Edward Bruce Hamley

“ Such was the woman to whom the clergy of Paris refused Christian burial, because of her profession. Her body was taken secretly by night in a hackney-coach to the bank of the Seine, not very far from where is now the Pont de la Concorde, and there hastily interred. It may be imagined with what feelings Voltaire, bringing with him from England a tenfold horror of fanaticism, beheld this outrage; and those feelings, which he himself describes as "indignation, tenderness, and pity," found expression in verse; [2] —
"On the Death of the Renowned Actress, Mademoiselle le Couvreur. ”

“ His subsequent investments were so advantageous—in annuities, loans, and mortgages—that he lived and died the richest of all eminent men of letters, and was quite independent of the profits of his writings, of which he always appears to have been careless. ”

“ In the passages where he reverts to their former intimacy, he uses the Thou,—where he speaks of her present position, the You; and we have, of course, no equivalent pronouns of famili- arity and respect. To this, and to its grace of expression, the poem owes its fame, rather than to more substantial merits. ↑ In poems of this class he seeks compensation for the severe restrictions to which writers of French poetry must submit, in frequently varying the order of the rhymes and the measure ”