ew.
In 1759 the privilege of publication was revoked, but the Government
did not enforce its own decree. Through all difficulties and dangers
Diderot held his ground. One day he wrote a fragment of the history
of philosophy; the next he was in a workshop examining the
construction of some machine: nothing was too great or too small for
his audacity or his patience. To achieve the work, tact was needed
as well as courage; at times he condescended to disguise his real
opinions, striving to weather the storm by yielding to it. In 1765
his gigantic labours were substantially accomplished, though the
last plates of the _Encyclopedie_ were not issued until 1772. When
all was finished, the scientific movement of the century was
methodised and popularised; a barrier against the invasion of the
past was erected; the rationalist philosophy, with all its truths
and all its errors, its knowledge and its ignorance, had obtained
its _Summa_.

But, besides this co-operative work, Diderot did much, and in many
directions, single-handed, flinging out his thoughts with ardent
haste, and often leaving what he had written to the mercies of chance;
a prodigal sower of good and evil seed. Several of his most remarkable
pieces came to light, as it were, by accident, and long after his
death. His novel _La Religieuse_--influenced to some extent by
Richardson, whom he superstitiously admired--is a repulsive exposure
of conventual life as it appeared to him, and of its moral disorder.
_Jacques le Fataliste_, in which the manner is coarsely imitated from
Sterne, a book ill-composed and often malodorous, contains, among
its heterogeneous tales, one celebrated narrative, the _Histoire de
Mme. de la Pommeraye_, relating a woman's base revenge on a faithless
lover. If anything of Diderot's can be named a masterpiece, it is
certainly _Le Neveu de Rameau_, a satire and a character-study of
the parasite, thrown into the form of dialogue, which he handled with
brilliant success; it remained unknown until the appearance of a
German version (1805), made by Goethe from a manuscript copy.

In his _Salons_, Diderot elevated and enlarged the criticism of the
pictorial art in France. His eye for colour and for contour was
admirable; but it is less the technique of paintings that he studies
than the subjects, the ideas, and the moral significance. Such
criticism may be condemned as literary rather than artistic; it was,
however, new and instructive, and did m