ting the frauds of cab-drivers on their masters and on the
public, that all payments of fares should be made to appointed officers
at the various cab-stations, and that no driver should take up a fare
except at one of these stations.[175] In writing about lackeys, after a
word on their insolence and on the wretched case in which most of them
end their days, he points out that the multitude of them is causing the
depopulation of the fields. They are countrymen who have thronged to
Paris to avoid military service. Peasants turned lackeys to escape the
conscription, just as in our own days they turn priests. Then, says
Diderot, this evil ought to be checked by a tax upon liveries; but such
a tax is far too sensible ever to be imposed.

Yet, notwithstanding the practical and fervid temper of his
understanding, Diderot is not above literary trifling when the humour
seizes him. If he can write an exhaustive article on Encyclopaedia, or
Spinosa, or Academies, or Weaving, he can also stoop to Anagrams, and
can tell us that the letters of Frere Jacques Clement, the assassin of
Henry III., make up the sinister words, _C'est l'enfer qui m'a cree_. He
can write a couple of amusing pages on Onomatomancy, or divination of a
man's fortune from his name; and can record with neutral gravity how
frequently great empires have been destroyed under princes bearing the
same name as their first founders; how, again, certain names are unlucky
for princes, as Cains among the Romans, John in France, England, and
Scotland, and Henry in France.

We have now and then an anecdote that is worth reading and worth
preserving. Thus, under Machiavellist: "I have heard that a philosopher,
being asked by a great prince about a refutation of Machiavellism, which
the latter had just published, replied, 'Sire, I fancy that the first
lesson that Machiavelli would have given to his disciple would have been
to refute his work.'" Whether Voltaire ever did say this to the great
Frederick, is very questionable, but it would not have been ill said.
After the reader has been taken through a short course of Arabian
philosophy, he is enlivened by a selection of poetic sayings about human
life from the Rose-garden of Sadi, and the whole article winds up with
an eastern fable, of no particular relevancy, of three men finding a
treasure, and of one of them poisoning the food for which the other two
had sent him; on his return they suddenly fell on him and slew him, and
t