life, and for
a vigorous and singular personality.

Diderot's knowledge of our language now did him good service. One of
the details of the method by which he taught himself English is curious.
Instead of using an Anglo-French dictionary, he always used one in
Anglo-Latin. The sense of a Latin or Greek word, he said, is better
established, more surely fixed, more definite, less liable to capricious
peculiarities of convention, than the vernacular words which the whim or
ignorance of the lexicographer may choose. The reader composes his own
vocabulary, and gains both correctness and energy.[25] However this may
be, his knowledge of English was more accurate than is possessed by most
French writers of our own day. Diderot's first work for the booksellers
after his marriage seems to have been a translation in three volumes of
Stanyan's History of Greece. For this, to the amazement of his wife, he
got a hundred crowns. About the same time (1745) he published Principles
of Moral Philosophy, or an Essay of Mr. S. on Merit and Virtue. The
initial stands for Shaftesbury, and the book translated was his Inquiry
concerning Virtue and Merit.

Towards the same time, again, Diderot probably made acquaintance with
Madame de Puisieux, of whom it has been said with too patent humour that
she was without either the virtue or the merit on which her admirer had
just been declaiming. We are told that it was her need of money which
inspired him with his first original work. As his daughter's memoir,
from which the tale comes, is swarming with blunders, this may not be
more true than some of her other statements. All that we know of
Diderot's sense and sincerity entitles him to the benefit of the doubt.
The Philosophical Thoughts (1746) are a continuation of the vein of the
annotations on the Essay. He is said to have thrown these reflections
together between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Nor is there anything
incredible in such rapid production, when we remember the sweeping
impetuosity with which he flung himself into all that he undertook. The
Thoughts are evidently the fruits of long meditation, and the literary
arrangement of them may well have been an easy task. They are a robuster
development of the scepticism which was the less important side of
Shaftesbury. The parliament of Paris ordered the book to be burnt along
with some others (July 7, 1746), partly because they were heterodox,
partly because the practice of publishing books