Read the following letter carefully before you choose your answer. The following is a letter written by an already established Voltaire to a young and newly published author, M. Helvetius, in 1739. (1) My dear friend—the friend of Truth and the Muses—your Epistle is full of bold reasoning in advance of your age, and still more in advance of those craven writers who rhyme for the book-sellers and restrict themselves within the compass of a royal censor, who is either jealous of them, or more cowardly than they are themselves. (2) What are they but miserable birds, with their wings close clipped, who, longing to soar, are for ever falling back to earth, breaking their legs! You have a fearless genius, and your work sparkles with imagination. I much prefer your generous faults to the mediocre prettinesses with which we are cloyed. If you will allow me to tell you where I think you can improve yourself in your art, I should say: Beware, lest in attempting the grand, you overshoot the mark and fall into the grandiose: only employ true similes: and be sure always to use exactly the right word. (3) Shall I give you an infallible little rule for verse? Here it is. When a thought is just and noble, something still remains to be done with it: see if the way you have expressed it in verse would be effective in prose: and if your verse, without the swing of the rhyme, seems to you to have a word too many—if there is the least defect in the construction—if a conjunction is forgotten—if, in brief, the right word is not used, or not used in the right place, you must then conclude that the jewel of your thought is not well set. Be quite sure that lines which have any one of these faults will never be learnt by heart, and never re-read: and the only good verses are those which one re—reads and remembers, in spite of oneself. There are many of this kind in your "Epistle"—lines which no one else in this generation can write at your age such as were written fifty years ago. (4) Do not be afraid, then, to bring your talents to a Parnassus1; they will undoubtedly redound to your credit because you never neglect your duties; for them: they are themselves very pleasant duties. Surely, those your position demand of you must be very uncongenial to such a nature as yours. They are as much routine as looking after a house, or the housebook of one's steward. Why should you be deprived of liberty of thought because you happen to be a farmer-general2? Atticus was a farmer-general, the old Romans were farmers-general, and they thought—as Romans. Go ahead, Atticus. 1A sacred mountain in Greece, known as the home of the Muses of Greek poetry 2A privileged member of French society who collected taxes on behalf of the king Paragraph 2 could be used to support which of the following claims about the writer's tone? His tone when discussing Helvetius's work is obsequious and flattering. His tone when discussing Helvetius's work is patronizing and demeaning. His tone when discussing the works of others is critical and analytical. His tone when discussing the works of others is deferential and complimentary.