ed; we are left with the vapid dregs of an obscene anachronism.
Mr. Carlyle, who knows how to be manly in these matters, and affects
none of the hypocritical airs of our conventional criticism, yet has not
more energetically than truly pronounced this "the beastliest of all
past, present, or future dull novels." As "the next mortal creature,
even a Reviewer, again compelled to glance into that book," I have felt
the propriety of our humorist's injunction to such a one, "to bathe
himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until
the even." Diderot himself, as might have been expected, soon had the
grace to repent him of this shameful book, and could never hear it
mentioned without a very lively embarrassment.[54]

As I have said before,[55] it was such books as this, as Crebillon's
novels, as Duclos's Confessions du Comte X., and the dissoluteness of
manners indicated by them, which invested Rousseau's New Heloisa
(1761) with its delightful and irresistible fascinations. Having
pointed out elsewhere the significance of the licentiousness from
which the philosophic party did not escape untainted,[56] I need not
here do more than make two short remarks. First, the corruption which
had seized the court after the death of Lewis XIV. in the course of a
few years had reached the middle class in the town. The loosening of
social fibre, caused by the insenate speculation at the time of Law,
no doubt furthered the spread of demoralisation. Second, the reaction
against the Church involved among its other elements a passionate
contempt for all asceticism. This happened to fall in with the
general relaxation of morals that followed Lewis's gloomy rigour.
Consequently even men of pure life, like Condorcet, carried the
theoretical protest against asceticism so far as to vindicate the
practical immorality of the time. This is one of those enormous
drawbacks that people seldom take into account when they are
enumerating the blessings of superstition. Mediaeval superstition had
produced some advantages, but now came the set-off. Durable morality
had been associated with a transitory religious faith. The faith fell
into intellectual discredit, and sexual morality shared its decline
for a short season. This must always be the natural consequence of
building sound ethics on the shifting sands and rotting foundations
of theology.

Such literature as these tales of Diderot's, was the mirror both of the
ordinary practi