“Indeed, I never read him at all,” replied Pococurante. “What a deuce is it to me whether he pleads for Rabirius or Cluentius? I try causes enough myself. I had once some liking for his philosophical works; but when I found he doubted of everything, I thought I knew as much as he, and had no need of a guide to learn ignorance.”
“Ha!” cried Martin, “here are fourscore volumes of the memoirs of the Academy of Science; perhaps there may be something valuable in them.”
“Yes,” answered Pococurante; “so there might if any one of the compilers of this rubbish had only invented the art of pin-making: but all these volumes are filled with mere chimerical systems without one single article conducive to real utility.”
“I see a prodigious number of plays,” said Candide, “in Italian, Spanish, and French.”
“Yes,” replied the Venetian; “there are I think three thousand, and not three dozen of them good for anything. As to these huge volumes of divinity, and those enormous collections of sermons, they are altogether not worth one single page in Seneca; and I fancy you will readily believe that neither myself, nor any one else, ever looks into them.”
Martin noticed some shelves filled with English books.
“I fancy,” he said, “that a republican must be highly delighted with those books, which are most of them written with a noble spirit of freedom.”
“It is noble to write as we think,” said Pococurante; “it is the privilege of humanity. Throughout Italy we write only what we do not think; and the present inhabitants of the country of the Caesars and Antoninus’s dare not acquire a single idea without the permission of a Dominican friar. I should be enamoured of the spirit of the English nation, did it not utterly frustrate the good effects it would produce, by passion and the spirit of party.”
Candide, seeing a Milton, asked the senator if he did not think that author a great man.
“Who?” said Pococurante sharply; “that barbarian who writes a tedious commentary in ten books of rumbling verse, on the first chapter of Genesis? that slovenly imitator of the Greeks, who disfigures the creation, by making the Messiah take a pair of compasses from heaven’s armoury to plan the world; whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole universe by his fiat? Can I, think you, have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso’s hell and the devil? who transforms Lucifer sometimes into a toad, and, at
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