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] As I have said before,[55] it was such books as this, as Crebillon's novels, as Duclos's Confessions du Comte X., and the dissoluteness of manners indicated by them, which invested Rousseau's New Heloisa (1761) with its delightful and irresistible fascinations.

Having pointed out elsewhere the significance of the licentiousness from which the philosophic party did not escape untainted,[56] I need not here do more than make two short remarks.

First, the corruption which had seized the court after the death of Lewis XIV.

in the course of a few years had reached the middle class in the town.

The loosening of social fibre, caused by the insenate speculation at the time of Law, no doubt furthered the spread of demoralisation.