en called the second generation of the _philosophes_, who
were naturally the pupils of the first, "were not like [that] first,"
that is to say, they did not reproduce the special talents of their
immediate masters in this department of ours, save in two instances.
Diderot's genius did not propagate itself in the novel way at all[385]:
indeed, as has been said, his best novel was not known till this second
generation itself was waning. The most brilliant of his direct hearers,
Joubert, took to another department; or rather, in his famous _Pensees_,
isolated and perfected the utterances scattered through the master's
immense and disorderly work. Naigeon, the most devoted, who might have
taken for his motto a slight alteration of the Mahometan confession of
faith, "There is no God; but there is only one Diderot, and I am his
prophet," was a dull fellow, and also, to adopt a Carlylian epithet, a
"dull-snuffling" one, who could not have told a neck-tale if the
Hairibee of the guillotine had caught him and given him a merciful
chance. Voltaire in Marmontel, and Rousseau in Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre, were more fortunate, though both the juniors considerably
transformed their masters' fashions; and Marmontel was always more or
less, and latterly altogether, an apostate from the principle that the
first and last duty of man is summed up in _ecrasons l'infame_.

This latter writer has had vicissitudes both in English and French
appreciation. We translated him early, and he had an immense influence
on the general Edgeworthian school, and on Miss Edgeworth herself. Much
later Mr. Ruskin "took him up."[386] But neither his good nor his bad
points have, for a long time, been such as greatly to commend
themselves, either to the major part of the nineteenth century, or to
what has yet passed of the twentieth, on either side of the channel.

He was, no doubt, only a second-class man of letters, and though he
ranks really high in this class, he was unfortunately much influenced by
more or less passing fashions, fads, and fancies of his
time--_sensibilite_ (see next chapter) philosophism,
politico-philanthropic economy, and what not. He was also much of a
"polygraph," and naturally a good deal of his polygraphy does not
concern us, though parts of his _Memoirs_, especially the rather
well-known accounts of his sufferings as a new-comer[387] in the
atrocious Bastille, show capital tale-telling faculty. His unequal
criticism, sometimes ver