90 VOLTAIRE. 



tations of duty, gratitude, attachment, and pitiful 

 appeals to the compassion of his tender and benevolent 

 nature. 



Miserable as this picture of Voltaire's weakness is, 

 we may be permitted to doubt if it is not surpassed in 

 baseness by the flattery with which he so long fed his 

 royal friend. He, no doubt, corrected his bad French, 

 and often objected to his poetical errors, or the sins of 

 his compositions against good taste. These acts of 

 friendship, these real services, it is probable Frederick 

 had enough of the royal author to dislike ; and possibly 

 some such feeling may have led to the exclamation 

 respecting oranges. But assuredly he had far less 

 right to complain, than Voltaire had to blush, at the 

 shameful excess of adulation which could make him 

 desire his own ' History of Louis XIV.' to be " placed 

 under Frederick's Memoirs of the House of Branden- 

 burgh, as the servant below the master" (Cor. avec les 

 Souverains, i. 756) ; and after sitting up all night to 

 read it, exclaiming, " Mon Dieu ! que tout cela est 

 net, elegante, precis, et surtout philosophique ; on 

 voit une genie toujours au-dessus son sujet (thus sub- 

 jecting the owner himself of that genius) : 1'histoire des 

 moeurs, du gouvernement, de la religion, est un chef- 

 d'oeuvre" (ib. 740). And all this about the worst history 

 that ever was written tawdry, rambling, conceited, 

 inflated in a style about as near Livy's or Voltaire's 

 own as that of Ossian's poems. 



After a delay of two months the King's resentment 

 appears to have cooled, or to have yielded to his pru- 

 dence. The leave to depart was granted, and he 

 desired to see Voltaire before he went. A long 



