in Ireland than the primate himself. The religion which Mr Pope professes, excludes him, indeed, from preferments of every kind, but then it did not prevent his gaining 200,000 livres by his excellent translation of Homer. I myself saw, a long time in France, the author of Rather Mistress, ready to perish for hunger, and the son of one of the greatest man our country ever gave birth to, and who was beginning to run the noble career which his father had set him, would have been reduced to the extremes of misery had he not been patronised by Mr Fagon. But the circumstance which mostly encouraged the arts in England is the great veneration which has paid them. The picture of the Prime Minister hands over the chimney of his own closet, but I have seen that of Mr Pope in 20 noblemen's houses. Sir Isaac Newton was revered in his lifetime and had a due respect paid to him after his death. The greatest man in the nation disputing who should have the honour of holding up his paw. Going to Westminster Abbey and you will find that what raises the admiration of the spectator is not the modulums of the English kings, but the monuments which the gratitude of the nation has erected to perpetuate the memory of those illustrious men who contributed to its glory. We view their statues in their abbey in the same manner as those of Sophocles, Plato, and other immortal personates were viewed in Athens and I'm persuaded that the bear's sight of those glorious monuments has fired more than one breast and been the occasion of there becoming great man. The English have even been reproached with paying two extravagant honours to mere merit and censured for entering the celebrated actress Mrs Oatfield in Westminster Abbey with almost the same pomp as Sir Isaac Newton. Some pretend that the English had paid her these great funeral honours purposely to make us more strongly sensible of the biberity and injustice which they object to us for having buried Mademoiselle Le Couvre ignominiously in the fields. But be assured from me that the English were prompted by no other principle in burying Mrs Oatfield in Westminster Abbey than their good sense. They are far from being so ridiculous as to brandon with infamy and art which has immortalised Euripides and Sophocles or to exclude from the body of their citizens. A set of people whose business is to set off with the utmost grace of speech and action those pieces which the nation is proud of. Under the reign of Charles I and in the beginning of the Civil Wars raised by a number of rigid fanatics who at last were the victims to it. A great many pieces were published against the theatrical and other shows which were attacked with the greater verulens because that monarch and his queen daughter to Henry the First of France were passionately fond of them. One Mr Pring, a man of most furiously scrupless principles who would have thought himself damned, had he won a cassock instead of a short cloak and had been glad to see one half of mankind cut the other to pieces for the glory of God and the propaganda Fidey took it into his head to write a most wretched sitire against some pretty good comedies which were exhibited very innocently every night before their majesties. He quoted the authority of the rabbis and some passages from Saint Bonaventure to prove that the Oedipus of Sophocles was the work of the evil spirit that Terence was excommunicated Ypsophacto and added that Douglas Brutus who was a very severe Jonsonist assassinated Julius Caesar for no other reason but because he who was Pontifax Maximus presumed to write a tragedy the subject of which was Oedipus. Lastly he declared that all who frequented the theatre were excommunicated as they thereby renounced their baptism. This was casting the highest insult on the king and all the royal family and as the English loved their prince at that time they could not bear to hear a writer talk of excommunicating him though they themselves afterwards cut his head off. Pring was summoned to appear before the star chamber, his wonderful book from which Father LeBouhan Stohes was sentenced to be burned by the common haman and himself to lose his years. His trial is now extant. The Italians are far from attempting to cast a blemish on Diobra or to excommunicate Senua Senesino or Senula Cuzzoni. With regard to myself I could presume to wish that the magistrates would suppress I know not what contemptible pieces written against the stage for when the English and Italians hear that we brand with the greatest a mark of infamy and art in which we excel that we excommunicate persons who receive salaries from the king that we condemn as empires a spectacle exhibited in convents and monasteries that we dishonour sports in which Louis XIV and Louis XV performed as actors that we give the title of the devil's work to pieces which are received by magistrates of the most severe character and represented before a virtuous queen when I say foreigners are told of this insolent conduct this contempt for the royal authority and this gothic rusticity which some presume to call christian severity what an idea must they entertain of our nation and how will it be possible for them to conceive either that our laws give a sanction to an art which is declared in famous or there's some persons there to stamp with infamy and art which receives a sanction from the laws is rewarded by kings cultivated and encouraged by the greatest a man and admired by whole nations and that Father