After a couple of years the young Diderot, like other sons of Adam, had
to think of earning his bread. The usual struggle followed between
youthful genius and old prudence. His father, who was a man of
substance, gave him his choice between medicine and law. Law he refused
because he did not choose to spend his days in doing other people's
business; and medicine, because he had no turn for killing. His father
resolutely declined to let him have more money on these terms, and
Diderot was thrown on his wits.

The man of letters shortly before the middle of the century was as much
an outcast and a beggar in Paris as he was in London. Voltaire, Gray,
and Richardson were perhaps the only three conspicuous writers of the
time, who had never known what it was to want a meal or to go without a
shirt. But then none of the three depended on his pen for his
livelihood. Every other man of that day whose writings have delighted
and instructed the world since, had begun his career, and more than one
of them continued and ended it, as a drudge and a vagabond. Fielding and
Collins, Goldsmith and Johnson, in England; Goldoni in Italy;
Vauvenargues, Marmontel, Rousseau, in France; Winckelmann and Lessing in
Germany, had all alike been doubtful of dinner, and trembled about a
night's lodging. They all knew the life of mean hazard, sorry shift,
and petty expedient again and again renewed. It is sorrowful to think
how many of the compositions of that time that do most to soothe and
elevate some of the best hours of our lives, were written by men with
aching hearts, in the midst of haggard perplexities. The man of letters,
as distinguished alike from the old-fashioned scholar and the systematic
thinker, now first became a distinctly marked type. Macaulay has
contrasted the misery of the Grub Street hack of Johnson's time, with
the honours accorded to men like Prior and Addison at an earlier date,