on of those works, to appreciate the singular
flexibility of his intellect, the extraordinarily wide range of his
interests and sympathies, the practical talents which accompanied his
literary genius.

[Sidenote: Diderot.]

Diderot's correspondence is also considerable in bulk, though not in
that respect to be compared to Voltaire's. It has several minor
divisions, the chief of which is a body of letters addressed to the
sculptor Falconnet in Russia. But the main claim of this versatile
writer and most fertile thinker to rank in this chapter lies in his
letters to Mademoiselle Volland, a lady of mature years, to whom, in his
own middle and old age, he was, after the fashion of the time, much
attached. These letters were not published till forty or fifty years
after his death, and it is not too much to say that they supply not only
the most vivid picture of Diderot himself which is attainable, but also
the best view of the later and extremer _philosophe_ society. Many, if
not most of them, are written from that society's head-quarters, the
country house of the Baron d'Holbach, at Grandval, where Diderot was an
ever welcome visitor. This society had certain drawbacks which made it
irksome, not merely to orthodox and sober persons, but to fastidious
judges who were not much burdened with scruples. Horace Walpole, for
instance, found himself bored by it. But it was the most characteristic
society of the time, and Diderot's letters are the best pictures of it,
because, unlike some not dissimilar work, they unite great vividness and
power of description with an obvious absence of the least design to
'cook,' that is to say, to invent or to disguise facts and characters.
Diderot, who possessed every literary faculty except the faculty of
taking pains and the faculty of adroitly choosing subjects, was marked
out as the describer of such a society as this, where brilliancy was the
one thing never wanting, where eccentricity of act and speech was the
rule, where originals abounded and took care to make the most of their
originality, and where all restraint of convention was deliberately cast
aside. The character and tendencies of this society have been very
variously judged, and there is no need to decide here between the judges
further than to say that, on the whole, the famous essay of Carlyle on
Diderot not inadequately reduces to miniature Diderot's own picture of
it. Only the extremest prejudice can deny the extraordinary me