have all vanished; we are left with the vapid dregs of an obscene anachronism.  Mr. Carlyle, who knows how to be manly in these matters, and affects none of the hypocritical airs of our conventional criticism, yet has not more energetically than truly pronounced this “the beastliest of all past, present, or future dull novels.”  As “the next mortal creature, even a Reviewer, again compelled to glance into that book,” I have felt the propriety of our humorist’s injunction to such a one, “to bathe himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until the even.”  Diderot himself, as might have been expected, soon had the grace to repent him of this shameful book, and could never hear it mentioned without a very lively embarrassment.[54]

As I have said before,[55] it was such books as this, as Crebillon’s novels, as Duclos’s Confessions du Comte X., and the dissoluteness of manners indicated by them, which invested Rousseau’s New Heloisa (1761) with its delightful and irresistible fascinations.  Having pointed out elsewhere the significance of the licentiousness from which the philosophic party did not escape untainted,[56] I need not here do more than make two short remarks.  First, the corruption which had seized the court after the death of Lewis XIV. in the course of a few years had reached the middle class in the town.  The loosening of social fibre, caused by the insenate speculation at the time of Law, no doubt furthered the spread of demoralisation.  Second, the reaction against the Church involved among its other elements a passionate contempt for all asceticism.  This happened to fall in with the general relaxation of morals that followed Lewis’s gloomy rigour.  Consequently even men of pure life, like Condorcet, carried the theoretical protest against asceticism so far as to vindicate the practical immorality of the time.  This is one of those enormous drawbacks that people seldom take into account when they are enumerating the blessings of superstition.  Mediaeval superstition had produced some advantages, but now came the set-off.  Durable morality had been associated with a transitory religious faith.  The faith fell into intellectual discredit, and sexual morality shared its decline for a short season.  This must always be the natural consequence of building sound ethics on the shifting sands and rotting foundations of theology.

Such literature as these tales of Diderot’s, was the mirror both of the ordinary practical sentiment and the philosophic theory.  A nation pays dearly for one of those outbreaks, when they happen to stamp themselves in a literary form that endures.  There are those who hold that Louvet’s Faublas is to this day a powerful agent in the depravation of the youth of France.  Diderot, however, had not the most characteristic virtues of French writing; he was no master in the art of the naif, nor in delicate malice, nor in sprightly cynicism.  His book, consequently, has not lived, and we need