truth, and his fine taste.  Colman is praised for translating Terence, for here, says Diderot, is the lesson of which Colman’s countrymen stand most in need.  The English comic writers have more verve than taste.  “Vanbrugh, Wycherley, Congreve, and some others have painted vices and foibles with vigour; it is not either invention or warmth or gaiety or force that is wanting to their pencil, but rather that unity in the drawing, that precision in the stroke, that truth in colouring, which distinguish portrait from caricature.  Especially are they wanting in the art of discerning and seizing those naif, simple, and yet singular movements of character, which always please and astonish, and render the imitation at once true and piquant."[270] Criticism has really nothing to add to these few lines, and if Diderot in his last years read The School for Scandal, or The Rivals, he would have found no reason to alter his judgment.

One English play had the honour of being translated by Diderot; this was The Gamester, not The Gamester of Shirley nor of Garrick, but of Edward Moore (1753).  It is a good example of the bourgeois tragedy or domestic drama, which Diderot was so eager to see introduced on to the French stage.  The infatuation of Beverley, the tears and virtue of Mrs. Beverley, the prudence of Charlotte and the sage devotion of her lover, the sympathetic remorse of Bates, and even the desperation of Stukely, made up a picture of domestic misery and moral sentiment with which Diderot was sure to fall in love.  Lillo’s George Barnwell, with its direct and urgent moral, was a still greater favourite, and Diderot compared the scene between Maria and Barnwell in prison to the despair of the Philocletes of Sophocles, as the hero is heard shrieking at the mouth of his cavern;[271] just as a more modern critic has thought Lillo’s other play, The Fatal Curiosity, worthy of comparison with the Oedipus Tyrannus.

Diderot’s feeling for Shakespeare seems to have been what we might have anticipated from the whole cast of his temperament.  One of the scenes which delighted him most was that moment of awe, when Lady Macbeth silently advances down the stage with her eyes closed, and imitates the action of washing her hands, as wondering that “the old man should have so much blood in him.”  “I know nothing,” he exclaims, “so pathetic in discourse as that woman’s silence and the movement of her hands.  What an image of remorse!"[272]

It was not to be expected that Diderot should indulge in those undiscriminating superlatives about Shakespeare which are common in Shakespeare’s country.  But he knew enough about him to feel that he was dealing with a giant.  “I will not compare Shakespeare,” he said, “to the Belvedere Apollo, nor to the Gladiator, nor to Antinous”—­he had compared Terence to the Medicean Venus—­“but to the Saint Christopher of Notre Dame, an unshapely colossus, rudely carven, but between whose legs we could all pass without our brows touching him."[273] Not very satisfactory recognition perhaps; but the Saint Christopher is better than Voltaire’s drunken savage.