It is a characteristic and displeasing mark of the time that Diderot in the midst of these serious speculations, should have set himself (1748) to the composition of a story in the kind which the author of the _Sofa_ had made highly popular. The mechanism of this deplorable piece is more grossly disgusting--I mean aesthetically, not morally--than anything to be found elsewhere in the too voluminous library of impure literature. The idea would seem to have been borrowed from one of the old Fabliaux.[53] But what is tolerable in the quaint and _naif_ verse of the twelfth or thirteenth century, becomes shocking when deliberately rendered by a grave man into bald unblushing prose of the eighteenth. The humour, the rich sparkle, the wit, the merry _gaillardise_, have all vanished; we are left with the vapid dregs of an obscene anachronism. Mr. Carlyle, who knows how to be manly in these matters, and affects none of the hypocritical airs of our conventional criticism, yet has not more energetically than truly pronounced this "the beastliest of all past, present, or future dull novels." As "the next mortal creature, even a Reviewer, again compelled to glance into that book," I have felt the propriety of our humorist's injunction to such a one, "to bathe himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until the even." Diderot himself, as might have been expected, soon had the grace to repent him of this shameful book, and could never hear it mentioned without a very lively embarrassment.[54]