f them. It would be a truly
imperial luxury, wrote A. W. Schlegel, to get a collection of pictures
described for oneself by Diderot.

[18] _Essays_, iv. 303. (Ed. 1869.)

There is a freshness, a vivacity, a zeal, a sincerity, a brightness of
interest in his subject, which are perhaps unique in the whole history
of criticism. He flings himself into the task with the perfection of
natural abandonment to a joyous and delightful subject. His whole
personality is engaged in a work that has all the air of being
overflowing pleasure, and his pleasure is contagious. His criticism
awakens the imagination of the reader. Not only do we see the picture;
we hear Diderot's own voice in ecstasies of praise and storms of
boisterous wrath. There is such mass in his criticism; so little of the
mincing and niggling of the small virtuoso. In facility of expression,
in animation, in fecundity of mood, in fine improvisation, these pieces
are truly incomparable. There is such an _impetus animi et quaedam artis
libido_. Some of the charm and freedom may be due to the important
circumstance that he was not writing for the public. He was not exposed
to the reaction of a large unknown audience upon style; hence the
absence of all the stiffness of literary pose. But the positive
conditions of such success lay in the resources of Diderot's own
character.

The sceptic, the dogmatist, the dialectician, and the other personages
of a heterogeneous philosophy who existed in Diderot's head, all
disappear or fall back into a secondary place, and he surrenders himself
with a curious freedom to such imaginative beauty as contemporary art
provided for him. Diderot was perhaps the one writer of the time who was
capable on occasion of rising above the strong prevailing spirit of the
time; capable of forgetting for a season the passion of the great
philosophical and ecclesiastical battle. No one save Diderot could have
been moved by sight of a picture to such an avowal as this:

"Absurd rigorists do not know the effect of external ceremonies on
the people; they can never have seen the enthusiasm of the
multitude at the procession of the _Fete Dieu_, an enthusiasm that
sometimes gains even me. I have never seen that long file of
priests in their vestments; those young acolytes clad in their
white robes, with broad blue sashes engirdling their waists, and
casting flowers on the ground before the Holy Sacrament; the crowd