edition after edition was printed; the desire to know and to think began to permeate through all the grades of society.  Nor was it only in France that these effects were visible; the prestige of French literature and French manners carried the teaching of the Philosophes all over Europe; great princes and ministers—­Frederick in Prussia, Catherine in Russia, Pombal in Portugal—­eagerly joined the swelling current; enlightenment was abroad in the world.

The Encyclopaedia would never have come into existence without the genius, the energy, and the enthusiasm of one man—­DIDEROT.  In him the spirit of the age found its most typical expression.  He was indeed the Philosophe—­more completely than all the rest universal, brilliant, inquisitive, sceptical, generous, hopeful, and humane.  It was he who originated the Encyclopaedia, who, in company with Dalembert, undertook its editorship, and who, eventually alone, accomplished the herculean task of bringing the great production, in spite of obstacle after obstacle—­in spite of government prohibitions, lack of funds, desertions, treacheries, and the mischances of thirty years—­to a triumphant conclusion.  This was the work of his life; and it was work which, by its very nature, could leave—­except for that long row of neglected volumes—­no lasting memorial.  But the superabundant spirit of Diderot was not content with that:  in the intervals of this stupendous labour, which would have exhausted to their last fibre the energies of a lesser man, he found time not only to pour out a constant flow of writing in a multitude of miscellaneous forms—­in dramas, in art criticism, in philosophical essays, and in a voluminous correspondence—­but also to create on the sly as it were, and without a thought of publication, two or three finished masterpieces which can never be forgotten.  Of these, the most important is Le Neveu de Rameau, where Diderot’s whole soul gushes out in one clear, strong, sparkling jet of incomparable prose.  In the sheer enchantment of its vitality this wonderful little book has certainly never been surpassed.  It enthrals the reader as completely as the most exciting romance, or the talk of some irresistibly brilliant raconteur.  Indeed, the writing, with its ease, its vigour, its colour, and its rapidity, might almost be taken for what, in fact, it purports to be—­conversation put into print, were it not for the magical perfection of its form.  Never did a style combine more absolutely the movement of life with the serenity of art.  Every sentence is exciting, and every sentence is beautiful.  The book must have been composed quickly, without effort, almost off-hand; but the mind that composed it was the mind of a master, who, even as he revelled in the joyous manifestation of his genius, preserved, with an instinctive power, the master’s control.  In truth, beneath the gay galaxies of scintillating thoughts that strew the pages, one can