dozen writers, each dealing with matters according
to his own individual taste and his own peculiar kind of knowledge.

Indeed, it is a curious and most interesting feature in the literary
activity of France in the eighteenth century, that the egoism and vanity
of authorship were reduced by the conditions of the time to a lower
degree than in any other generation since letters were invented. The
suppression of self by the Jesuits was hardly more complete than the
suppression of self by the most brilliant and effective of the
insurgents against Jesuitry. Such intimate association as exists in our
day between a given book and a given personality, was then thoroughly
shaken by the constant necessity for secrecy. As we have seen, people
hardly knew who set up that momentous landmark, the _System of Nature_.
Voltaire habitually and vehemently denied every one of his most
characteristic pieces, and though in the buzz of Parisian gossip the
right name was surely hit upon for such unique performances as
Voltaire's, yet the fame was far too broken and uncertain to reward his
vanity, if the better part of himself had not been fully and sincerely
engaged in public objects in which vanity had no part. Rousseau was an
exception, but then Rousseau was in truth a reactionist, and not a loyal
member of the great company of reformers. As for Diderot, he valued the
author's laurel so cheaply, as we have seen, that with a gigantic
heedlessness and Saturnian weariness of the plaudits or hisses of the
audience, while supremely interested in the deeper movements of the
tragi-comic drama of the world, he left some of his masterpieces lying
unknown in forgotten chests. Again, in the case of the Encyclopaedia, as
we have also seen, Turgot as well as less eminent men bargained that
their names should not be made public. Wherever a telling blow was to be
dealt with the sword, or a new stone to be laid with the trowel, men
were always found ready to spend themselves and be spent, without taking
thought whether their share in the work should be nicely measured and
publicly identified, or absorbed and lost in the whole of which it was a
part.

Whatever may have been the secret of the authorship of Raynal's book,
and whether or no even the general conception of such a performance was
due to Raynal, it is at least certain that the original author, whoever
he may have been, divined a remarkable literary opportunity. This
divination is in authorship wh