erot in a broken voice; "I am filled with misery by a story
that I am writing!" This capacity of thinking of imaginary personages as
if they were friends living in the next street, had been stirred by
Richardson. His acquaintances would sometimes notice anxiety and
consternation on his countenance, and would ask him if anything had
befallen his health, his friends, his family, his fortune. "O my
friends," he would reply, "Pamela, Clarissa, Grandison ...!" It was in
their world, not in the Rue Taranne, that he really lived when these
brooding moods overtook him. And while he was writing _The Nun_, Sister
Susan and Sister Theresa, the lady superior of Longchamp, and the
libertine superior of Saint Eutropius, were as alive to him as Clarissa
was alive to the score of correspondents who begged Richardson to spare
her honour, not to let her die, to make Lovelace marry her, or by no
means to allow Lovelace to marry her.

_The Nun_ professes to be the story of a young lady whose family have
thrust her into a convent, and her narrative, with an energy and
reality that Diderot hardly ever surpassed, presents the odious sides of
monastic life, and the various types of superstition, tyranny, and
corruption that monastic life engenders. Yet Diderot had far too much
genius to be tempted into the exaggerations of more vulgar assailants of
monkeries and nunneries. He may have begun his work with the purpose of
attacking a mischievous and superstitious system that mutilates human
life, but he certainly continued it because he became interested in his
creations. Diderot was a social destroyer by accident, but in intention
he was a truly scientific moralist, penetrated by the spirit of
observation and experiment; he shrunk from no excess in dissection, and
found nothing in human pathology too repulsive for examination. Yet _The
Nun_ has none of the artificial violences of the modern French school,
which loves moral disease for its own sake. The action is all very
possible, and the types are all sufficiently human and probable. The
close realistic touches which flowed from the intensity of the writer's
illusion, naturally convey a certain degree of the same illusion to the
mind of the reader.

Existence as it goes on in these strange hives is caught with what one
knows to be true fidelity; its dulness, its littleness, its goings and
comings, its spite, its reduction of the spiritual to the most purely
mechanical.

"The first momen