ABSTRACT
Voltaire’s exile in England is an important episode in his life. If it has been over-estimated by English writers anxious to claim for their own country the credit of Voltaire’s genius, it has been almost as much underestimated by Frenchmen either from a similarly absurd nationalism or from real ignorance of English life and literature. The story of Voltaire’s visit to Congreve is well known. Congreve at that time had abandoned literature for grandeur and the Duchess of Marlborough ; he begged Voltaire not to look upon him as a writer but as a “gentleman” ; to which Voltaire very properly replied that if Congreve had been “only a gentleman “he should not have taken the trouble to call. England was the political model Voltaire presented to the French during nearly half a century of pamphleteering.
