[351] His verse tales, even if stories in verse had not by this time fallen out of our proper range, require little notice. The faculty of "telling" did not remain with him here, perhaps because it was prejudicially affected by the "dryness" and unpoetical quality of his poetry, and of the French poetry of the time generally, perhaps for other reasons. At any rate, as compared with La Fontaine or Prior, he hardly counts. Le Mondain, Le Pauvre Diable, etc., are skits or squibs in verse, not tales. The opening one of the usual collection, Ce qui plaît aux Dames,—in itself a flat rehandling of Chaucer and Dryden,—is saved by its charming last line—
Ah! croyez-moi, l'erreur a son mérite,
a rede which he himself might well have recked.
[352] In justice to Voltaire it ought to be remembered that no less great, virtuous, and religious a person than Milton ranked as one of the two objects to which "all mortals most aspire," "to offend your enemies."
[353] It has been noted above (see p. 266, note), how some have directly traced Zadig to the work of a person so much inferior to Hamilton as Gueulette.
[354] Micromégas and one or two other things avowed—in fact, Voltaire, if not "great," was "big" enough to make as a rule little secret of his levies on others; and he had, if not adequate, a considerable, respect for the English Titan.
[355] Cacambo was not a savage, but he had savage or, at least, non-European blood in him.
[356] Not in the Grandisonian sense, thank heaven! But as has been hinted, he is a little of a prig.
[357] He has been allowed a great deal of credit for the Calas and some other similar businesses. It is unlucky that the injustices he combated were somehow always clerical, in this or that fashion.
[358] It was said of them at their appearance "[cet] ouvrage est sans goût, sans finesse, sans invention, un rabâchage de toutes les vieilles polissonneries que l'auteur a débitées sur Moïse, et Jésus-Christ, les prophètes et les apôtres, l'Église, les papes, les cardinaux, les prêtres et les moines; nul intêret, nulle chaleur, nulle vraisemblance, force ordures, une grosse gaieté.... Je n'aime pas la religion: mais je ne la hais pas assez pour trouver cela bon." The authorship, added to the justice of it, makes this one of the most crushing censures ever committed to paper; for the writer was Diderot (Œuvres, Ed. Assézat, vi. 36).