of all the friends of decency, and placed an insuperable obstacle in the way of his return. For some years he resided chiefly at Colmar; after that at Lausanne and in the neighbourhood of Geneva. But the simplicity which yet distinguished that republic was intolerable to so profligate a worldling; and in 1759 he passed into the French territory, and fixed his permanent abode at Ferney. The discontented Genevese crowded around him; his château was soon surrounded by a considerable village, and his vanity was amused by the opportunity of mimicking the duties of the legislator and the sovereign. During the twenty years which Voltaire spent at Ferney, his activity continued unabated, and it was chiefly exercised against religion. With unceasing assiduity he rang the changes on the commonplace objections to Christianity, and inculcated universal scepticism. It is not easy to discover the actual extent of his own unbelief. With the gospel, however, he certainly rejected the most important points of what is called natural religion. He altogether denied the doctrine. of a future life; he laboured to confound the distinction between vice and virtue; and though he always professed to acknowledge a Creator, he was ever willing to raise a laugh by the most fearful blasphemies. But his attacks on Christianity, powerful as they were at the time for evil, were little calculated to add permanently to his reputation. They exposed his weakest points. His hostility to religion was not the result of thought or learning; it was the offspring of a corrupt heart. He prosecuted it in a way which plainly shewed how ill he reasoned, and how little he knew. It may be remarked with regard to all the infidel writers of modern times, that it is no easy matter to get an accurate notion of their real views till they arrive at absolute atheism. But in Voltaire this indistinctness was so remarkable as to amount to an intellectual deficiency. He had nothing positive or substantial about him—it was "vox et præterea nihil;" or rather a charming tongue expressing only low thoughts and base passions. The fecundity of his mind bore no proportion to his marvellous facility in composition; but he was not ashamed to repeat himself; and the principles and objections which he had broached forty years before, and which had over and over again been exposed and answered, were put forth from Ferney with as much complacency as if they had been irrefragable, and new. Accustomed as we have been in England to see infidelity met in all its attempts by our ablest scholars, and enriched as our literature is with the apologetic writings of such men as Bentley, Chandler, Butler, and a host of others, many of them of scarcely inferior name, we naturally feel some surprise that the works of Voltaire and his associates did not excite in a higher degree the literary efforts of the French clergy; and that, of the pieces which were published in defence of the Christian Evidences, one only (the "Lettres de quelques Juifs,"* of Guenee,) obtained any considerable celebrity. The clergy were more disposed to solicit the interference of the government for the suppression of free discussion than to undertake the defence of truth A Paris, 1769. upon terms of equal warfare. The fact must be attributed in some degree to the genius of the Romish system, but still more to the peculiar circumstances of the church of France at that period. The means of resistance are not easily supplied by an effete and corrupted body. It was then with the Gallican church as it has often been with degenerate states. The empire in its decline patiently submitted to the injuries of the foes whom it had been the glory of the Romans of better days to resist and conquer. In the meantime, Voltaire received the most flattering homage. Frederic resumed his correspondence with him, and sent him a bust of himself, inscribed, "Viro immortali;" Catherine of Russia courted his friendship; one of the German princes caused a medal to be struck in his honour, bearing as an inscription a verse of the Henriade, "Il ôte aux nations le bandeau de l'erreur;" and his statue* was erected in Paris. Ferney was a place of pilgrimage. Enlightened persons of all nations were proud to bow before the patriarch of modern wisdom. Yet he had to endure various circumstances of annoyance and mortification. Though he still affected to take the lead in the crusade against Christianity, and spoke of our Lord in language which breathed the virulence of personal enmity, he found his disciples most of them stepping before him in the march of impiety, and despising him for his lingering prejudices. The tranquillity of Ferney, sweetened as it was by attentions and flattery, could not satisfy the cravings of his vanity. At the age of eighty-four he determined again to shew himself in Paris. His reception was a triumph. His presence was acknowledged with more