f a son, died at the
end of October 1783. Turgot, gazing with eyes of astonished sternness on
a society hurrying incorrigibly with joyful speed along the path of
destruction, had passed away two years before (1781). Voltaire, the
great intellectual director of Europe for fifty years, and Rousseau, the
great emotional reactionist, had both, as we know, died in 1778. The
little companies in which, from Adrienne Lecouvreur, the Marquise de
Lambert, and Madame de Tencin, in the first half of the century, groups
of intelligent men and women had succeeded in founding informal schools
of disinterested opinion, and in finally removing the centre of
criticism and intellectual activity from Versailles to Paris, had now
nearly all come to an end. Madame du Deffand died in 1780, Madame
Geoffrin in 1779, and in 1776 Mdlle. Lespinasse, whose letters will long
survive her, as giving a burning literary note to the vagueness of
suffering and pain of soul. One of Diderot's favourite companions in
older days, Galiani, the antiquary, the scholar, the politician, the
incomparable mimic, the shrewdest, wittiest, and gayest of men after
Voltaire, was feeling the dull grasp of approaching death under his
native sky at Naples. Galiani's _Dialogues on the Trade in Grain_
(1769-70) contained, under that most unpromising title, a piece of
literature which for its verve, rapidity, wit, dialectical subtlety, and
real strength of thought, has hardly been surpassed by masterpieces of a
wider recognition. Voltaire vowed that Plato and Moliere must have
combined to produce a book that was as amusing as the best of romances,
and as instructive as the best of serious books. Diderot, who had a hand
in retouching the _Dialogues_ for the press,[200] went so far as to
pronounce them worthy of a place along with the _Provincial Letters_ of
Pascal, and declared that, like those immortal pieces, Galiani's
dialogues would remain as a model of perfection in their own kind, long
after both the subject and the personages concerned had lost their
interest.[201] The prophecy has not come quite true, for the world is
busy, and heedless, and much the prey of accident and capricious
tradition in the books that it reads. Yet even now, although Galiani
was probably wrong on the special issue between himself and the
economists, it would be well if people would turn to his demolition, as
wise as witty, of the doctrine of absolute truths in political economy.
Galiani's constan