such occasions is gaining ground in Italy, and will probably be the means of improving the style of preaching, by leading the orator to forsake the low grounds of tradition, miracle-mongering, and scholastic common-places, for the elevated fields of Christian philanthropy and moral philosophy, the universal nature of man, and the unadulterated precepts of the Redeemer. In conclusion, it is obvious to remark how powerful an instrument in the elevation of the national character the Italian pulpit is calculated to become, and how little it has hitherto effected. Amongst the natives of this interesting country, the majority feel an indifference to its success or failure, which there is too much in its past history to excuse. Hope beats high in the bosoms of the few. 1 [From "The Quarterly Review," No. 94.] [We have for some time seen nothing of more interest in "The Quarterly Review than the following article. No good account of Diderot, such as is furnished by it, has, as far as we recollect, previously appeared in our language. He was an individual conspicuous in his day, and one whose history must occupy a considerable space in that of French literature during a period when it waged an unprincipled and indiscriminate warfare with established opinions, with errors the most injurious, and with truths the most essential to human happiness. His character, though certainly not his works, may be worth our study. In the original article the extracts are given in French, so that many readers may be deterred from its perusal. We have laid it open to a great part of the public by furnishing a translation of them. EDD.] ART. II. - Mémoires, Correspondance, et Ouvrages inédits de Memoirs, Correspondence, and unpublished Works of DIDEROT. THE Voluminous correspondence, which passes under the name of Grimm, with the episodical volumes of the fair votaries, the Espinasses and D'Épinays, who encouraged with their smiles, and rewarded with unscrupulous prodigality the labors of the French philosophers in enlightening mankind, long ago introduced us to an intimate acquaintance with the social state of Paris during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The noctes cœnæque, we must not add Deûm; the ease, the pleasantry, the cleverness, the genuine wit, the conversational eloquence; the coarseness and indelicacy, the petty jealousy and intrigue; the cool heartlessness, (not, indeed, that kind and even generous feelings were altogether wanting, or that some of them would not have made any sacrifice for a friend, except that of their own personal vanity; they would have spent their last livre one day for a companion, whose reputation they would have slain with an epigram, or with whose mistress they would have intrigued the next): into all this, to say nothing of many circumstances utterly revolting to every well-regulated mind, we had been freely admitted; all the mysteries had been laid open before us with such truth, and life, and reality, that personal familiarity scarcely seemed wanting to complete our knowledge of the whole fraternity, from the patriarch of Ferney to the humblest contributor to the collective wisdom of the Encyclopédie. However free and unrestrained the tone of society, however slight the disguise which individual character would wear in the small circle of intimate friends, who formed these separate coteries, in comparison with the stiff and artificial full-dress, which is so often put on in more general and formal intercourse with the world, we have now seen most of these remarkable men in a more complete state of nature still; we have more than once been admitted into yet closer intimacy with them than in their convivial meetings and most select petits soupers; we have found our way behind the scenes of this brilliant comedy, and become acquainted with the actors, when entirely careless of stage effect, with their minds and their manners in perfect dishabille, and not even condescending to wear the very thin mask, which is commonly assumed even among the most domesticated acquaintance, among every-day familiars. The result has not been altogether favorable to the authors of the new code of human virtue and happiness. Man is no more a philosopher than a hero to his valet de chambre. The Bourriennes and Madame Junots who have disclosed the privacy of the great despot of French literature during the last century, have been as little friendly to his fame, as they who performed the same treacherous office to the master of the imperial throne. Both have alike paid the penalty of greatness; their meannesses, their small jealousies, the coarse, and low, and vulgar parts of their characters have obtained equal notoriety with their better and nobler qualities. The hands which raised the veil and laid open the most intimate secrets of Voltaire's philosophic retirement in the country-seat of Madame du Châtelet, not merely displayed a connexion offensive to severer moralists, whose condemnation Voltaire himself would have treated with indifference; - they have lowered him in the estimation of less scrupulous persons, by the display of so many miserable acts of domestic baseness and tyranny, such as those who might have endeavoured, for a time at least, to forget the author of the Pucelle, and the bitter foe of religion, in the poet of Zaïre and Tancrède, and in the defender of the family of Calas, could not but read with shame and sorrow. Whatever palliation for his irreligion might be suggested by the calmer survey of the state and opinions of his age, nothing can soften or excuse this total want of dignity of character, this inveterate selfishness, this condescension to the basest means of gratifying his spleen or feeding his insatiate vanity. The humane and charitable spirit of Christianity, which Voltaire professed to admire, was as entirely obliterated from his heart, as the belief in the doctrines, which he openly despised, from his understanding. Even his own party shrunk aghast at the moral suicide committed by Rousseau in his "Confessions." Others had sacrificed on the altar of personal vanity (that universal household god to. which each individual in the whole circle paid, either in public or more secretly, his unbounded homage), not merely all moral and religious, but even almost all the generous and lofty sentiments of our nature; as a last holocaust Jean Jacques boldly threw himself. This autobiography is the most painful book in the whole range of literature; the contrast between the cold, the serious, the labored obscenity of parts (for there were sentences in the earlier editions too gross even for the unfastidious eyes of his own age and country), and the glowing, the impassioned diction of others, the base treachery and ingratitude by which the favors of his earliest benefactors are repaid, and the "ggnra of women, ἄρρητα which, whatever their weaknesses and vices, ought to have been sacred at