er Therese told
fibs, whether, on the 14th of the month, Grimm was grossly impertinent,
and whether, on the 15th, Rousseau was outrageously rude, whether
Rousseau revealed a secret to Diderot, which Diderot revealed to
Saint-Lambert, and whether, if Diderot revealed it, he believed that
Rousseau had revealed it before--these circumstances form, as Lord
Morley says, 'a tale of labyrinthine nightmares,' and Mrs. Macdonald has
done very little to mitigate either the contortions of the labyrinths or
the horror of the dreams. Her book is exceedingly ill-arranged; it is
enormously long, filling two large volumes, with an immense apparatus of
appendices and notes; it is full of repetitions and of irrelevant
matter; and the argument is so indistinctly set forth that even an
instructed reader finds great difficulty in following its drift.
Without, however, plunging into the abyss of complications which yawns
for us in Mrs. Macdonald's pages, it may be worth while to touch upon
one point with which she has dealt (perhaps wisely for her own case!)
only very slightly--the question of the motives which could have induced
Grimm and Diderot to perpetuate a series of malignant lies.

It is, doubtless, conceivable that Grimm, who was Madame d'Epinay's
lover, was jealous of Rousseau, who was Madame d'Epinay's friend. We
know very little of Grimm's character, but what we do know seems to show
that he was a jealous man and an ambitious man; it is possible that a
close alliance with Madame d'Epinay may have seemed to him a necessary
step in his career; and it is conceivable that he may have determined
not to rest until his most serious rival in Madame d'Epinay's affections
was utterly cast out. He was probably prejudiced against Rousseau from
the beginning, and he may have allowed his prejudices to colour his view
of Rousseau's character and acts. The violence of the abuse which Grimm
and the rest of the Encyclopaedists hurled against the miserable
Jean-Jacques was certainly quite out of proportion to the real facts of
the case. Whenever he is mentioned one is sure of hearing something
about _traitre_ and _mensonge_ and _sceleratesse_. He is referred to as
often as not as if he were some dangerous kind of wild beast. This was
Grimm's habitual language with regard to him; and this was the view of
his character which Madame d'Epinay finally expressed in her book. The
important question is--did Grimm know that Rousseau was in reality an
honour