As a contrast to the views of Dr. Johnson and De Maistre, which for generations represented the current opinion of Protestants and Catholics, I bring together a few independent testimonies. As time goes on his admirers increase in volume, while his detractors now are mainly those who have an interest in or secret sympathy with the abuses he destroyed. And first, I will give the testimony of Goldsmith who had met him. It was written while Voltaire was alive, but when a false report of his death had been received in England. “Should you look for the character of Voltaire among the journalists and illiterate writers of the age, you will find him there characterised as a monster, with a head turned to wisdom, and a heart inclining to vice—the powers of his mind and the baseness of his principles forming a detestable contrast. But seek for his character among writers like himself, and you will find him very differently described. You perceive him, in their accounts, possessed of good nature, humanity, greatness of soul, fortitude, and almost every virtue: in this description those who might be supposed best acquainted with his character are unanimous. The royal Prussian, D’Argens, Diderot, D’Alembert, and Fontenelle conspire in drawing the picture, in describing the friend of man, and the patron of every rising genius.” Lord Byron’s lines on Voltaire and Gibbon (Childe Harold, iii., 105-107) are well known. He says:
They were gigantic minds, and their steep aim
Was, Titan-like, on daring doubts to pile
Thoughts which should call down thunder, and the flame
Of Heaven again assail’d, if Heaven the while
On man and man’s research could deign do more than smile.
 
The one was fire and fickleness, a child
Most mutable in wishes, but in mind
A wit as various,—gay, grave, sage, or wild,—
Historian, bard, philosopher, combined;
He multiplied himself among mankind,
The Proteus of their talents:
But his own
Breathed most in ridicule,—which, as the wind,
Blew where it listed, laying all things prone,—
Now to o’erthrow a fool, and now to shake a throne.
 
The other, deep and slow, exhausting thought,
And having wisdom with each studious year,
In meditation dwelt, with learning wrought,
And shaped his weapon with an edge severe,
Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer;
The lord of iron,—that master-spell,
Which stung his foes to wrath, which grew from fear,
And doom’d him to the zealot’s ready Hell,
Which answers to all doubts so eloquently well.
Warton, the learned critic and author of a History of Poetry (Dissertation I.) remarked: “Voltaire, a writer of much deeper research than is imagined, and the first who has displayed the literature and customs of the dark ages with any degree of penetration and comprehension.” Robertson, the historian, similarly observed that, had Voltaire only given his authorities, “many of his readers who only consider him as an entertaining and lively writer would have found that he is a learned and well informed historian.”
Lord Holland wrote, in his account of the Life and Writings of Lope de Vega: “Till Voltaire appeared there was no nation more ignorant of its neighbors’ literature than the French. He first exposed and then corrected this neglect in his countrymen. There is no writer to whom the authors of other nations, especially of England, are so indebted for the extension of their fame in France, and, through France, in Europe. There is no critic who has employed more time, wit, ingenuity, and diligence in promoting the literary intercourse between country and country, and in celebrating in one language the triumphs of another. His enemies would fain persuade us that such exuberance of wit implies a want of information; but they only succeed in showing that a want of wit by no means implies an exuberance of information.”
Goethe said: “Voltaire will ever be regarded as the greatest name in literature in modern times, and perhaps even in all ages, as the most astonishing creation of nature, in which she united, in one frail human organisation, all the varieties of talent, all the glories of genius, all the potencies of thought. If you wish depth, genius, imagination, taste, reason, sensibility, philosophy, elevation, originality, nature, intellect, fancy, rectitude, facility, flexibility, precision, art, abundance, variety, fertility, warmth, magic, charm, grace, force, an eagle sweep of vision, vast understanding, instruction rich, tone excellent, urbanity, suavity, delicacy, correctness, purity, cleanness, eloquence, harmony, brilliancy, rapidity, gaiety, pathos, sublimity and universality—perfection indeed—behold Voltaire.”
