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Updated: September 19, 2025
Voltaire left France, reached London in August, 1726, went as guest to the house of a rich merchant at Wandsworth, and remained three years in this country, from the age of thirty-two to the age of thirty-five. He was here when George I. died, and George II. became king. He published here his Henriade.
"The poem of the Henriade pleaded in its favour;" but, says Mercier, "he was an ancestor of the perjured king," Then, and not till then, this venerated statue underwent the same fate. It has been generally believed that the deed of Ravaillac was dictated by fanaticism, or that he was the instrument employed by the Marchioness of Verneuil and the Duke of Epernon for assassinating that monarch.
Voltaire, however, was not the man to turn up his nose at royalty, in whatever form it might present itself; and it was moreover clear that the young prince had picked up at least a smattering of French culture, that he was genuinely anxious to become acquainted with the tendencies of modern thought, and, above all, that his admiration for the author of the Henriade and Zaïre was unbounded.
As to my own poor verses But, after all, "that HENRIADE is the writing of an Honest Man: fit, in that sense, that it find grace with a Philosopher Prince. "I will obey your commands as to sending those unpublished Pieces. You shall be my public, Monseigneur; your criticisms will be my reward: it is a price few Sovereigns can pay.
The verse of the plays is hardly better than the character-drawing. It is sometimes good rhetoric; it is never poetry. The same may be said of La Henriade, the National Epic which placed Voltaire, in the eyes of his admiring countrymen, far above Milton and Dante, and, at least, on a level with Virgil and Homer.
Launched upon the most brilliant society, everywhere courted and flattered, Voltaire was constantly at work, displaying the marvellous suppleness of his mind by shifting from the tragedies of Artemise and Marianne, which failed, to the comedy of L'Indiscret, to numerous charming epistles, and lastly to the poem of La Henriade, which he went on carefully revising, reading fragments of it as he changed his quarters from castle to castle.
It was to hare preceded a translation of the Henriade, by Ned Purdon, Goldsmith's old schoolmate, now a Grub Street writer, who starved rather than lived by the exercise of his pen, and often tasked Goldsmith's scanty means to relieve his hunger.
Thus invited, she draped herself again, stalked down to the footlights for the third time, and in a high, shrill voice, with every variety of artificial emphasis and studied gesture, recited Voltaire's famous "Death of Coligny," from the Henriade.
That the world results from the fortuitous concourse of atoms? You might as well say that Homer's Iliad, or Voltaire's Henriade, is a result of the fortuitous concourse of written characters. Now for my part, I should be very sorry to use that reasoning to an atheist; the comparison would give him a very easy game to play.
He now called the author of the "Henriade" a FOOL; it excited and troubled his spirit to see that this great author was mean and contemptible in character, cold and cunning in heart. He had loved Voltaire as a friend, and now he confessed with pain that Voltaire's friendship was a possession which must be cemented with gold, if you did not wish to lose it.
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