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Publisher's Preface.
ance, and justice, and his influence, like his popularity, increases with the diffusion of his ideas.
No matter what the reader's opinion of Voltaire's works may be, it will readily be conceded that without these translations of his comedies, tragedies, poems, romances, letters, and incomparable histories, the literature of the world would sustain an immeasurable loss, and that these forty-two exquisite volumes will endure as a stately monument, alike to the great master and the book-maker's artcraft he did so much to inspire.
E. R. D.
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