134 VOLTAIRE. 



APPENDIX I. 



IT would be improper to dismiss the subject of Voltaire with- 

 out adverting to the somewhat ambitious work which Condorcet 

 has written under the somewhat inaccurate title of his ' Life.' 

 This is a defence and panegyric throughout; no admission of 

 blame, or even error, is ever made ; and there is a scorn of all 

 details, facts, dates, which takes from the book its whole value 

 as a biographical, while its unremitting partiality deprives it 

 of all merit as a philosophical composition. Considering the 

 importance of the subject, and the resources of the writer for 

 either recording facts or giving a commentary, it may safely 

 be asserted that there is no greater failure than this work, 

 appealed to as it so often is, out of mere deference to the 

 respectable name it bears. Condorcet was a man of science, 

 no doubt, a good mathematician ; but he was in other respects 

 of a middling understanding and violent feelings. In the 

 revolution they called him " le mouton enrage," by way of 

 describing his feeble fury. He belonged to the class of lite- 

 rary men in France whose intolerance was fully equal to that 

 of their pious adversaries those denouncing as superstition all 

 belief, these holding all doubt to be impious. Rather ena- 

 moured of Voltaire's irreligion than dazzled with his wit or 

 his fine sense, he makes no distinction between his good and 

 his bad writings in point of moral worth, nor indeed ever 

 seems to admit that in point of merit one is or can be inferior 

 to another. Witness his panegyric of the ' Pucelle,' which, 

 after some passages were erased, he pronounces to be " a work 

 for which the author of 'Mahomet' and 'Louis XIV.' had no 

 longer any reason to blush" (Vie de Voltaire, 100). His 

 credulity on material things is at least equal to his unbelief on 

 spiritual. He gravely relates that hopes were held out from 

 the court of Madame de Pompadour of a cardinal's hat for 

 Voltaire when he was instructed to translate some psalms, a 

 task which he performed with such admirable address, though 

 in perfect good faith, that they excited a general horror, and 



