There was one man who might have told us a thousand interesting things both about Diderot's conversations with Voltaire, and his relations with other men. This man was Naigeon, to whom Diderot gave most of his papers, and who always professed, down to his death in 1814, to be Diderot's closest adherent and most authoritative expounder. Diderot was, as he always knew and said, less an author than a talker; not a talker like Johnson, but like Coleridge. If Naigeon could only have contented himself with playing reporter, and could have been blessed by nature with the rare art of Boswell. "We wanted," as Carlyle says, "to see and know how it stood with the bodily man, the working and warfaring Denis Diderot; how he looked and lived, what he did, what he said." Instead of which, nothing but "a dull, sulky, snuffling, droning, interminable lecture on Atheistic Philosophy," delivered with the vehemence of some pulpit-drumming Gowkthrapple, or "precious Mr. Jabesh Rentowel." Naigeon belonged to the too numerous class of men and women overabundantly endowed with unwise intellect. He was acute, diligent, and tenacious; fond of books, especially when they had handsome margins and fine bindings; above all things, he was the most fanatical atheist, and the most indefatigable propagandist and eager proselytiser which that form of religion can boast. We do not know the date of his first acquaintance with Diderot;[190] we only know that at the end of Diderot's days he had no busier or more fervent disciple than Naigeon. To us, at all events, whatever it may have been to Diderot, the acquaintance and discipleship have proved good for very little. [190] The _Biographie Universelle_, after giving 1738 as the date of Naigeon's birth, absurdly attributes to him the article on _Ame_ in the Encyclopaedia, which was published in 1752, when Naigeon was fourteen years old.