life of it, and is a far more rational and consistent
person than the orator and the philosopher.[297] Lucian's satire is
vivid, brilliant, and diverting. Yet every one feels that Diderot's
performance, while equally vivid, is marked by greater depth of spirit;
comes from a soil that has been more freely broken up, and has been
enriched by a more copious experience. The ancient turned upon these
masterpieces of depravation the flash of intellectual scorn; the modern
eyes them with a certain moral patience, and something of that curious
kind of interest, looking half like sympathy, which a hunter has for the
object of his chase.

The Rameau of the dialogue was a real personage, and there is a dispute
whether Diderot has not calumniated him. Evidence enough remains that he
was at least a person of singular character and irregular disastrous
life. Diderot's general veracity of temperament would make us believe
that his picture is authentic, but the interest of the dialogue is
exactly the same in either case. Juvenal's fifth satire would be worth
neither more nor less, however much were found out about Trebius.

"Rameau is one of the most eccentric figures in the country, where God
has not made them lacking. He is a mixture of elevation and lowness, of
good sense and madness; the notions of good and bad must be mixed up
together in strange confusion in his head, for he shows the good
qualities that nature has bestowed on him without any ostentation, and
the bad ones without the smallest shame. For the rest, he is endowed
with a vigorous frame, a particular warmth of imagination, and an
uncommon strength of lungs. If you ever meet him, unless you happen to
be arrested by his originality, you will either stuff your fingers into
your ears or else take to your heels. Heavens, what a monstrous pipe!
Nothing is so little like him as himself. One time he is lean and wan,
like a patient in the last stage of consumption: you could count his
teeth through his cheeks; you would say he must have passed some days
without tasting a morsel, or that he is fresh from La Trappe. A month
after, he is stout and sleek as if he had been sitting all the time at
the board of a financier, or had been shut up in a Bernardine monastery.
To-day in dirty linen, his clothes torn and patched, with barely a shoe
to his foot, he steals along with a bent head; one is tempted to hail
him and toss him a shilling. To-morrow, all powdered, curled, in a good
c