Scattered among the more serious fragments of the dialogue is some excellent by-play of sarcasm upon Palissot, and one or two of the other assailants of the new liberal school.  Palissot is an old story.  The Palissots are an eternal species.  The family never dies out, and it thrives in every climate.  All societies know the literary dangler in great houses, and the purveyor to fashionable prejudices.  Not that he is always servile.  The reader, I daresay, remembers that La Bruyere described a curious being in Troilus, the despotic parasite.  Palissot, eighteenth century or nineteenth century, is often like Troilus, parasite and tyrant at the same time.  He usually happens to have begun life with laudable aspirations and sincere interests of his own; and when, alas, the mediocrity of his gifts proves too weak to bear the burden of his ambitions, the recollection of a generous youth only serves to sour old age.

    Bel esprit abhorre de tous les bons esprits,
    Il pense par la haine echapper au mepris. 
    A force d’attentats il se croit illustre;
    Et s’il n’etait mechant, il serait ignore.

Palissot began with a tragedy.  He proceeded to an angry pamphlet against the Encyclopaedists and the fury for innovation.  Then he achieved immense vogue among fine ladies, bishops, and the lighter heads of the town, by the comedy in which he held Diderot, D’Alembert, and the others, up to hatred and ridicule.  Finally, after coming to look upon himself as a serious personage, he disappeared into the mire of half-oblivious contempt and disgust that happily awaits all the poor Palissots and all their works.  His name only survives in connection with the men whom he maligned.  He lived to be old, as, oddly enough, Spite so often does.  In the Terror he had a narrow escape, for he was brought before Chaumette.  Chaumette apostrophised the assailant of Rousseau and Diderot with rude energy, but did not send him to the guillotine.  In this the practical disciple only imitated the magnanimity of his theoretical masters.  Rousseau had declined an opportunity of punishing Palissot’s impertinences, and Diderot took no worse vengeance upon him than by making an occasional reference of contempt to him in a dialogue which he perhaps never intended to publish.

Another subject is handled in Rameau’s Nephew, which is interesting in connection with the mental activity of Paris in the eighteenth century.  Music was the field of as much passionate controversy as theology and philosophy.  The Bull Unigenitus itself did not lead to livelier disputes, or more violent cabals, than the conflict between the partisans of French music and the partisans of Italian music.  The horror of a Jansenist for a Molinist did not surpass that of a Lullist for a Dunist, or afterwards of a Gluckist for a Piccinist.[298] Lulli and Rameau (the uncle of our parasite) had undisputed possession of Paris until the arrival, in 1752, of a company of Italian