be fulfilled.  First let us have our sleep.”  The next morning his father took two places in the coach, and carried him to Paris to the College d’Harcourt.  He made all the arrangements, and wished his son good-bye.  But the good man loved the boy too dearly to leave him without being quite at ease how he would fare; he had the patience to remain a whole fortnight, killing the time and half dead of weariness in an inn, without ever seeing the one object of his stay.  At the end of the fortnight he went to the college, and Diderot used many a time to say that such a mark of tenderness and goodness would have made him go to the other end of the world if his father had required it.  “My friend,” said his father, “I am come to see if you are well, if you are satisfied with your superiors, with your food, with your companions, and with yourself.  If you are not well or not happy, we will go back together to your mother.  If you had rather stay where you are, I am come to give you a word, to embrace you, and to leave you my blessing.”  The boy declared he was perfectly happy; and the principal pronounced him an excellent scholar, though already promising to be a troublesome one.[4]

After a couple of years the young Diderot, like other sons of Adam, had to think of earning his bread.  The usual struggle followed between youthful genius and old prudence.  His father, who was a man of substance, gave him his choice between medicine and law.  Law he refused because he did not choose to spend his days in doing other people’s business; and medicine, because he had no turn for killing.  His father resolutely declined to let him have more money on these terms, and Diderot was thrown on his wits.

The man of letters shortly before the middle of the century was as much an outcast and a beggar in Paris as he was in London.  Voltaire, Gray, and Richardson were perhaps the only three conspicuous writers of the time, who had never known what it was to want a meal or to go without a shirt.  But then none of the three depended on his pen for his livelihood.  Every other man of that day whose writings have delighted and instructed the world since, had begun his career, and more than one of them continued and ended it, as a drudge and a vagabond.  Fielding and Collins, Goldsmith and Johnson, in England; Goldoni in Italy; Vauvenargues, Marmontel, Rousseau, in France; Winckelmann and Lessing in Germany, had all alike been doubtful of dinner, and trembled about a night’s lodging.  They all knew the life of mean hazard, sorry shift, and petty expedient again and again renewed.  It is sorrowful to think how many of the compositions of that time that do most to soothe and elevate some of the best hours of our lives, were written by men with aching hearts, in the midst of haggard perplexities.  The man of letters, as distinguished alike from the old-fashioned scholar and the systematic thinker, now first became a distinctly marked type.  Macaulay has contrasted the misery of the Grub Street hack