f verse grows narrower and narrower, it is
probable that the great poet who is also a great thinker will now and
again insist on being heard. In Sully-Prudhomme France has possessed an
eminent writer whose methods are directly instructive, and both _La
Justice_ (1878) and _Le Bonheur_ (1888) are typically didactic poems.
Perhaps future historians may name these as the latest of their class.
(E. G.)

DIDEROT, DENIS (1713-1784), French man of letters and encyclopaedist,
was born at Langres on the 5th of October 1713. He was educated by the
Jesuits, like most of those who afterwards became the bitterest enemies
of Catholicism; and, when his education was at an end, he vexed his
brave and worthy father's heart by turning away from respectable
callings, like law or medicine, and throwing himself into the vagabond
life of a bookseller's hack in Paris. An imprudent marriage (1743) did
not better his position. His wife, Anne Toinette Champion, was a devout
Catholic, but her piety did not restrain a narrow and fretful temper,
and Diderot's domestic life was irregular and unhappy. He sought
consolation for chagrins at home in attachments abroad, first with a
Madame Puisieux, a fifth-rate female scribbler, and then with Sophie
Voland, to whom he was constant for the rest of her life. His letters to
her are among the most graphic of all the pictures that we have of the
daily life of the philosophic circle in Paris. An interesting contrast
may be made between the Bohemianism of the famous English literary set
who supped at the Turk's Head with the Tory Johnson and the Conservative
Burke for their oracles, and the Bohemianism of the French set who about
the same time dined once a week at the baron D'Holbach's, to listen to
the wild sallies and the inspiring declamations of Diderot. For Diderot
was not a great writer; he stands out as a fertile, suggestive and
daring thinker, and a prodigious and most eloquent talker.

Diderot's earliest writings were of as little importance as Goldsmith's
_Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning_ or Burke's _Abridgement of
English History_. He earned 100 crowns by translating Stanyan's _History
of Greece_ (1743); with two colleagues he produced a translation of
James's _Dictionary of Medicine_ (1746-1748) and about the same date he
published a free rendering of Shaftesbury's _Inquiry Concerning Virtue
and Merit_ (1745), with some original notes of his own. With strange and
characteristi