on Voltaire, with all their brilliance, penetration, and incomparable satire, were the high-water mark in this country of the literary reaction against the French school of Revolution.  Everybody knows the famous diatribes against the Bankrupt Century and all its men and all its works.  Voltaire’s furies, Diderot’s indigestions, Rousseau’s nauseous amours, and the odd tricks and shifts of the whole of them and their company, offered ready material for the boisterous horseplay of the transcendental humourist.  Then the tide began to turn.  Mr. Buckle’s book on the history of civilisation had something to do with it.  But it was the historical chapters in Comte’s Positive Philosophy that first opened the minds of many of us, who, five-and-twenty years ago, were young men, to a very different judgment of the true place of those schools in the literary and social history of Western Europe.  We learnt to perceive that though much in the thought and the lives of the literary precursors of the Revolution laid them fairly open to Carlyle’s banter, yet banter was not all, and even grave condemnation was not all.  In essays, like mine, written from this point of view, and with the object of trying to trim the balance rather more correctly, it may well have been that the better side of the thinkers concerned was sometimes unduly dwelt upon, and their worse side unduly left in the background.  It may well have been that an impression of personal adhesion was conveyed which only very partially existed, or even where it did not exist at all:  that is a risk of misinterpretation which it is always hard for the historical critic to escape.  There may have been a too eager tone; but to be eager is not a very bad vice at any age under the critical forty.  There were some needlessly aggressive passages, and some sallies which ought to have been avoided, because they gave pain to good people.  There was perhaps too much of the particular excitement of the time.  It was the date when Essays and Reviews was still thought a terrible explosive; when Bishop Colenso’s arithmetical tests as to the flocks and herds of the children of Israel were believed to be sapping not only the inspiration of the Pentateuch but the foundations of the Faith and the Church; and when Darwin’s scientific speculations were shaking the civilised world.  Some excitement was to be pardoned in days like those, and I am quite sure that one side needed pardon at least as much as the other.  For the substantial soundness of the general views winch I took of the French revolutionary thinkers at that time, I feel no apprehension; nor—­some possible occasional phrases or sentences excepted and apart—­do I see the smallest reason to shrink or to depart from any one of them.  So far as one particular reference may serve to illustrate the tenour of the whole body of criticism, the following lines, which close my chapter on the “Encyclopaedia,” will answer the purpose as well as any others, and I shall perhaps be excused for transcribing them:—­