and constrain him to make choice of some profession, and once for all to become Doctor, Procureur, or Advocate. My father begged time to think of it; time was given. At the end of several months these proposals were again laid before him: he answered that the profession of Doctor did not please him, for he could not think of killing any body; that the Procureur business was too difficult to execute with delicacy; that he would willingly choose the profession of Advocate, were it not that he felt an invincible repugnance to occupy himself all his life with other people's business. 'But,' said M. Clement, what will you be then?'-On my word, nothing, nothing whatever, (Ma foi, rien, mais rien du tout.) I love study; 1 am very happy, very content, and want no.hing else."'

Here clearly is a youth of spirit, determined to take the world on the broadside, and eat thereof, and be filled. His decided turn, like that of so many others, is for the trade of sovereign prince, in one shape or other; unhappily, however, the capital and outfit to set it up is wanting. Under which circumstances, nothing remains but to instruct M. Clement de Ris that no more board-wages will henceforth be paid, and the young sovereign may, at his earliest convenience, be turned out of doors.

That

little toast and wine; he goes to bed.
day,' he has often said to me, 'I swore that, if
ever I came to have any thing, I would never
in my life refuse a poor man help, never con-
demn my fellow-creatures to a day as pain-
ful.""

That Diderot, during all this period, escaped starvation, is plain enough by the result: but how he specially accomplished that, and the other business of living, remains mostly left to conjecture. Mademoiselle, confined at any rate within narrow limits, continues as usual too intent on sparkling: is brillante and pétillante, rather than lucent and illuminating. How inferior, for seeing with, is your brightest train of fireworks to the humblest farthing candle! Who Diderot's companions, friends, enemies, patrons were, what his way of life was, what the Paris he lived in and from his garret looked down on was, we learn only in hints, dislocated, enigmatic. It is in general to be impressed on us, that young Denis, as a sort of spiritual swashbuckler, who went about conquering Destiny, in light rapier-fence, by way of amusement; or at lowest, in reverses, gracefully insulting her with mock reverences,-lived and acted like no other man; all which being freely admitted, we ask, with small increase of knowledge, How he did act then?

What Denis, perched aloft in his own-hired He gave lessons in Mathematics, we find; attic, may have thought of it now, does not ap- but with the princeliest indifference as to paypear. The good old Father, in stopping his ment: "was his scholar lively, and prompt of allowance, had reasonably enough insisted on conception, he sat by him teaching all day; one of two things: either that he should be- did he chance on a blockhead, he returned not take him to some intelligible method of exist- back. They paid him in books, in movables, ence, wherein all help should be furnished in linen, in money, or not at all; it was quite him; or else return home within the week. the same." Farther, he made Sermons, (to Neither of which could Denis think of doing. order;) as the Devil is said to quote Scripture: A similar demand continued to be reiterated a Missionary bespoke half-a-dozen of him (of for the next ten years, but always with the Denis, that is) for the Portuguese Colonies, like none-effect. King Denis, in his furnished and paid for them very handsomely at fifty attic, with or without money to pay for it, was crowns each. Once, a family Tutorship came now living and reigning, like other kings, "by in his way, with tolerable appointments, but the grace of God;" and could nowise resolve likewise with incessant duties: at the end of to abdicate. A sanguineous, vehement, volatile three months, he waits upon the house-father mortal; young, and in so wide an earth, it with this abrupt communication: "I am come, seemed to him next to impossible but he must Monsieur, to request you to seek a new tutor; find gold-mines there. He lived, while victual I cannot remain with you any longer."-" But, was to be got, taking no thought for the mor- Monsieur Diderot, what is your grievance? row. He had books, he had merry company, a Have you too little salary? I will double it. whole piping and dancing Paris round him; Are you ill-lodged? Choose your apartment. he could teach Mathematics, he could turn Is your table ill-served? Order your own himself so many ways; nay, might not he be- dinner. All will be cheap to parting with you." come a Mathematician one day; a glorified" Monsieur, look at me: a citron is not so Savant, and strike the stars with his sublime head! Meanwhile he is like to be overtaken by one of the sharpest of human calamities, "cleanness of teeth."

yellow as my face. I am making men of your children; but every day I am becoming a child with them. I feel a hundred times too rich and two well off in your house; yet I must leave it: the object of my wishes is not to live better, but to keep from dying."

