Take this of Smelfungus; this Pair of Cabinet Sketches,--"hasty outlines; extant chiefly," he declares, "by Voltaire's blame:"-- LA BEAUMELLE.--"Voltaire has a fatal talent of getting into I quarrels with insignificant accidental people; and instead of silently, with cautious finger, disengaging any bramble that catches to him, and thankfully passing on, attacks it indignantly with potent steel implements, wood-axes, war-axes; brandishing and hewing;--till he has stirred up a whole wilderness of bramble-bush, and is himself bramble-chips all over.

M.Angliviel de la Beaumelle, for example, was nothing but a bramble: some conceited Licentiate of Theology, who, finding the Presbytery of Geneva too narrow a field, had gone to Copenhagen, as Professor of Rhetoric or some such thing; and, finding that field also too narrow, and not to be widened by attempts at Literature, MES PENSEES and the like, in such barbarous Country",--had now [end of 1751] come to Berlin; and has Presentation copies of MES PENSEES, OU LE QU'EN DIRA-T-ON, flying right and left, in hopes of doing better there.

Of these PENSEES (Thoughts so called) I will give but one specimen" (another, that of "King Friedrich a common man," being carefully suppressed in the Berlin Copies, of La Beaumelle's distributing):-- "There have been greater Poets than Voltaire; there was never any so well recompensed: and why?
Because Taste (GOUT, inclination) sets no limits to its recompenses.

The King of Prussia overloads men of talent with his benefits for precisely the reasons which induce a little German Prince to overload with benefits a buffoon or a dwarf." [--OEuvres de Voltaire,--xxvii.

220 n.] Could there be a phenomenon more indisputably of bramble nature?
"He had no success at Berlin, in spite of his merits; could not come near the King at all; but assiduously frequented Maupertuis, the flower of human thinkers in that era,--who was very humane to him in consequence.