scale elements of character that lie furtively in the depths of characters that are not vile.  It seems as if Diderot unconsciously anticipated that terrible, that woful, that desolating saying,—­There is in every man and woman something which, if you knew it, would make you hate them.  Rameau is not all parasite.  He is your brother and mine, a product from the same rudimentary factors of mental composition, a figure cast equally with ourselves in one of the countless moulds of the huge social foundry.

Such is the scientific attitude of mind towards character:  It is not philanthropic nor pitiful:  the fact that base characters exist and are of intelligible origin is no reason why we should not do our best to shun and to extirpate them.  This assumption of the scientific point of view, this change from mere praise and blame to scrutiny, this comprehension that mere execration is not the last word, is a mark of the modern spirit.  Besides Juvenal, another writer of genius has shown us the parasite of an ancient society.  Lucian, whose fertility, wit, invention, mockery, freshness of spirit, and honest hatred of false gods, make him the Voltaire of the second century, has painted with all his native liveliness more than one picture of the parasite.  The great man’s creature at Rome endures exactly the same long train of affronts and humiliations as the great man’s creature at Paris sixteen centuries later, beginning with the anguish of the mortified stomach, as savoury morsels of venison or boar are given to more important guests, and ending with the anguish of the mortified spirit, as he sees himself supplanted by a rival of shapelier person, a more ingenious versifier, a cleverer mountebank.  The dialogue in which Lucian ironically proves that Parasitic, or the honourable craft of Spunging, has as many of the marks of a genuine art as Rhetoric, Gymnastic, or Music, is a spirited parody of Socratic catechising and Platonic mannerisms.  Simo shows to Tychiades, as ingeniously as Rameau shows to Diderot, that the Spunger has a far better life of it, and is a far more rational and consistent person than the orator and the philosopher.[297] Lucian’s satire is vivid, brilliant, and diverting.  Yet every one feels that Diderot’s performance, while equally vivid, is marked by greater depth of spirit; comes from a soil that has been more freely broken up, and has been enriched by a more copious experience.  The ancient turned upon these masterpieces of depravation the flash of intellectual scorn; the modern eyes them with a certain moral patience, and something of that curious kind of interest, looking half like sympathy, which a hunter has for the object of his chase.

The Rameau of the dialogue was a real personage, and there is a dispute whether Diderot has not calumniated him.  Evidence enough remains that he was at least a person of singular character and irregular disastrous life.  Diderot’s general veracity of temperament would make us believe that his picture is authentic, but the interest of the dialogue is exactly the same in either case.  Juvenal’s fifth satire would be worth neither more nor less, however much were found out about Trebius.