With the eternal exception of Germany, French literature during this time was not much studied abroad in its older divisions, and had not much assistance to offer, in the direction of which we are now speaking, in its more modern. When a man like Sterne touched the former, it was probably for the reasons so handsomely palliated in the last sentence of the last paragraph: and few others touched it at all. The influence of the modern literature of France, exaggerated as it may have been, had yet been considerable enough to deprive it of all value as an _alterative_ save in the cases of exceptional and outlying writers like La Fontaine and Fontenelle, and to some extant Marivaux, the last of whom had himself already derived much from England, if he was to give much back to her.[337] In other parts of Europe this influence was no doubt still very great: it conditioned, as we have seen, the powerful action of Lessing, both in the way of attraction and in that of repulsion. But of the persons who attracted and inspired Lessing, Diderot, however unlike Bentham, had something of the Benthamic fate of requiring transportation and transformation before he could be really operative; and the gospel of Marmontel was altogether too inconsistent and transitional to be very effective. Rousseau, of course, to mention him yet once more, is epoch-making enough in himself. But Rousseau is, on the purely literary side, rather an immense propelling force than an origin: and it is not to be forgotten, though it often has been, that the _Confessions_ and the _Rêveries_, the most important of his works as literature, did not appear till after his death. As for _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, it is a question whether it is nearly so much a literary origin as _Manon Lescaut_, its elder by a generation. [Sidenote: _Of Italian._]