Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet, called Voltaire (1694–1778), was the central writer of the French Enlightenment: dramatist, historian, satirist, letter-writer and the author of the philosophical tale Candide. He spent the years 1726–28 in exile in England, where he met the circle of Pope and Swift and began to publish his epic poem.

La Henriade, first printed as La Ligue in 1723 and revised until its definitive text of 1728, takes the civil wars of religion under Henri IV as its subject and is the only French epic in ten cantos in the classical manner. It was long counted among the great poems of the age. It appears here in a rhymed English version of the eighteenth century.