A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 10

Between two servants of Humanity, who appeared eighteen hundred years apart, there is a mysterious relation. Let us say it with a sentiment of profound respect: JESUS WEPT: VOLTAIRE SMILED. Of that divine tear and of that human smile is composed the sweetness of the present civilization. VICTOR HUGO.
LIST OF PLATES—VOL. X

For one night, upon the ruins of the Bastille, rested the body of Voltaire, on fallen wall and broken aroh, above the dungeons where light had faded from the lives of men, and hope had died in breaking hearts. The conqueror, resting upon the conquered; throned upon the Bastille, the fallen fortress of night. —INGERSOLL.
It is very strange that since the French people became literary they have had no book written in a good style, until the year 1654, when the Provincial Letters appeared; and why had no one written history in a suitable tone, previous to that of the Conspiracy of Venice of the Abbé St. Réal? How is it that Pellisson was the first who adopted the true Ciceronian style, in his memoir for the superintendent Fouquet?
Nothing is more difficult and more rare than a style altogether suitable to the subject in hand.
The style of the letters of Balzac would not be amiss for funeral orations; and we have some physical treatises in the style of the epic poem or the ode. It is proper that all things occupy their own places.
Affect not strange terms of expression, or new words, in a treatise on religion, like the Abbé Houteville; neither declaim in a physical treatise. Avoid pleasantry in the mathematics, and flourish and extravagant figures in a pleading. If a poor intoxicated woman dies of an apoplexy, you say that she is in the regions of death; they bury her, and you exclaim that her mortal remains are confided to the earth. If the bell tolls at her burial, it is her funeral knell ascending to the skies. In all this you think you imitate Cicero, and you only copy Master Littlejohn....
Without style, it is impossible that there can be a good work in any kind of eloquence or poetry. A profusion of words is the great vice of all our modern philosophers and anti-philosophers. The Système de la Nature is a great proof of this truth. It is very difficult to give just ideas of God and nature, and perhaps equally so to form a good style.