Take a third example of a very different kind. We have a short review[167] by Diderot (first extracted by M. Assézat from MS.) of Voltaire’s _Lettres d’Amabed_. This book, it is hardly necessary to say, is anti-religious: and Diderot was violently anti-religious himself. It is saturated with Voltaire’s sniggering indecency: and Diderot was the author of _Les Bijoux Indiscrets_.[168] Lastly, it was by Voltaire, of whom Diderot, though an independent, was an eager and faithful champion. But it is “without taste, without _finesse_, without invention; a botching up of stale blackguardisms about Moses and Christ and the rest; it has no interest, no fire, no verisimilitude, but plenty of dirt and of clumsy fun.” This is the plain critical truth about the _Letters of Amabed_, and it is Diderot who says it in so many words, and says it moreover in MS.—which could curry no favour with, and obtain none from, public hypocrisy and cant. [Sidenote: _The Examination of Seneca_.] Turn the examining instrument from these short pieces to the long critical examination of Seneca,[169] which forms the second part of the _Essai sur les Règnes de Claude et de Néron_. It is open to any one to agree or disagree with Diderot’s uncompromising, though by no means indiscriminate, championship of the usurious philosopher-statesman; as a matter of fact, though it is a matter of only argumentative importance, I am, except on the head of style, one of those who disagree with it. But agree or disagree as he may with the conclusion, no competent critic, I should suppose, can fail to admire the thoroughness with which Diderot has taken in and digested his complicated literary subject, the range and extent of literary knowledge with which he illustrates it, the readiness of his argumentation and exposition, and, above all, the craftsmanlike and attractive fashion in which he combines analysis and criticism. Again, I doubt whether there is an earlier example of what we may call “freehand” criticism—the criticism which is not tethered to the necessity of applying or expounding rules in reference to its subject, but can take that subject in, can deal with it on its own plan and specification—can, in fact, _appreciate_, without being bound to refer to and obey some official book of prices. There are some two hundred pages of this appreciation, and one’s only reason (itself rather uncritical) for qualified satisfaction with it is that it does not handle some writer of greater intrinsic value and wider artistic appeal. [Sidenote: _The quality and eminence of his critical position._]