_New Heloisa_, the greatest of the romances that were
directly modelled on Richardson. He had no vision for the strange social
aspirations that were silently haunting the inner mind of his
contemporaries. Of these aspirations, in all their depth and
significance, Diderot was the half-conscious oracle and unaccepted
prophet. It was not deliberate philosophical calculation that made him
so, but the spontaneous impulse of his own genius and temperament. He
was no conscious political destroyer, but his soul was open to all those
voices of sentiment, to all those ideals of domestic life, to those
primary forces of natural affection, which were so urgently pressing
asunder the old feudal bonds, and so swiftly ripening a vast social
crisis. Thus his enthusiasm for Richardson was, at its root, another
side of that love of the life of peaceful industry, which gave one of
its noblest characteristics to the Encyclopaedia.

To this enthusiasm Diderot gave voice in half a dozen pages which are
counted among his masterpieces. Richardson died in 1761, and Diderot
flung off a commemorative piece, which is without any order and
connection; but this makes it more an echo, as he called it, of the
tumult of his own heart. Here, indeed, he merits Gautier's laudatory
phrase, and is as "flamboyant" as one could desire. To understand the
march of feeling in French literature, and to measure the growth and
expansion in criticism, we need only compare Diderot's _eloge_ on
Richardson with Fontenelle's _eloge_ on Dangeau or Leibnitz. The
exaggerations of phrase, the violences of feeling, the broken
apostrophes, give to Diderot's _eloge_ an unpleasant tone of
declamation. Some of us may still prefer the moderation, the subtlety,
the nice discrimination, of the critics of another school. Still it
would be a sign of narrowness and short-sight not to discern the
sincerity, the movement, the real meaning underneath all that profusion
of glaring colour.

"O Richardson, Richardson, unique among men in my eyes, thou shalt
be my favourite all my life long! If I am hard driven by pressing
need, if my friend is overtaken by want, if the mediocrity of my
fortune is not enough to give my children what is necessary for
their education, I will sell my books; but thou shalt remain to me,
thou shalt remain on the same shelf with Moses, Homer, Euripides,
Sophocles!

"O Richardson, I make bold to say that the truest histor