Lord Brougham, in his Lives of Men of Letters and Science who flourished in the time of George III., devotes a considerable section to Voltaire. After censuring “the manner in which he devoted himself to crying down the sacred things of his country,” he continues: “But, though it would be exceedingly wrong to pass over this great and prevailing fault without severe reprobation, it would be equally unjust, nay, ungrateful, ever to forget the immense obligations under which Voltaire has laid mankind by his writings, the pleasure derived from his fancy and his wit, the amusement which his singular and original humor bestows, even the copious instruction with which his historical works are pregnant, and the vast improvement in the manner of writing history which we owe to him. Yet, great as these services are—among the greatest that can be rendered by a man of letters—they are really of far inferior value to the benefits which have resulted from his long and arduous struggle against oppression, especially against tyranny in the worst form which it can assume, the persecution of opinion, the infraction of the sacred right to exercise the reason upon all subjects, unfettered by prejudice, uncontrolled by authority, whether of great names or of temporal power.”
Macaulay, in his Essay on Frederick the Great, observes: “In truth, of all the intellectual weapons which have ever been wielded by man, the most terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. Bigots and tyrants, who had never been moved by the wailing and cursing of millions, turned pale at his name.”
Carlyle, in his depreciatory essay, acknowledged: “Perhaps there is no writer, not a mere compiler, but writing from his own invention or elaboration, who has left so many volumes behind him; and if to the merely arithmetical we add a critical estimate, the singularity is still greater; for these volumes are not written without an appearance of due care and preparation; perhaps there is not one altogether feeble and confused treatise, nay, one feeble and confused sentence to be found in them.” And at the end he admits: “He gave the death-stab to modern Superstition! That horrid incubus, which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, is passing away; with all its racks and poison chalices, and foul sleeping-draughts, is passing away without return. It was a most weighty service.”
One of the strangest of tributes to Voltaire is that from Ruskin, the disciple of Carlyle. In his Fors Clavigera (vol. viii., p. 76) he says: “There are few stronger adversaries to St. George than Voltaire. But my scholars are welcome to read as much of Voltaire as they like. His voice is mighty among the ages.”
Dr. D. F. Strauss wrote: “Voltaire’s historical significance has been illustrated by the observation of Goethe that, as in families whose existence has been of long duration, Nature sometimes at length produces an individual who sums up in himself the collective qualities of all his ancestors, so it happens also with nations, whose collective merits (and demerits) sometimes appear epitomised in one individual person. Thus in Louis XIV. stood forth the highest figure of a French monarch. Thus, in Voltaire, the highest conceivable and congenial representative of French authorship. We may extend the observation farther, if, instead of the French nation only, we take into view the whole European generation on which Voltaire’s influence was exercised. From this point of view we may call Voltaire emphatically the representative writer of the eighteenth century, as Goethe called him, in the highest sense, the representative writer of France.”
Victor Hugo, in the magnificent oration which he pronounced on the centenary of Voltaire’s death, said: “Voltaire waged the splendid kind of warfare, the war of one alone against all—that is to say, the grand warfare; the war of thought against matter; the war of reason against prejudice; the war of the just against the unjust; the war of the oppressed against the oppressor; the war of goodness; the war of kindness. He had the tenderness of a woman and the wrath of a hero. He was a great mind and an immense heart. He conquered the old code and the old dogma. He conquered the feudal lord, the Gothic judge, the Roman priest. He raised the populace to the dignity of people. He taught, pacified, and civilised. He fought for Sirven and Montbailly, as for Calas and La Barre. He accepted all the menaces, all the persecutions, calumny, and exile. He was indefatigable and immovable. He conquered violence by a smile, despotism by sarcasm, infallibility by irony, obstinacy by perseverance, ignorance by truth.”
Buckle, in his History of Civilisation (vol. ii., p. 304) says: “It would be impossible to relate all the original remarks of Voltaire, which, when he made them, were attacked as dangerous paradoxes, and are now valued as sober truths. He was the first historian who recommended universal freedom of trade; and although he expresses himself with great caution, still, the mere announcement of the idea is a popular history forms an epoch in the progress of the French mind. He is the originator of that important distinction between the increase of population and the increase of food, to which political economy has been greatly indebted, a principle adopted several years later by Townsend, and then used by Malthus as the basis of his celebrated work. He has, moreover, the merit of being the first who dispelled the childish admiration with which the Middle Ages had been hitherto regarded. In his works the Middle Ages are for the first time represented as what they really were—a period of ignorance, ferocity, and licentiousness; a period when injuries were unredressed, crime unpunished, and superstition ............