Lebron's impertinent libel against the stage is seen in a bookseller's shop standing the very next to the immortal labours of Hassan of Cornier of Muller and etc end of letter 23 recording by Cheyenne Arosmith letter 24 of letters on England by Voltaire edited by Harry molly this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Cheyenne Arosmith letter song England by Voltaire letter 24 on the royal society and other academies the English had an academy of sciences many years before us but then it is not under such prudent regulations as ours the only reason of which very possibly is because it was founded before the academy of Paris for had it been founded after it would very probably have adopted some of the sage laws of the former and improved upon others two things and those the most essential to man are wanting in the royal society of London I mean rewards and the laws a seat in the academy at Paris is a small but secure fortune to a geometrician or a chemist but this is so far from being the case at London that the several members of the royal society are at a continual though indeed a small expense any man in England who declares himself a lover of the mathematics and natural philosophy and expresses an inclination to be a member of the royal society is immediately elected into it but in France it is not enough that a man who aspires to the honor of being a member of the academy and of receiving the royal stipend has a love for the sciences he must at the same time be deeply skilled in them and is obliged to dispute to the seat with competitors who are so much the more formidable as they are fired by a principle of glory by interest by the difficulty itself and by that inflexibility of mind which is generally found in those who devote themselves to that pertinacious study the mathematics the academy of sciences is prudently confined to the study of nature and indeed this is a field spacious enough for 50 or three score persons to range in that of london mixes indiscriminately literature with physics but he thinks the founding and academy merely for the polite arts is more judicious as it prevents confusion and the joining in some measure of heterogeneous such as a dissertation on the head addresses of the roman ladies with a hundred or more new curves as there is very little order and regularity in royal society and not the least encouragement and that the academy of paris is on a quite different foot it is no wonder that our transactions are drawn up in a more just and beautiful manner than those of the english so just who are under a regular discipline and besides well paid must necessarily at last perform more glorious achievements than others who are mere volunteers it must indeed be confessed that the royal society boasts to their newton but then he did not owe his knowledge and discoveries to that body so far from it that the letter were intelligible to very few of his fellow members a genius like that of sir isaac belongs to all the academies in the world because all had a thousand things to learn of him the celebrated dean swift formed a design in the letter end of the late queen's reign to find an academy for the english tongue upon the model of that of the french this project was promoted by the late ear of oxford lord high treasurer and much more by the lord bollingbrook secretary of state who had a happy talent of speaking without premeditation in a parliament house with as much purity as dean swift wrote in his closet and who would have been the ornament and protector of that academy those only would have been chosen members of it whose works will last as long as the english tongue such as dean swift mr prior whom we saw here invested with a public character and whose fame in england is equal to that of la fontaine in france mr pope the english boilou mr congrief who may be called their mollard and several other eminent persons whose names i have forgotten all these would have raised the glory of that body to a great height even in its infancy but queen am being snatched suddenly from the world the wicks were resolved to ruin the protectors of the intended academy a circumstance that was of the most fatal consequence to polite literature the members of this academy would have had a very great advantage over those who first the fall to that of the french for swift prior congrief dryden pope and his son etc had fixed the english tongue by their writings whereas chapelin colette casenier faqe behan cotton our first admissions were a disgrace to their country and so much ridicule is now attached to their very names that even author of these genius in this age had the misfortune to be called chapelin or cotton he would be under a necessity of changing his name one circumstance to which the english academy should especially have attended is to have prescribed it to themselves occupations of a quite different kind from those with which our academicians amuse themselves a widow of this country asked me for the memoir of the french academy i answered they have no memoir but i have printed three score four score volumes in quarter of compliments the gentleman perused the one or two of them but without being able to understand the style in which they were written though he understood all our good authors perfectly or said he i see in these elegant discourses is that the member elect having assured the audience that his predecessor was a great man that the cardinal was a very great man that the