was received, and by his own statement

was not given to inaccuracy - spent an hour with the aged philosopher, in conversation tête-à-tête. Can you imagine the scene - the withered but still sinister Son of the Morning, with his satirical smile and his benevolent eye, confronting the busy, inquisitive, entertaining young Scot? "It was," says Boswell in describing the interview to Rous"a most serious conversation. He talked of his natural religion in a striking manner." James, you see, had introduced the subject of religion doubtless by means of citing his own infidelities. Already he has in mind an account of his discussion with Voltaire which shall correct the popular impression of him as devoid of the religious instinct.

seau,

After Voltaire had talked for a time, the young man said to himself, and on the principle that James Boswell uttered whatever came into his head, I do not scruple to assert that he cried aloud, -"Aut Erasmus, aut diabolus!" In discussing his favourite theme of the nature of the soul, Boswell asked Voltaire a question which well indicates the skill with which he ensnared his destined prey, and which, indeed, has a very modern ring to it. "I asked him if he could give me any notion of the situation of our ideas which we have totally forgotten at the time, yet shall afterwards recollect. He paused, meditated a

little, and acknowledged his ignorance in the spirit of a philosophical poet, by repeating, as a very happy allusion, a passage in Thomson's 'Seasons': ‘Aye,' said he, ""Where sleep the winds when it is calm ?"""

Of course he got Voltaire to express an opinion of Rousseau ; and tells us, in his "Tour to Corsica," that the older philosopher consistently spoke of the younger with a "satirical smile." Yet Boswell let his romantic imagination (as he would have called it) play with the notion of bringing the two men together, and even had the temerity to say to Rousseau, "In spite of all that has happened, you would have loved him that evening." An astute remark, which may lead to much. For, if Rousseau replies to the letter, he may assent to this pious opinion or he may reject it, but in either case there begins new matter for a biographer. As we know, neither James Boswell nor anybody else reconciled the two philosophers; but James, I regret to say, did something to increase the asperity between them. In the spring of 1776, after Rousseau had quarrelled with his English friends, Boswell designed and published a "ludicrous print," into which he introduced his three philosophical friends, Rousseau, Hume, and Voltaire. Rousseau in the shaggy attire of a "wild man" (as conceived in the reign of George III) occupies the

centre of the picture, while Voltaire smiles cynically in the background, as one of the bystanders cries out, "Wip 'im, Voltaire!"

On New Year's Day, 1765, James Boswell departed from Geneva, in search of new worlds to conquer and other great men to record. He had come into conjunction with two of the major planets of the literary heavens. He had filled note-books with his accounts of their conversation

notebooks whose loss the world will long deplore. He passed from Geneva to Turin with his social and anecdotical soul aflame, rapt away, one fancies, in a vision of all the glory that might be his.

On the tenth of January, he learned that John Wilkes, in political exile from his native land, was, for the moment, in Turin. At once he prepared himself for the attack. O reader, do you perchance know the ballet of "Tamar"? If you do, you will recall the close of that vivid drama. Tamar, having finished off one victim, beholds from her window, as she sinks back into momentary ease, the approach of another wayfarer. She lifts herself from cushioned luxury, and beckons to him afar. And so the piece ends as it had begun. Or are you, perchance, a reader of M. Benoit's sultry romance, "L'Atlantide"? If so, you will recall the cruel loveliness of the princess, whose malign ambition is to surround herself with the glistening