wearied out; to-day the prophecy seems in a fair way of fulfilment. [2] The handsome edition of Diderot’s “Œuvres” in some twenty volumes, edited by Assézat and Tourneux, contains nearly a fourth of previously unpublished material, much of considerable interest. The _centenaire_ edition of his “Œuvres Choisies,” comprised in one moderate-sized volume, includes all that most people need read of Diderot’s works, and is, on the whole, a most varied and judicious selection, made by such competent editors as Letourneau, Lefèvre, Guyot, Véron, &c. Mr. Morley’s well-known work on Diderot and the Encyclopædists has done more than anything else to create an intelligent English interest in the matter. The whole life of Diderot, all his actions and all his words, everything that he wrote, bears the impress of his ever-flaming enthusiasm. That “air vif, ardent et fou,” which, in his own words, marked him in early life, meets us at every turn. As a boy at the Jesuit College he wished to go out into the world. “But what do you wish to be?” asked over and over again that most excellent of fathers, the cutler of Langres. And the young Diderot persisted that he wanted to be nothing: “mais rien, mais rien du tout.” He was not the last youth who, feeling the stirring of a deep instinct, would not, and could not, shut himself down to one narrow path of life. But to the men of this stamp “nothing” means “everything.” Then ten years passed, ten years, as his daughter wrote, passed “sometimes in good society, sometimes in indifferent, not to say bad, society, given up to work, to pain, to pleasure, to weariness, to want, sometimes intoxicated with gaiety, sometimes drowned in bitter reflection.” He taught mathematics: if the scholar was apt, he taught him all day; if he was a fool, he left him. “He was paid in books, in furniture, in linen, in money, or not at all.” When teaching failed he had to earn money how he could--as by supplying a missionary with a stock of sermons. Once he had to starve for a few days. That was not the least instructive experience to the youth, for he resolved that, whenever he could help it, no fellow-creature should suffer the like.