Yet, notwithstanding the practical and fervid temper of his understanding, Diderot is not above literary trifling when the humour seizes him.  If he can write an exhaustive article on Encyclopaedia, or Spinosa, or Academies, or Weaving, he can also stoop to Anagrams, and can tell us that the letters of Frere Jacques Clement, the assassin of Henry III., make up the sinister words, C’est l’enfer qui m’a cree.  He can write a couple of amusing pages on Onomatomancy, or divination of a man’s fortune from his name; and can record with neutral gravity how frequently great empires have been destroyed under princes bearing the same name as their first founders; how, again, certain names are unlucky for princes, as Cains among the Romans, John in France, England, and Scotland, and Henry in France.

We have now and then an anecdote that is worth reading and worth preserving.  Thus, under Machiavellist:  “I have heard that a philosopher, being asked by a great prince about a refutation of Machiavellism, which the latter had just published, replied, ’Sire, I fancy that the first lesson that Machiavelli would have given to his disciple would have been to refute his work.’” Whether Voltaire ever did say this to the great Frederick, is very questionable, but it would not have been ill said.  After the reader has been taken through a short course of Arabian philosophy, he is enlivened by a selection of poetic sayings about human life from the Rose-garden of Sadi, and the whole article winds up with an eastern fable, of no particular relevancy, of three men finding a treasure, and of one of them poisoning the food for which the other two had sent him; on his return they suddenly fell on him and slew him, and then ate the poisoned food, and so the treasure fell to none of them.[176]

We have spoken in the previous section of the contempt expressed by D’Alembert for mere literary antiquarianism—­a very different thing, let us remember, from scientific inquiry into the origin and classification of institutions and social organs.  Diderot’s article on the Germans is an excellent illustration of this wholesome predominance of the scientific spirit over the superficialities of barren erudition.  The word “Allemand,” says Diderot, “has a great many etymologies, but they are so forced, that it is almost as well to know none of them, as to know them all.  As for the origin of this famous stock, all that has been said on that matter, between Tacitus and Clovis, is simply a tissue of guesses without foundation.”  Of course in this some persons will see a shameful levity; others will regard it as showing very good sense, and a right estimate of what is knowable and worth knowing, and what is neither one nor the other.  In the article on Celibacy we notice the same temper.  A few sentences are enough for the antiquarianism of the subject, what the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans thought and ordained about celibacy.  The substance of the article is a reproduction of the Abbe Saint