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LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC HEN.

deplored his failure. The spectacle of injustice filledhim with anguish. His mind endured torture from thesense of injury done others, and he felt it impera-tive to prevent or repair crime. The sight, the ideaonly, of a triumphant or unpunished oppressor, excitedthe liveliest emotions of compassion and indignationin his sensitive and proud spirit. His private bene-volence was not less active. The bookseller Jore,whose imprudence and want of fidelity had endan-gered his liberty, applied to him in distress, and wasrelieved, with expressions of kindness. A friend diedin Paris ; his wife, who had been living separate fromhim, seized on all he left, and an old and faithful ser-vant was left destitute. Voltaire instantly made her anallowance. We might multiply such instances ; andwhile this sad world is filled with the needy, theafflicted, and the oppressed, it is impossible not warmlyto admire a man who sympathises in the necessities ofhis fellow-creatures and alleviates their sufferings.

The great and lasting blame attached to him arisesfrom the inveterate and bitter hostility he expressed toChristianity . The texture of his mind partly occa-sioned this. He was incapable of understanding orfeeling the sublime, the simple, and the pure. Thepoetry of the Bible was a dead letter to him ; and thismay he the more readily accounted for, as the livingFrench poet, La Martine , whose nature is pious andreverential, mentions that he never felt its sublimity tilla few years ago, when translated by his friend M.de Genoude. Impurity and grossness was also a partof Voltaire ’s nature; and these led him to depreciatethe beauty of the Saviour’s character, and the moralityof the gospel.

The French clergy of those days must bear, how-ever, much of the blame. Voltaire ardently desired tocrush a church which, in power, showed itself utterlydevoid of the principles of Christianity . Arnaud,Fenelon, the recluses of Port Royal, and the Quietists ,had been its victims. Racine, Boileau, men of highly