variety of form by virtue of its inherent quality of motion.[52]

It is a characteristic and displeasing mark of the time that Diderot in
the midst of these serious speculations, should have set himself (1748)
to the composition of a story in the kind which the author of the _Sofa_
had made highly popular. The mechanism of this deplorable piece is more
grossly disgusting--I mean æsthetically, not morally--than anything to
be found elsewhere in the too voluminous library of impure literature.
The idea would seem to have been borrowed from one of the old
Fabliaux.[53] But what is tolerable in the quaint and _naïf_ verse of
the twelfth or thirteenth century, becomes shocking when deliberately
rendered by a grave man into bald unblushing prose of the eighteenth.
The humour, the rich sparkle, the wit, the merry _gaillardise_, have all
vanished; we are left with the vapid dregs of an obscene anachronism.
Mr. Carlyle, who knows how to be manly in these matters, and affects
none of the hypocritical airs of our conventional criticism, yet has not
more energetically than truly pronounced this "the beastliest of all
past, present, or future dull novels." As "the next mortal creature,
even a Reviewer, again compelled to glance into that book," I have felt
the propriety of our humorist's injunction to such a one, "to bathe
himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until
the even." Diderot himself, as might have been expected, soon had the
grace to repent him of this shameful book, and could never hear it
mentioned without a very lively embarrassment.[54]

As I have said before,[55] it was such books as this, as Crébillon's
novels, as Duclos's Confessions du Comte X., and the dissoluteness of
manners indicated by them, which invested Rousseau's New Heloïsa
(1761) with its delightful and irresistible fascinations. Having
pointed out elsewhere the significance of the licentiousness from