his is all true enough, and if Seneca had been only a
statesman, the world would probably have applauded him for clinging to
the helm at all cost. Unhappily, he was not only a statesman, but a
moralist. The two characters are always hard to reconcile, as perhaps
any parliamentary candidate might tell us. The contrast between lofty
writing and slippery policy has been too violent for Seneca's good fame,
as it was for Francis Bacon's. It is ever at his own proper risk and
peril that a man dares to present high ideals to the world.

[183] Above, vol. ii. chap. i.

[184] iii. 110, 111.

One of the strangest of the many strange digressions in which the Essay
on Claudius and Nero abounds, brings us within the glare of the great
literary quarrel of the century. Soon after Rousseau settled in Paris
for the last time, on his return from England and the subsequent
vagabondage, it was known that he had written the _Confessions_, dealing
at least as freely with the lives of others as with his own. He had even
in 1770 and 1771 given readings of certain passages from them, until
Madame d'Epinay, and perhaps also the Marechale de Luxemburg, prevailed
on the authorities to interfere. No one was angrier than Diderot, and
in the first edition of the Essay, published in the year of Rousseau's
death (1778), he incongruously placed in the midst of his disquisitions
on the philosopher of the first century, a long and acrimonious note
upon the perversities of the reactionary philosopher of the eighteenth.
He was believed by those who talked to him to be in dread of the
appearance of the _Confessions_, and we may accept this readily enough,
without assuming that Diderot was conscious of hidden enormities which
he was afraid of seeing publicly uncovered. Rousseau, as Diderot well
knew, was so wayward, so strangely oblique both in vision and judgment,
that innocence was no security against malice and misrepresentation.

Rousseau's name has never lacked fanatical partisans down to our own
day, and Diderot was attacked by some of the earliest of them for his
note of disparagement. The first part of the _Confessions_--all that
Diderot ever saw--appeared in 1782, and in the same year Diderot
published a second edition of the Essay on Claudius and Nero, so
augmented by replies, inserted in season and out of season, to the
diatribes of the party of Rousseau, that as it now stands the reader may
well doubt whether the substance and foundatio