"One Shrove Tuesday morning, he rises, gropes in his pocket; he has not wherewith to dine; will not trouble his friends who have Mademoiselle grants that, if sometimes not invited him. This day, which in child-"drunk with gayety," he was often enough hood he had so often passed in the middle of relations who adored him, becomes sadder by remembrance: he cannot work; he hopes to dissipate his melancholy by a walk; goes to the Invalides, to the Courts, to the Bibliothèque du Roi, to the Jardin des Plantes. You may drive away tedium; but you cannot give hunger the slip. He returns to his quarters; on entering he feels unwell; the landlady gives him a

plunged in bitterness; but then a Newtonian problem, a fine thought, or any small godsend of that sort, would instantly cheer him again. The "gold mines" had not yet come to light Meanwhile, between him and starvation we can still discern Langres covertly stretching out its hand. Of any Langres man, coming in his way, Denis frankly borrows; and the good old Father refuses not to pay. The

Mother is still kinder, at least softer: she sends | into a small historical scene, that he may see him direct help, as she can; not by the post, with his own eyes. Diderot is the historian; but by a serving-maid, who travelled these the date too is many years later, when times, sixty leagues on foot; delivered him a small if any thing, were mended: sum from his mother; and, without mentioning it, added all her own savings thereto. This Samaritan journey she performed three times. "I saw her some years ago," adds Mademoiselle; "she spoke of my father with tears; her whole desire was to see him again: sixty years' service had impaired neither her sense nor her sensibility."

However, our Denis has now emerged from the intermediate Hades of Translatorship into the Heaven of perfected Authorship; empties his common-place book of Pensees Philoso phiques, (it is said in the space of four days ;) writes his metaphysico-Baconian phantasmagories on the Interprétation de la Nature, (an endless business to "interpret ;") and casts the money-produce of both into the lap of his Scarlet-woman Puisieux. Then forthwith, for the same object, in a shameful fortnight, puts together the beastliest of all past, present, or future dull Novels; a difficult feat, unhappily not an impossible one. If any mortal creature, even a Reviewer, be again compelled to glance into that Book, let him bathe himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until the even. As yet the

All this is beautiful, told with a graceful for ever slip through our fingers, and leave us simplicity; the beautiful, real-ideal prose-idyl alone among the gravel. One reason may of a Literary Life: but, alas, in the music of partly be, that Shaftesbury was not only a your prose-idyl there lurks ever an accursed Skeptic but an Amateur Skeptic; which sort dissonance (or the players make one ;) where a darker, more earnest, have long since swalmen are, there will be mischief. "This jour- lowed and abolished. The meaning of a deliney," writes Mademoiselle, "cost my mother cate, perfumed, gentlemanly individual standmany tears." What will the reader say, when ing there, in that war of Titans, (hill meeting he finds that Monsieur Diderot has, in the in- hill with all its woods,) and putting out hand terim, taken up with a certain Madame de Pui- to it-with a pair of tweezers ? sieux; and welcomes his brave Wife (worthy to have been a true man's) with a heart and bosom henceforth estranged from her! Madame Diderot "made two journeys to Langres, and both were fatal to her peace." This affair of the Puisieux, for whom he despicably enough not only burned, but toiled and made money, kept him busy for some ten years; till at length, finding that she played false, he gave her up; and minor miscellaneous flirtations seem to have succeeded. But, returning from her second journey, the much-enduring House-mother finds him in a meridian glory with one Voland, the un-maiden Daughter of a "Financier's Widow;" to whom we owe this present preternuptial Correspondence; to whom indeed he mainly devoted himself for the rest of his life, "parting his time between his study and her" to his own Wife and house- metaphysico-Atheistic Lettre sur les Sourds et hold giving little save the trouble of cooking for him, and of painfully, with repressed or irrepressible discontent, keeping up some appearance of terms with him. Alas! alas! and his Puisieux seems to have been a hollow Mercenary (to whose scandalous soul he reckons obscenest of Books fit nutriment;) and the Voland an elderly Spinster, with caur sensible, cœur honnête, ame tendre et bonne! And then those old dinings on bread; the six sous spared for his cup of coffee! Foolish Diderot, scarcely pardonable Diderot! A hard saying it is, yet a true one: scoundrelism signifies injustice, and should be left to scoundrels alone. For thy wronged Wife, whom thou hast sworn far other things to, ever in her afflictions (here so hostilely scanned and written of,) a true sympathy will awaken; and sorrow that the patient, or even impatient, endurances of such a woman should be matter of speculation and self-gratulation to such another. But looking out of doors now, from an indifferently-guided Household, which must have fallen shamefully in pieces, had not a wife been wiser and stronger than her husband, we find the Philosophe making distinct way with the Bibliopolic world; and, likely, in the end, to pick up a kind of living there. The Stanyan's History of Greece; the other Englishtranslated, nameless Medical Dictionary, are dropped by all editors as worthless: a like fate might, with little damage, have overtaken the Essai sur le Merite et la Vertu, rendered or redacted out of Shaftesbury's Characteristics. In which redaction, with its Notes, of anxious Orthodoxy, (and bottomless Falsehood looking through it,) we individually have found nothing, save a confirmation of the old twicerepeated experience, That in Shaftesbury's famed Book there lay, if any meaning, a meaning of such long-windedness, circumvo'ution, and lubricity, that, like an eel, it must

