Meanwhile France provided Italy with fresh cause for uneasiness by abating her hostility to Germany.
Hence he appears to have encouraged agriculture by abating the tax on small farms, and even by assisting them with money and stock.
In 1757 Voltaire came to reside at Lausanne; and although he took but little notice of the young Englishman of twenty, who eagerly sought and easily obtained an introduction, the establishment of the theatre at Monrepos, where the brilliant versifier himself declaimed before select audiences his own productions on the stage, had no small influence in fortifying Gibbon's taste for the French theatre, and in at the same time abating that "idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman."
He informed Dean the climbers, who were due to check out later, had left for the ice park, grumbling at the heavy accumulation of snow which was abating to a last-ditch flurry after depositing thirty inches of fluffy white.
The heat of controversy is, however, abating, and during the past thirty or forty years both Catholic and Protestant investigators have been vying with one another in adding to our knowledge and in rectifying old mis takes; while an ever-increasing number of writers pledged to neither party are aiding in developing an idea of the scope and nature of the Reformation which differs radically from the traditional one.