than royal honours. But the excitement was too great for his remaining strength. He felt that his days were numbered, and declared that he had come to Paris to find glory and a tomb. Amid the most flattering marks of the public admiration, he died a miserable death, on the 20th of May, 1778. Such was Voltaire; such the origin of French infidelity. The "Economistes" completed the work of the "Encyclopédistes," and ten years more brought about the Revolution. A bolder generation put in practice the theories of their speculative predecessors, and the throne and the altar were supplanted by the rights of man, and the worship of the goddess of reason. Illa propago Contemptrix superûm, sævæque avidissima cædis The first result of the experiment was an explosion which shook the world—an eruption which caused a wide-spread desolation. Some regions still feel the consequences in an uniform barrenness, others have begun to wear a partial vegetation, others again exhibit a productiveness which they did not possess before. It effected permanent organic changes. The aspect of the social system testifies to the violence of the mighty agencies which shook down mountains, and * With the inscription, "Statue érigée à Voltaire par les hommes de lettres ses compatriotes." elevated valleys, and gave admission to a flood of waters which affected the very structure of the moral world. The principles and maxims evolved in this great convulsion, the modifications which it brought about in the constitution of society, the direction which it communicated to inquiry, the influence which it exercised upon the various branches of literature, and, above all, the effects which it produced upon the general state of morality and religion, are subjects of absorbing interest. Perhaps we are yet too near to appreciate them fairly. We must stand at a greater distance before we can take in the whole landscape; we cannot see it clearly till the mists of passion and party-spirit have been blown away. The writer of these papers has endeavoured to speak of the remarkable man who has been the subject of his memoir with moderation. He has been willing to ascribe as much of what he found most painful in his history as he fairly might to the circumstances of his life, and the natural infirmities of his character. The naturalist who examines the structure of the fallen monster is not under the influence of the feelings which inspired the bosoms of those who pursued him in the eagerness of the chase as a beast of prey. TEWKESBURY CHURCH. IT can scarcely be matter of doubt whether the architects of our chief ecclesiastical edifices improved in style as they deviated from the romanesque of their fathers. Yet few who are not most classically prejudiced will deny that there is an air of rude genius and originality in that modification of Italian forms which prevails in the finest AngloNorman churches. The abbey of Tewkesbury is exceeded by few remains in England, as illustrative of those principles of beauty to which artists of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries trusted for effect. Drawing their ground plan in the form of an elongated Roman theatre, they placed the altar at the semicircular end. Small clerestory windows admitted a dim religious light upon it, as it closed an avenue of simple massive columns. Glass, especially the stained glass which so richly decorates later churches, was scarcely introduced until Norman architecture grew obsolete, but often, when returning from vespers, the old Benedictines must have seen what compensated for its absence; a vast circular-headed arch, extending the whole width and height of the middle aisle, gave entrance to a tide of light from the setting sun; no tracery impeded a single ray; every columu caught its share of splendour. Behind that grand proscenium they beheld, as in a glass, the death of every heir of immortality, the "grave where the sunbeams rest When they promise a glorious morrow." This arch is now glazed and filled up with bad tracery of the latest style, and, viewed from within, conveys but a faint idea of its original condition. The circular head, spaced out to inscribe a pointed arch within its span, no longer harmonizes with, the perspective of the aisles; and it is only from without, where the grand simplicity of its form arrests the most inexperienced eye, that its interior beauty can be imagined. There is something, however, so true to human perverseness in the whole contrivance, that, could the designer return to life, he might smile in the midst of his vexation. He would see in the best Gothic churches evidence that the architects who built them so much admired the effect of his invention, that, regardless of distracting the mind from those solemnities in which man draws nearest to his Maker, they determined to procure at both extremities of their buildings the brilliance he was contented