ry that one evening at St. Petersburg, Diderot was
declaiming with stormy eloquence against the baseness of those who
flatter kings; for such, he said, there ought to be a deeper and a
fiercer hell. "Tell me, Diderot," said the Empress by and by, "what they
say in Paris about the death of my husband." Instead of telling her the
plain truth that everybody said that Peter had been murdered by her
orders, the philosopher poured out a stream of the smoothest things.
"Come now," said Catherine suddenly, "confess, if you are not walking
along the path that leads to your deep hell, you are certainly coming
very close to purgatory." Diderot's elaborate concessions to her
majesty's political religion would, it is to be feared, have brought him
still further in the same sulphureous track.

As we have often had to bewail Diderot's diffuseness, it is as well to
remark that a long passage in the sketch of which we are speaking shows
how close and concentrated he could be upon occasion. The two pages in
which he demolishes the incorrigible superstition about Latin and
Greek,[217] contain a thoroughly exhaustive summary of all the arguments
and the answers. In the immense discussion about Latin and Greek that
has taken place in the hundred years since Diderot's time, it is
tolerably safe to say that not a single point has been brought forward
which Diderot did not in these most pithy and conclusive pages attempt
to deal with. He winds up with the position that, even for the man of
letters, the present system of teaching Latin and Greek is essentially
sterile. I am perfectly sure, he says, that Voltaire, who is not exactly
a mediocrity as a man of letters, knows extremely little Greek, and that
he is not twentieth nor even hundredth among the Latinists of the
day.[218]

[217] _Ib._ iii. 469-471.

[218] _Oeuv._, iii. 473.

Following this sketch is printed a letter to the Countess of Forbach on
the education of children. It is full of rich wisdom on its special
subject. Nobody can read it without feeling that quality in Diderot
which made his friends love him. And we see how, when he was called to
practical counsel, he banished into their own sphere the explosive
paradoxes with which he delighted to amuse his hours of speculative
dreaming.

IV.

Romilly has told us that Diderot was bent on converting him from the
error of his religious ways, and with that intention read to him a
Conversation with the Marechale de----.[2