Mademoiselle Jodin
Landois
Rousseau
Grimm
Diderot's money affairs
Succour rendered by Catherine of Russia
French booksellers in the eighteenth century
Dialogue between Diderot and D'Alembert
English opinion on Diderot's circle

CHAPTER VII.
THE STAGE.

In what sense Diderot the greatest genius of the century
Mark of his theory of the drama
Diderot's influence on Lessing
His play, _The Natural Son_ (1757)
Its quality illustrated
His sense of the importance of pantomime
The dialogues appended to _The Natural Son_
His second play, _The Father of the Family_ (1758)
One radical error of his dramatic doctrine
Modest opinion of his own experiments
His admiration for Terence
Diderot translates Moore's _Gamester_
On Shakespeare
The Paradox on the Player
Account of Garrick
On the truth of the stage
His condemnation of the French classic stage
The foundations of dramatic art
Diderot claims to have created a new kind of drama
No Diderotian school
Why the Encyclopaedists could not replace the classic
drama
The great drama of the eighteenth century

CHAPTER VIII.
"RAMEAU'S NEPHEW."

The mood that inspired this composition
History of the text
Various accounts of the design of _Rameau's Nephew_
Juvenal's Parasite
Lucian
Diderot's picture of his original
Not without imaginative strokes
More than a literary diversion
Sarcasms on Palissot
The musical controversy

DIDEROT.

CHAPTER I.

PRELIMINARY.

There was a moment in the last century when the Gallican church hoped
for a return of internal union and prosperity. This brief era of hope
coincided almost exactly with the middle of the century. Voltaire was in
exile at Berlin. The author of the Persian Letters and the Spirit of
Laws was old and near his end. Rousseau was copying music in a garret.
The Encyclopaedia was looked for, but only as a literary project of some
associated booksellers. The Jansenists, who had been so many in number
and so firm in spirit five-and-twenty years earlier,