with at one; and again he would see their imitators (A.D. 1656), incapable of feeling their principles, but doggedly faithful to their details, imagining they improved his window by setting it at variance with the adjacent forms, and contracting its noble aperture. Peace to his ashes; for his memory has perished, like that of most of his brethren, whose genius adorned England with structures which modern parsimony and utilitarianism forbid us to think will soon be rivalled. Of his life, therefore, nothing can be said; and his times must be conjectured from such data as these. The abbey of Tewkesbury was founded by Dukes of Mercia, for three or four Benedictine monks, in 715. The first building is said to have commemorated a spot where Theok, a hermit, had acquired the fame of sanctity. Brictric, king of the West Saxons, was buried within its walls in 799. In 980 it was subjected as a cell to the abbey of Cranburn by Aylward, a knight templar, founder of the latter, and patron of the former. But in 1102, Robert Fitz Haimon, a Norman to whom Brictric's estates had been granted, enlarged and endowed Tewkesbury so amply that the monks removed from Cranburn thither, which thenceforth sunk into a cell to Tewkesbury. The old buildings, however, do not seem to have been destroyed, and it is probable that he merely extended in length the walls that he found standing; few churches of any size having been erected in the life time of an individual; most being the venerable accumulation of centuries. Hence it is doubtful whether the antique capitals and shafts entombed in situ in the choir wall belong to a Norman or a Saxon period. A fire in 1177 consumed great part of Fitz Haimon's work, and it would now require much study to discriminate between the Saxon and early and later Norman masonry. This conflagration the Martyrologist informs us was a divine judgment brought down by the depraved inmates upon the building which gave them shelter; but as a new church resembling, yet far more splendid than the old, rose rapidly from its ashes, the monks, no doubt, took to themselves the consolation of Asturius "Ardet adhuc, et jam occurrit qui marmora donet while Christians of a less prejudiced school, remembering the tower in Siloam, can account for the burning of a church without the perdition of its priests, and feel grateful to that Providence which thus led to the erection of a fane where many generations have worshipped, with whatever mixture of ignorance and frailty, the same God through the same Redeemer. No very important change (raising the choir in the fourteenth century excepted) can have taken place in the interior of the church from this time to the present; most of the windows were indeed altered, and tombs were gradually added, but these occupy too subordinate places to impair or improve such a temple as that which contains them. The monuments are numerous and curious. One of the earliest (figured in Gough's Sep. Mon.) is Abbot Alan's. He had been prior of Canterbury, the friend and biographer of Thomas à Becket. Interred in a coffin of Purbeck marble, under a plain semi-quatrefoil arch in the southern wall, his ashes maintain a repose denied to him whose fame he celebrated, (A.D. 1202.) Another, once adorned with gold and precious stones, is remarkable for an epitaph more full of classical allusion than might be expected from its date, (1262.) It commemorates Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, in the following lines: "Hic pudor Hippoliti, Paridis gena, sensus Ulissis, Æneæ pietas, Hectoris ira jacet." Beneath a gray marble slab at the entrance of the choir it is said that the remains of Prince Edward, murdered after the battle of Tewkesbury, are deposited. Recently the stone was broken, and discovered a small coffin and the skeleton of a youth. Beneath an arch in the chancel, north of the high altar, the Duke of Clarance has been thought to lie. This tradition is by no means undoubted, but if Shakspeare held it, and drew not from a still higher source, it probably suggested one of his finest and most terrible pictures.* Not having any commentary on Shakspeare accessible, I cannot tell whether the subjoined parallel has been noticed. The dramatist does little more than substitute perjury for pride. ISAIAH, XIV. 9, &c.—vide LowTH AND HOUBIGant. Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming, It stirreth up for thee the chief ones of the earth. All they shall speak and say unto thee...... How art thou fallen from heaven, Oh Lucifer, son of the morning. For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend the heavens, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God...... But thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit; They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, That did shake the kingdoms...... Prepare slaughter for his children? RICHARD III., ACT I., SCENE 4. |