VOLTAIRE. 119 



by his brilliant reputation, had paid him a court by no 

 means niggardly, yet not subject to the charge of 

 flattery. Voltaire had returned his civilities, as was 

 his wont, with good interest. Rousseau, on the Lisbon 

 poem appearing, wrote an answer in a long, eloquent, 

 and ill-reasoned letter to Voltaire, which he never 

 made public, but it came into print by some accident 

 yet unaccounted for. Voltaire had, in a note, half 

 jocose and quite kind, declined the controversy, as he 

 had before declined to discuss the benefits of civilization 

 and learning with the same antagonist. Rousseau had, 

 previously to the letter appearing, written an attack 

 upon the Theatre, and was supposed by Voltaire to have 

 stirred up the people of Geneva against him, partly on 

 that account, and partly because of his infidel opinions. 

 Rousseau now, in 1760, addressed a letter to him full 

 of bitter complaints, laying to his door the moral 

 destruction, as he calls it, of Geneva (meaning by the 

 Ferney theatricals), his own proscription there, and 

 his banishment from his native country, rendered 

 insupportable by the neighbourhood of Ferney (Con- 

 fessions, Part ii., book x.). To this letter Voltaire very 

 properly returned no answer ; he treats it as the 

 effusion of a distempered mind, in all the allusions to 



asserted, that the charge of injuring the writer of it 

 was so far from being well founded, that he had 

 uniformly supported him among his bigoted country- 

 men. Be this as it may, we find ever after the most 

 unmeasured and unmerciful abuse of Rousseau as often 

 as he is mentioned ; and the dull but malignant poem, 

 ' Guerre civile de Geneve,' contains a more fierce and 







it which we find among his letters. But he always 