chancellor was a pretty great man that lui the 14th was a more than great man the director answers in the very same string and adds that the member elect may also be a sort of great man that himself in quality of director must also have some share in this greatness the cause why all these academical discourses have unhappily done so little honor to this body is evident enough the time is the temporary support here so come ominous the fault is only to the age rather than to particular persons it grew up insensibly into accustomed for every actor mission to repeat these illogiums at his reception it was laid down as a kind of law that the public should be indulged from time to time the sullen satisfaction of joining over these productions if the reason should afterwards be sought why the greatest the geniuses who have been incorporated into that body have sometimes made the worst speeches i answer that it is a holy owing to a strong propension the gentleman in question had to shine and to display a thread bare worn out subject in a new and uncommon light the necessity of saying something the perplexity of having nothing to say and a desire of being witty are three circumstances which alone are capable of making even the greatest the writer ridiculous these gentlemen not being able to strike out to any new thought hunted after a new play of words and delivered themselves without thinking at all in like manner as people who should seem to chew with great eagerness and make as though they were eating at the same time that they were just a starved it is a law in the french academy to publish all those discourses by which only they are known but they should rather make a law never to print any of them but the academy of the bellette have a more prudent and more useful object which is to present the public with a collection of transactions that are abound with curious research and critics these transactions are already esteemed by foreigners and it were only to be wished that some subjects in them had been more thoroughly examined and that others had not been treated at all as for instance we should have been very well satisfied had they omitted i know not what dissertation on the prerogative of the right hand over the left and some others which though not published under so ridiculous a title are yet written on subjects that are almost as frivolous and silly the academy of sciences in such of their research as are of a more difficult kind and a more sensible use embrace the knowledge of nature and the improvements of the arts we may presume that such profound such uninterrupted pursuits as these such exact calculations such refined discoveries such extensive and exhorted views will at last produce something that may prove of advantage to the universe either tall as we have observed together the most useful discoveries have been made in a most barbarous times one would conclude that the business of the most enlightened ages and the most learned bodies is to argue and debate on things which were invented by ignorant people we know exactly the angle which the sail of a ship is to make with the keel in order to its sailing better and yet columbus discovered america without having the least idea of the property of this angle however a far from inferring from hence that we are to confine ourselves merely to a blind practice but happy it were would naturalists and geometricians unite as much as possible to practice with the theory strange but so it is that those things which reflect the greatest honor on the human mind are frequently of the least the benefit to it a man who understands the four fundamental rules of arithmetic aided by a little good sense show a mass prodigious wealth in trade shall become as a peter del meh as a richard hopkins as a gilbert hit coat while is the poor algebraist spends his whole life in searching for astonishing properties and relations in numbers which at the same time are of no manner of use and will not acquaint him with the nature of exchanges this is very nearly the case with most of the arts there is a certain point beyond which all research to serve to no other purpose they're merely to delight an inquisitive mind those ingenious and useless truths may be compared to stars which by being placed at two greater distance cannot afford us the least light with regard to the french academy how great a service would they do to literature to the language and the nation if instead of publishing a set of complements annually they would give us new editions of the valuable works written in the age of louis the 14th purged from the several eras of diction which are crept into them there are many of these errors in cockney and the mollard but those in la fontaine are very numerous such as could not be corrected might at least be pointed out by this means as all the europeans read those works they would teach them our language in its utmost purity which by that means would be fixed to a lasting standard and valuable french books being then printed at the king's expense would prove one of the most glorious monuments the nation could boast i have been told that boirou formerly made this proposal and that it has since been revived by a gentleman eminent for his genius his fine sense and just a taste for criticism but this thought has met with the fate of many other useful projects of being applauded and neglected end of letter 24 recording by shoyan arosmith end of letters on england by volitaire