Muets, and Lettre sur les Aveugles, which brings glory and a three months' lodging in the Castle of Vincennes, are at years' distance in the background. But already by his gilded tongue, growing repute, and sanguineous, projecting temper, he has persuaded Booksellers to pay off the Abbé Gua, with his lean Version of Chambers's Dictionary of Arts, and convert it into an Encyclopédie, with himself and D'Alembert for Editors; and is henceforth (from the year of grace 1751) a duly dis-indentured Man of Letters, an indisputable and more and more conspicuous member of that surprising guild.

Literature, ever since its appearance in our European world, especially since it emerged out of Cloisters into the open Market-place, and endeavoured to make itself room, and gain a subsistence there, has offered the strangest phases, and consciously or unconsciously done the strangest work. Wonderful Ark of the Deluge, where so much that is precious, nay priceless to mankind, floats carelessly onwards through the Chaos of distracted Times,—if so be it may one day find an Ararat to rest on, and see the waters abate! The History of Literature, especially for the last two centu ries, is our proper Church History; the other Church, during that time, having more and more decayed from its old functions and influence, and ceased to have a history. And now, to look only at the outside of the matter, think of the Tassos and older or later Racines, struggling to raise their office from its pristine abasement of Court-jester: and teach and elevate the World, in conjunction with that other quite heteroclite task of solacing and glorifying some Pullus Jovis, in plush cloak and other gilt or golden king-tackle, that they in the interim might live thereby! Consider the Shakspeares and Molières, plying a like trade, but on a double material: glad of any roval or

ble, was better to deal in than false; farther, by credible tradition of public consent, that such and such had the talent of furnishing true Thought, (say rather truer, as the more correct word:) on this hint the Timber-headed spake and bargained. Nay, let us say he bargained, and worked, for most part with industrious assiduity, with patience, suitable prudence; nay, sometimes with touches of generosity and magnanimity, beautifully irradiating the circumambient mass of greed and dulness. For the rest, the two high contracting parties roughed it out as they could; so that if Booksellers, in their back parlour Valhalla, drank wine out of the sculls of Authors, (as they were fabled to do,) Authors, in the front-apartments, from time to time, gave them a Rowland for their Oliver: a Johnson can knock his Osborne on the head, like any other Bull of Bashan; a Diderot commands his corpulent Panckouke to "leave the room and go to the devil;" allez au diable, sortez de chez moi!