least to him, all unblushingly laid open to the public gaze, these abandon the man to universal disgust and detestation; while, at the same time, we have a disagreeable consciousness, that we are not yet disenchanted from the spell of his inimitable style. No other book generates in the same degree that painful mistrust of genius; that chilling sense of the insincerity, the falsehood of all the fire, and energy, and passion of language, to the contagion of which we have at once surrendered ourselves; the withering suspicion, that the noblest bursts of poetry come not from the heart of the poet; that all the vehemence, the moral indignation of the orator may be but factitious and mechanical. In Rousseau, there is not even that comic and playful turn, which, in the worst parts of Voltaire and in Don Juan, in some degree prepares us for the jar upon our high-wrought feelings; with them, the jest which breaks in upon us during an exquisite description or a burst of deep passion, is unwelcome and ill-timed, but still it is a jest; and, though grieved and revolted, we make some allowance for the temptation, and admit the plea of wayward humor in the poet, and his uncontrollable disposition to see things in a ludicrous light, as some, however poor and imperfect, extenuation. But in Rousseau all is alike serious, earnest, intense; that which is mean, and profligate, and obscene seems to come from the very depths of his heart as much as the most intense sentiment; or rather, the imagination has so completely brought itself to speak the language of the feelings, that even when our eyes are opened, we can scarcely persuade ourselves that all those eloquent dreams of unattainable virtue, those wild and distempered, but still eager yearnings after what is great and ennobling, are the mere creations of an ardent fancy, without any real kindred or communion with the moral being of the man. The autobiography of Rousseau was a deed of deliberate selfmurder; the Life of Diderot, which at present lies before us, we might almost describe as an act of unintentional parricide. We can scarcely believe that some parts of these volumes have seen the light under female auspices; that the daughter of Diderot is answerable for more than the "Mémoire,” — either for the larger and more important correspondence with an unmarried mistress, at the perpetual indelicacy and grossness of which, it will be impossible for us to do more than to hint; or for one paper particularly, at the close of the work, which we should have hoped that even the least scrupulous part of the Parisian press would have hesitated to publish. We would not, indeed, bring too heavy a charge against Madame de Vandeul, but we must confess that, in this yet imperfectly enlightened country, we could scarcely conceive a daughter exposing to the world even those questionable passages of his private life, which are contained in this lady's brief memoir of her father; his ingratitude and unkindness to her mother, his claim to the authorship of some of the most licentious books in the language; and all this with the most perfect sangfroid, apparently without the least suspicion that she is doing dishonor to the memory of hin, for whom she appears to have entertained the warmest filial attachment. We regret this the more, because the Memoir, brief as it is, is written with singular ease and vivacity, and gives, especially when illustrated by the correspondence with Mademoiselle Voland, altogether a very curious picture of the progress of a literary adventurer, who, commencing with the lowest book-making drudgery, at length rose, to be if not the head, at least a distinguished member of the most 'influential literary society in Europe. As editor of the Encyclopédie, Diderot obtained a most powerful, however perniciously misused, authority over the mind of his age; and was courted, invited to the capital, and received on terms of familiar intimacy by the great female autocrat of Petersburgh. A sketch of such a life will scarcely be unamusing or uninstructive, particularly if contrasted with the same kind of literary career in England; as it may throw light on some of those circumstances, which caused the public mind, especially among men of letters, to diverge so far asunder at the great crisis which closed the last century. Denis Diderot was born in the year 1713, at Langres, in Champagne. His father was an honest cutler, a branch of trade which had been followed by his family for two hundred years. He was a man of some ingenuity, having attracted notice by inventing a particular kind of lancet; and of strict integrity, and plain good sense, which showed itself in his conduct towards his wild and unmanageable son. Young Denis was intended for an ecclesiastic; an uncle in the church was to vacate a canonry in his favor. The boy, according to his biographer, gave early proofs of the sensibility of his disposition; at three years old he was carried to see an execution, he returned sick, and was attacked by a violent jaundice. At eight or nine years he commenced his clerical studies under the Jesuits of his native town; and at twelve received the tonsure; but of this part of his life he had related to his daughter but few anecdotes. Once, on account of a quarrel with a fellow-student, he was excluded from competition for the prizes at the public examinations. He could not endure the disgrace of staying at home with his parents; he went to the gate of the college, was refused admittance, rushed in with the crowd, and passed the porter, who struck at him with his halberd; took his place, and carried off all the prizes; returned with his crowns round his neck, and his arms loaded with books. His mother received him with open arms, and it was not till the next Sunday that it was discovered that he had received a serious wound from the porter's pike, which either, in his excitement, he had not felt, or, from pride of spirit, he had determined not to complain of. But young Denis loved "la chasse" better than his studies. The tutors remonstrated, and Denis determined to give up his learned pursuits. "You must be a cutler then," said his father. "With "all my heart," replied the boy; but after some days' confinement, and after having spoiled some of his father's best penknives, he exclaimed, "I like what vexes better than what tires "me," took up his books again, marched off to his college, and ever after followed his studies with the utmost perseverance. Nothing is more remarkable in the memoirs of those times than the vigilance with which the Jesuits seem to have watched all the seminaries of education, and endeavoured by every artifice, wherever promising talents and rising character were developed, to enroll the humble, but perhaps ambitious youth, in their own body. In the life of Marmontel, there is a curious account of their attempt to ensnare him, and they did not overlook the opportunity |