ors into decent shape. He spent his days in
the workshops, mastering the processes of manufactures, and his nights
in reproducing on paper what he had learnt during the day. And he was
incessantly harassed all the time by alarms of a descent from the
police. At the last moment, when his immense work was just drawing to an
end, he encountered one last and crowning mortification: he discovered
that the bookseller, fearing the displeasure of the government, had
struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands,
all passages that he chose to think too hardy. The monument to which
Diderot had given the labour of twenty long and oppressive years was
irreparably mutilated and defaced. It is calculated that the average
annual salary received by Diderot for his share in the _Encyclopaedia_
was about L120 sterling. "And then to think," said Voltaire, "that an
army contractor makes L800 in a day!"

Although the _Encyclopaedia_ was Diderot's monumental work, he is the
author of a shower of dispersed pieces that sowed nearly every field of
intellectual interest with new and fruitful ideas. We find no
masterpiece, but only thoughts for masterpieces; no creation, but a
criticism with the quality to inspire and direct creation. He wrote
plays--_Le Fils naturel_ (1757) and _Le Pere de famille_ (1758)--and
they are very insipid performances in the sentimental vein. But he
accompanied them by essays on dramatic poetry, including especially the
_Paradoxe sur le comedien_, in which he announced the principles of a
new drama,--the serious, domestic, bourgeois drama of real life, in
opposition to the stilted conventions of the classic French stage. It
was Diderot's lessons and example that gave a decisive bias to the
dramatic taste of Lessing, whose plays, and his _Hamburgische
Dramaturgie_ (1768), mark so important an epoch in the history of the
modern theatre. In the pictorial art, Diderot's criticisms are no less
rich, fertile and wide in their ideas. His article on "Beauty" in the
_Encyclopaedia_ shows that he had mastered and passed beyond the
metaphysical theories on the subject, and the _Essai sur la peinture_
was justly described by Goethe, who thought it worth translating, as "a
magnificent work, which speaks even more helpfully to the poet than to
the painter, though to the painter too it is as a blazing torch."
Diderot's most intimate friend was Grimm, one of the conspicuous figures
of the philosophic body. Grim