“An urgent social task lay before France and before Europe:  it could not be postponed until the thinkers had worked out a scheme of philosophic completeness.  The thinkers did not seriously make any effort after this completeness.  The Encyclopaedia was the most serious attempt, and it did not wholly fail.  As I replace in my shelves this mountain of volumes, ’dusky and huge, enlarging on the sight,’ I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom again be disturbed by me or by others.  They served a great purpose a hundred years ago.  They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with all the profuse associations of history.  It is no Ozymandias of Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile memories we contemplate.  We think rather of the grey and crumbling walls of an ancient stronghold, reared by the endeavour of stout hands and faithful, whence in its own day and generation a band once went forth against barbarous hordes, to strike a blow for humanity and truth."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Diderot, i. 247.]

It is gratifying to find that the same view of the work of these famous men, and of its relation to the social necessities of the time, commends itself to Mr. Lecky, who has since gone diligently and with a candid mind over the same ground.[1] Then where is the literary Jacobin?

[Footnote 1:  See his vol. vi. 305 et seq.]

Of course, it is easy enough to fish out a sentence or a short passage here and there which, if taken by itself, may wear a very sinister look, and carry the most alarming impressions.  Not many days ago a writer addressed a letter to the Times which furnishes a specimen of this kind of controversy.  He gave himself the ambiguous designation of “Catholicus”; but his style bore traces of the equivocally Catholic climate of Munich.  His aim was the lofty and magnanimous one of importing theological prejudice into the great political dispute of the day; in the interest, strange to say, of the Irish party who have been for ages the relentless oppressors of the Church to which he belongs, and who even now hate and despise it with all the virulence of a Parisian Red.  This masked assailant conveys to the mind of the reader that I applaud and sympathise with the events of the winter of 1793, and more particularly with the odious procession of the Goddess of Reason at Notre Dame.  He says, moreover, that I have “the effrontery to imply that the horrible massacres of the Revolution ... were ’a very mild story compared with the atrocities of the Jews or the crimes of Catholicism.’” No really honest and competent disputant would have hit on “effrontery” as the note of the passage referred to, if he had had its whole spirit and drift before him.  The reader shall, if he pleases, judge for himself.  After the words just quoted, I go on to say:—­