The ancient turned upon these masterpieces of depravation the flash of intellectual scorn; the modern eyes them with a certain moral patience, and something of that curious kind of interest, looking half like sympathy, which a hunter has for the object of his chase.
The Rameau of the dialogue was a real personage, and there is a dispute whether Diderot has not calumniated him.

Evidence enough remains that he was at least a person of singular character and irregular disastrous life.

Diderot's general veracity of temperament would make us believe that his picture is authentic, but the interest of the dialogue is exactly the same in either case.

Juvenal's fifth satire would be worth neither more nor less, however much were found out about Trebius.
"Rameau is one of the most eccentric figures in the country, where God has not made them lacking.

He is a mixture of elevation and lowness, of good sense and madness; the notions of good and bad must be mixed up together in strange confusion in his head, for he shows the good qualities that nature has bestowed on him without any ostentation, and the bad ones without the smallest shame.