[38] De la Suffisance de la Religion Naturelle, § 5.
[39] It is well to remember that torture was not abolished in France until the Revolution. A Catholic writer makes the following judicious remark: "We cannot study the eighteenth century without being struck by the immoral consequences that inevitably followed for the population of Paris from the frequency and the hideous details of criminal executions. In reading the journals of the time, we are amazed at the place taken in popular life by the scenes of the Grève. It was the theatre of the day. The gibbet and the wheel did their work almost periodically, and people looked on while poor wretches writhed in slow agony all day long. Sometimes the programme was varied by decapitation and even by the stake. Torture had its legends and its heroes—the everyday talk of the generation which, having begun by seeing Damiens torn by red-hot pincers, was to end by rending Foulon limb from limb." (Carné, Monarchie française au 18ième Siècle, p. 493.)
[40] Lettres sur les Anglais, xxiii.
[41] Essai sur le Mérite, I. ii. § 3. Œue., i. 33.
[42] "Shaftesbury is one of the most important apparitions of the eighteenth century. All the greatest spirits of that time, not only in England, but also Leibnitz, Voltaire, Diderot, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Wieland, and Herder, drew the strongest nourishment from him." (Hettner, Literaturgeschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts: ler Theil. 188.) See also Lange's Gesch. des Materialismus, i. 306, etc. An excellent account of Shaftesbury is given by Mr. Leslie Stephen, in his Essays on Free-thinking and Plain-speaking.
[43] Œuv., i. xlvi.
[44] Jobez, France sous Louis XV., ii. 373. There were, in 1725, 24,000 houses, 20,000 carriages, and 120,000 horses. (Martin's Hist, de France, xv. 116.)
[45] The records of Paris in this century contain more than one illustration of the turbulence of this odious army of lackeys. Barbier, i. 118. For the way in which their insolence was fostered, see Saint-Simon, xii. 354, etc. The number of lackeys retained seems to have been extraordinarily great in proportion to the total of annual expenditure, and this is a curious point in the manners of the time. See Voltaire, Dict. Phil, § v. Économie Domestique (liv. 182).
[46] Duclos, Mém. secrets sur le Règne de Louis XV., iii 306.
[47] Œuv., xix. 91.