offered him any terms if he would remain.  “Look at me, sir,” replied the tutor; “my face is as yellow as a lemon.  I am making men of your children, but each day I am becoming a child with them.  I am a thousand times too rich and too comfortable in your house; leave it I must.  What I want is not to live better, but to avoid dying.”  Again he plunged from comfort into the life of the garret.  If he met any old friend from Langres, he borrowed, and the honest father repaid the loan.  His mother’s savings were brought to him by a faithful creature who had long served in their house, and who now more than once trudged all the way from home on this errand, and added her own humble earnings to the little stock.  Many a time the hours went very slowly for the necessitous man.  One Shrove Tuesday he rose in the morning, and found his pockets empty even of so much as a halfpenny.  His friends had not invited him to join their squalid Bohemian revels.  Hunger and thoughts of old Shrovetide merriment and feasting in the far-off home made work impossible.  He hastened out of doors and walked about all day visiting such public sights as were open to the penniless.  When he returned to his garret at night, his landlady found him in a swoon, and with the compassion of a good soul she forced him to share her supper.  “That day,” Diderot used to tell his children in later years, “I promised myself that if ever happier times should come, and ever I should have anything, I would never refuse help to any living creature, nor ever condemn him to the misery of such a day as that."[6] And the real interest of the story lies in the fact that no oath was ever more faithfully kept.  There is no greater test of the essential richness of a man’s nature than that this squalid adversity, not of the sentimental introspective kind but hard and grinding, and not even kept in countenance by respectability, fails to make him a savage or a miser or a misanthrope.

Diderot had his bitter moments.  He knew the gloom and despondency that have their inevitable hour in every solitary and unordered life.  But the fits did not last.  They left no sour sediment, and this is the sign of health in temperament, provided it be not due to mere callousness.  From that horrible quality Diderot assuredly was the furthest removed of any one of his time.  Now and always he walked with a certain large carelessness of spirit.  He measured life with a roving and liberal eye.  Circumstance and conventions, the words under which men hide things, the oracles of common acceptance, the infinitely diversified properties of human character, the many complexities of our conduct and destiny—­all these he watched playing freely around him, and he felt no haste to compress his experience into maxims and system.  He was absolutely uncramped by any of the formal mannerisms of the spirit.  He was wholly uncorrupted by the affectation of culture with which the great Goethe infected part of the world a generation later.  His own life was never made