noble patronage, but eliciting, as their surer stay, some fractional contribution from the thick-skinned, many-pocketed million. Saumaises, now bully-fighting "for a hundred gold Jacobuses," now closeted with Queen Christinas, who blow the fire with their own queenly mouth, to make a pedant's breakfast; anon cast forth (being scouted and confuted,) and dying of heartbreak, coupled with henpeck. Then the Laws of Copyright, the Quarrels of Authors, the Calamities of Authors; the Heynes dining on boiled peasecods, the Jean Pauls on water; the Johnsons bedded and boarded on fourpence-halfpenny a-day. Lastly, the unutterable confusion worse confounded of our present Periodical existence; when, among other phenomena, a young Fourth Estate (whom all the three elder may try if they can hold) is seen sprawling and staggering tumultuously through the world; as yet but a huge, raw-boned, lean calf; fast growing, however, to be a Pharaoh's lean cow, -of whom let the fat-kine beware! All this of the mere exterior, or dwelling-place of Literature, not yet glancing at the internal, at the Doctrines emitted or striven after, will the future Eusebius and Mosheim have to record; and (in some small degree) explain to us what it means. Unfathomable is its meaning: Life, mankind's Life, ever from its unfathomable fountains, rolls wondrous on, another though the same; in Literature too, the seeing eye will distinguish Apostles of the Gentiles, Proto and Deutero-martyrs; still less will the Simon Magus, or Apollonius with the golden thigh be wanting. But all now is on an infinitely wider scale; the elements of it all swim far scattered, and still only striving towards union;—whereby, indeed, it happens that to the most, under this new figure, they are unre-losophes existed at Paris, but as other sects cognisable.

Under the internal or Doctrinal aspect, again, French Literature, we can see, knew far better what it was about than English. That fable, indeed, first set afloat by some Trevoux Journalist of that period, and which has floated foolishly enough into every European ear since then, of there being an Association specially organized for the destruction of government, religion, society, civility, (not to speak of tithes, rents, life, and property,) all over the world; which hell-serving Association met at the Baron d'Holbach's, there had its blue-light sederunts, and published Transactions legible to all,-was and remains nothing but a fable. Minute-books, president's hammer, ballot-box, punch-bowl of such Pandemonium have not been produced to the world. The sect of Phi

do; held together by loosest, informal, unreFrench Literature, in Diderot's time, presents cognised ties; within which every one, no itself in a certain state of culmination, where doubt, followed his own natural objects, of causes long prepared are rapidly becoming proselytism, of glory, of getting a livelihood. effects; and was doubtless in one of its more Meanwhile, whether in constituted association notable epochs. Under the Economic aspect, or not, French Philosophy resided in the perin France, as in England, this was the Age of sons of the French Philosophes; and, as a Booksellers; when, as a Dodsley and Miller mighty deep-struggling force, was at work could risk capital in an English Dictionary, a there. Deep struggling, irrepressible; the subLebreton and Briasson could become purvey-terranean fire, which long heaved unquietly, ors and commissariat officers for a French Encyclopédie. The world for ever loves Knowledge, and would part its last sixpence in payment thereof: this your Dodsleys and Lebretons well saw; moreover they could act on it, for as yet PUFFERY was not. Alas, offences must come; Puffery from the first was inevitable: wo to them, nevertheless, by whom it did come! Meanwhile, as we said, it slept in Chaos: the Word of man and tradesman was still partially credible to man. Booksellers were therefore a possible, were even a necessary class of mortals, though a strangely anomalous one; had Why France became such a volcano-crater, they kept from lying, or lied with any sort of what specialities there were in the French moderation, the anomaly might have lasted national character, and political, moral, intelstill longer. For the present, they managed in lectual condition, by virtue whereof French PhiParis as elsewhere: the Timber-headed could losophy there and not elsewhere, then and not perceive that for Thought the world would give sooner or later, evolved itself, is an inquiry money; farther, by mere shopkeeper cunning, that has been often put, and cheerfully anthat true Thought, as in the end sure to be re-swered; the true answer of which might lead cognised, and by nature infinitely more dura-us far. Still deeper than this Whence were the

and shook all things with an ominous motion, was here, we can say, forming itself a decided spiracle;—which, by and by, as French Revolution, became that volcano-crater, worldfamous, world-appalling, world-maddening, as yet very far from closed! Fontenelle said, he wished he could live sixty years longer, and see what that universal infidelity, depravity, and dissolution of all ties would turn to. In threescore years Fontenelle might have seen strange things; but not the end of the phenomenon, perhaps in three hundred.