Voltaire's Romances, Complete in One Volume

affairs by an ever-manifesting interposing Providence, may be just as easily refuted as proved by history and experience. In Memnon is shown, in an admirable manner, how the multitude are enamoured of their prudence, and laugh at nature and its feelings. In the Ingenu, the witty man yields himself up wholly to his humor and to accident, and brings forth a rich abundance of wit and flashes of genius with respect to the most various subjects."

"Voltaire had the genius of criticism," says Lamartine,[11] "that power of raillery which withers all it overthrows. He had made human nature laugh at itself, had felled it low in order to raise it, had laid bare before it all errors, prejudices, iniquities, and crimes of ignorance; he had urged it to rebellion against consecrated ideas, not by the ideal but by sheer contempt. Destiny gave him eighty years of existence, that he might slowly decompose the decayed age; he had the time to combat against time, and when he fell he was the conqueror.