l the forms of a
prosecution had been duly gone through. It was no Bishop's court nor
Star Chamber, much less a warrant signed by George the Third or by Bute,
which in 1762 condemned Peter Annet to the pillory and the gaol for his
Free Inquirer. The only evil which overtook Mandeville for his Fable of
the Bees was to be harmlessly presented (1723) as a public nuisance by
the Grand Jury of Middlesex. We may contrast with this the state of
things which prepared a revolution in France.

One morning in July, 1749--almost exactly forty years before that July
of '89, so memorable in the annals of arbitrary government and state
prisons--a commissary of police and three attendants came to Diderot's
house, made a vigorous scrutiny of his papers, and then produced a
warrant for his detention. The philosopher, without any ado, told his
wife not to expect him home for dinner, stepped into the chaise, and
was driven off with his escort to Vincennes. His real offence was a
light sneer in the Letter on the Blind at the mistress of a
minister.[80] The atheistical substance of the essay, however, apart
from the pique of a favourite, would have given sufficiently good
grounds for a prosecution in England, and in France for that vile
substitute for prosecution, the _lettre-decachet_. And there happened to
be special causes for harshness towards the press at this moment. Verses
had been published satirising the king and his manner of life in bitter
terms, and a stern raid was made upon all the scribblers in Paris. At
the court there had just taken place one of those reactions in favour of
the ecclesiastical party, which for thirty years in the court history
alternated so frequently with movements in the opposite direction. The
gossip of the town set down Diderot's imprisonment to a satire against
the Jesuits, of which he was wrongly supposed to be the author.[81] It
is not worth while to seek far for a reason, when authority was as able
and as ready to thrust men into gaol for a bad reason as for a good one.
The writer or the printer of a philosophical treatise was at this moment
looked upon in France much as a magistrate now looks on the wretch who
vends infamous prints.

The lieutenant of police (Berryer) treated the miserable author with
additional severity, for stubbornly refusing to give up the name of the
printer. Diderot was well aware that the printer would be sent to the
galleys for life, if the lieutenant of police could once la