ardent and penetrating, and there is a malignant quickness in his eye; thesfame fire that animates his works appears in his actions, which are lively even to absurdity; he is a kind of meteor, perpetually coming and going with a quick motion, and a sparkling light that dazzles our eyes. A man thus constituted, cannot fail of being a valetudinarian: the blade eats away the scabbard; gay by complexion, grave by regimen; open without frankness, politic without refinement, sociable without friends: He knows the world, and he forgets it; in the morning he is Aristippus, and Diogenes at night; he loves grandeur, and despises the great; with his superiors his carriage is easy, but with his equals constrained; he is first polite, then cold, then disgusting. He loves the court, yet makes himself weary of it; he has sensibility without connections, and is voluptuous without passion. He is attached to nothing by choice, but to every thing by inconstancy. As he reasons without principle, his reason has its fits like the folly of others. He has a clear head, and a corrupt heart; he thinks of every thing, and treats every thing with derision. He is a libertine without a constitution for pleasure, and he knows how to moralize without morality. His vanity is excessive, but his avarice is yet greater than his vanity; he therefore writes less for reputation than money, for which he may be said both to hunger and thirst. He is in haste to work that he may be in haste to live: he was made to enjoy, and he determines only to hoard. Such is the man, and such is the author.
There is no other poet in the world, whose verses cost him so little labour: but this facility of composition hurts him, because he abuses it; as there is but little for labour to supply, he is content that little should be wanting, and therefore almost all his pieces are unfinished. But though he is an easy, and ingenious, and elegant writer of poetry, yet his principal excellence would be history, if he made fewer reflections, and drew no parallels; in both of which, however, he has sometimes been very happy. In his last work he has imitated the manner of Bayle, of whom, even in his censure of him, he has exhibited a copy. It has long been said, that for a writer to be without passion, and without prejudice, he must have neither religion nor country, and in this respect Mr. Voltaire has made great advances towards perfection. He cannot be accused of being a partisan to his nation; he appears on the contrary to be infected with a species of madness somewhat like that of old men, who are always extolling the time past, and bitterly complaining of the present. Voltaire is always dissatisfied with his own country, and lavish in his praise of those that are a thousand leagues off. As to religion, he is in that respect utterly undetermined, and he would certainly be the neutral and impartial being, so much desired for an author, but for a little leaven of anti-jansenism which appears somewhat too plainly distinguished in his works. Voltaire has much foreign and much French literature; nor is he deficient in that mixed erudition which is now so much in fashion. He is a po- litician,
