and
enlightened Englishman, whose memory must be held in perpetual honour
among us. Samuel Romilly, then a young man of four-and-twenty, visited
Paris in 1781. He made the acquaintance of the namesake who had written
the articles on watch-making in the Encyclopaedia, and whose son had
written the more famous articles on Toleration and Virtue. By this
honest man Romilly was introduced to D'Alembert and Diderot. The former
was in weak health and said very little. Diderot, on the contrary, was
all warmth and eagerness, and talked to his visitor with as little
reserve as if he had been long and intimately acquainted with him. He
spoke on politics, religion, and philosophy. He praised the English for
having led the way to sound philosophy, but the adventurous genius of
the French, he said, had pushed them on before their guides. "You
others," he continued, "mix up theology with your philosophy; that is to
spoil everything, it is to mix up lies with truth; _il faut sabrer la
theologie_--we must put theology to the sword." He was ostentatious,
Romilly says, of a total disbelief in the existence of a God. He quoted
Plato, "the author of all the good theology that ever existed in the
world, as saying that there is a vast curtain drawn over the heavens,
and that men must content themselves with what passes beneath that
curtain, without ever attempting to raise it; and in order to complete
my conversion from my unhappy errors, he read me all through a little
work of his own"--of which we shall presently speak. On politics he
talked very eagerly, "and inveighed with great warmth against the
tyranny of the French government. He told me that he had long meditated
a work upon the death of Charles the First; that he had studied the
trial of that prince; and that his intention was to have tried him over
again, and to have sent him to the scaffold if he had found him guilty,
but that he had at last relinquished the design. In England he would
have executed it, but he had not the courage to do so in France.
D'Alembert, as I have observed was more cautious; he contented himself
with observing what an effect philosophy had in his own time produced on
the minds of the people. The birth of the Dauphin (known afterwards as
Lewis XVII., the unhappy prisoner of the Temple) afforded him an
example. He was old enough, he said, to remember when such an event had
made the whole nation drunk with joy (1729), but now they regarded with
great indiffere