1684 till the year of his death; this
although dull, and as Saint-Simon said "of an insipidity to make you
sick," is an inexhaustible storehouse of facts about the reign of Louis
XIV. Saint-Simon's own brilliant memoirs, written from 1691 to 1723, may
be considered as a sort of diary. The lawyer, Edmond Barbier
(1689-1771), wrote a journal of the anecdotes and little facts which
came to his knowledge from 1718 to 1762. The studious care which he took
to be correct, and his manifest candour, give a singular value to
Barbier's record; his diary was not printed at all until 1847, nor, in
its entirety, until 1857. The song-writer, Charles Colle (1709-1783),
kept a _journal historique_ from 1758 to 1782; it is full of vivacity,
but very scandalous and spiteful. It saw the light in 1805, and
surprised those to whom Colle, in his lifetime, had seemed the most
placid and good-natured of men. Petit de Bachaumont (1690-1770) had
access to remarkable sources of information, and his _Memoires secrets_
(a diary the publication of which began in 1762 and was continued after
Bachaumont's death, until 1787, by other persons) contains a valuable
mass of documents. The marquis d'Argenson (1694-1757) kept a diary, of
which a comparatively full text was first published in 1859. In recent
times the posthumous publication of the diaries of the Russian artist,
Marie Bashkirtseff (1860-1884), produced a great sensation in 1887, and
revealed a most remarkable temperament. The brothers Jules and Edmond de
Goncourt kept a very minute diary of all that occurred around them in
artistic and literary Paris; after the death of Jules, in 1870, this was
continued by Edmond, who published the three first volumes in 1888. The
publication of this work was continued, and it produced no little
scandal. It is excessively ill-natured in parts, but of its vivid
picturesqueness, and of its general accuracy as a transcript of
conversation, there can be no two opinions. (E. G.)

DIASPORE, a native aluminium hydroxide, AlO(OH), crystallizing in the
orthorhombic system and isomorphous with gothite and manganite. It
occurs sometimes as flattened crystals, but usually as lamellar or scaly
masses, the flattened surface being a direction of perfect cleavage on
which the lustre is markedly pearly in character. It is colourless or
greyish-white, yellowish, sometimes violet in colour, and varies from
translucent to transparent. It may be readily distinguished from