lks are charming; I do not know whether the
women are all very sage, but with their great straw hats, their eyes
fixed on the ground, and the enormous fichus spread over their bosoms,
they have the air of coming back from prayers or going to confession."
Diderot did not fail to notice more serious things than this. His
remarks on the means of travelling with most profit are full of sense,
and the account which he wrote of Holland shows him to have been as
widely reflective and observant as we should have expected him to
be.[70] It will be more convenient to say something on this in
connection with the stay which he again made at the Hague on his return
from his pilgrimage to Russia.

[70] _Oeuv._, xviii. 365, 471.

After many hesitations the die was cast. Nariskin, a court chamberlain,
took charge of the philosopher, and escorted him in an excellent
carriage along the dreary road that ended in the capital reared by Peter
the Great among the northern floods. It is worth while to digress for a
few moments, to mark shortly the difference in social and intellectual
conditions between the philosopher's own city and the city for which he
was bound, and to touch on the significance of his journey. We can only
in this way understand the position of the Encyclopaedists in Europe, and
see why it is interesting to the student of the history of Western
civilisation to know something about them. It is impossible to have a
clear idea of the scope of the revolutionary philosophy, as well as of
the singular pre-eminence of Paris over the western world, until we have
placed ourselves, not only at Ferney and Grandval, and in the parlours
of Madame Geoffrin and Mademoiselle Lespinasse, but also in palaces at
Florence, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.

From Holland with its free institutions, its peaceful industry, its
husbanded wealth, its rich and original art, its great political and
literary tradition, to go to Russia was to measure an arc of Western
progress, and to retrace the steps of the genius of civilisation. The
political capital of Russia represented a forced and artificial union
between old and new conditions. In St. Petersburg, says an onlooker,
were united the age of barbarism and the age of civilisation, the tenth
century and the eighteenth, the manners of Asia and the manners of
Europe, the rudest Scythians and the most polished Europeans, a
brilliant and proud aristocracy and a people sunk in servitude. On one
s