oysters and lampreys at supper, he yielded to a dish of beet and mallow so dressed with pot-herbs, ut nil posset esse suavius.  Whatever men could say to one another or to their surgeons they saw no harm in saying to women.  We have to remember how Sir Walter Scott’s great-aunt, about the very time when Diderot was writing to Mademoiselle Voland, had heard Mrs. Aphra Behn’s books read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London.  We think of Swift, in an earlier period of the century, enclosing to Stella some recklessly gross verses of his own upon Bolingbroke, and habitually writing to fine ladies in a way that Falstaff might have thought too bad for Doll Tearsheet.  In saying that these coarse impurities are only points of manners, we are as far as possible from meaning that they are on that account unimportant.  But it is childish to waste our time in censorious judgment on the individual who does no worse than represent a ruling type.  We can only note the difference and pass on.

A characteristic trait in this rural life is Diderot’s passion for high winds.  They gave him a transport, and to hear the storm at night, tossing the trees, drenching the ground with rain, and filling the air with the bass of its hoarse ground-tones, was one of his keenest delights.[203] Yet Diderot was not of those in whom the feeling for the great effects of nature has something of savagery.  He was above all things human, and the human lot was the central source of his innermost meditations.  In the midst of gossip is constantly interpolated some passage of fine reflection on life—­reflection as sincere, as real, coming as spontaneously from the writer’s inmost mood and genuine sentiment, as little tainted either by affectation or by commonness, as ever passed through the mind of a man.  Some of these are too characteristic to be omitted, and there is so little of what is exquisite in the flavour of Diderot’s style, that he perhaps suffers less from the clumsiness of translation than writers of finer colour or more stirring melody.  One of these passages is as follows:—­

“The last news from Paris has made the Baron anxious, as he has considerable sums in royal securities.  He said to his wife:  ’Listen, my friend; if this is going on, I put down the carriage, I buy you a good cloak and a good parasol, and for the rest of our days we will bless the minister for ridding us of horses, lackeys, coachmen, ladies’-maids, cooks, great dinner-parties, false friends, tiresome bores, and all the other privileges of opulence.’  And for my part I began to think, that for a man without a wife or child, or any of those connections that make us long for money, and never leave any superfluity, it would be almost indifferent whether he were poor or rich.  This paradox comes of the equality that I discover among various conditions of life, and in the little difference that I allow, in point of happiness,