But these virtuous ejaculations do not warm and elevate us.  In such a case words count for nothing.  It is actual presentation of beautiful character, and not talk about it, that touches the spectator.  It is the association of interesting action with character, that moves us and inspires such better moods as may be within our compass.  Diderot, like many other people before and since, sought to make the stage the great moral teacher.  That it may become so, is possible.  It will not be by imitating the methods of that colossal type of histrionic failure, the church-pulpit.  Exhortation in set speeches always has been, and always will be, the feeblest bulwark against the boiling floods of passion that helpless virtue ever invented, and it matters not at all whether the hortatory speeches are placed on the lips of Mr. Talkative, the son of Saywell, or of some tearful dummy labelled the Father of the Family.[267]

Yet one is half ashamed to use hard words about Diderot.  He was so modest about his work, so simple and unpretending, so wholly without restless and fretting ambitions, and so generous in his judgment of others.  He made his own dramatic experiment, he thought little enough of it; and he was wholly above the hateful vice of sourly disparaging competitors, whether dead or living.  He knew that he was himself no master, but he was manly enough to admire anybody who was nearer to mastery.  He was full of unaffected delight at Sedaine’s busy and pleasing little comedy, The Philosopher without knowing it; it was so simple without being stiff, so eloquent without the shadow of effort or rhetoric.  After seeing it, Diderot ran off to the author to embrace him, with many tears of joyful sympathy and gratitude.  Sedaine, like Lillo, the author of Diderot’s favourite play of George Barn_well_, was a plain tradesman, and the success of his libretti for comic operas had not spoiled him.  He could find no more expansive words for his excited admirer than “Ah, Monsieur Diderot, que vous etes beau!"[268] Diderot was just as sensible of the originality and Aristophanic gaiety of Colle’s brilliant play, Truth in Wine, though Colle detested the philosophic school from Voltaire downwards, and left behind him a bitterly contemptuous account of The Natural Son.[269]

Of all comic writers, however, the author of the Andria and the Heautontimorumenos was Diderot’s favourite.  The half dozen pages upon Terence, which he threw off while the printer’s boy waited in the passage (1762), are one of the most easy, flowing, and delightful of his fragments; there is such appreciation of Terence’s suavity and tact, of his just and fine judgment, of his discrimination and character.  He admits that Terence had no verve; for that he commends the young poet to Moliere or Aristophanes, but as verve was exactly the quality most wanting to Diderot himself, he easily forgave its absence in Terence, and thought it amply replaced by his moderation, his