n a man. "I am more
affected," he said, in words of which better men that Diderot might
often be reminded, "by the charms of virtue than by the deformity of
vice. I turn mildly away from the bad, and I fly to embrace the good. If
there is in a work, in a character, in a painting, in a statue, a single
fine bit, then on that my eyes fasten; I see only that: that is all I
remember; the rest is as good as forgotten."[15]

This is the secret of a rare and admirable temperament. It carried
Diderot well through the trial and ordeal of the ragged apprenticeship
of letters. What to other men comes by culture, came to him by inborn
force and natural capaciousness. We do not know in what way Diderot
trained and nourished his understanding. The annotations to his
translation of Shaftesbury, as well as his earliest original pieces,
show that he had read Montaigne and Pascal, and not only read but
meditated on them with an independent mind. They show also that he had
been impressed by the Civitas Dei of Augustine, and had at least dipped
into Terence and Horace, Cicero and Tacitus. His subsequent writings
prove that, like the other men of letters of his day, he found in our
own literature the chief external stimulant to thought. Above all, he
was impressed by the magnificent ideas of the illustrious Bacon, and
these ideas were the direct source of the great undertaking of Diderot's
life. He is said to have read little and to have meditated much--the
right process for the few men of his potent stamp. The work which he had
to do for bread was of the kind that crushes anything short of the
strongest faculty. He composed sermons. A missionary once ordered
half-a-dozen of them for consumption in the Portuguese colonies, and
paid him fifty crowns apiece, which Diderot counted far from the worst
bargain of his life. All this was beggarly toil for a man of genius, but
Diderot never took the trouble to think of himself as a man of genius,
and was quite content with life as it came. If he found himself
absolutely without food and without pence, he began moodily to think of
abandoning his books and his pen, and of complying with the wishes of
his father. A line of Homer, an idea from the Principia, an interesting
problem in algebra or geometry, was enough to restore the eternally
invincible spell of knowledge. And no sooner was this commanding
interest touched, than the cloud of uncomfortable circumstance vanished
from before the sun, and calm