An identification nearly twenty years afterwards of verbal resemblances and minute references, in a work that had been only a short time in his hands, cannot be counted testimony of the highest kind.

We have thus the extraordinary circumstance that for a great number of years, down almost to the present decade, the text of the one masterpiece of a famous man who died so recently as 1784 rested on a single manuscript, and that a manuscript of disputed authenticity.[295] Critics differ extremely in their answers to the question of the subject or object of Diderot's singular "farce-tragedy." One declares it to be merely a satirical picture of contemporary manners.

Another insists that it is meant to be an ironical _reductio ad absurdum_ of the theory of self-interest, by exhibiting a concrete example of its working in all its grossness.

A third holds that it was composed by way of rejoinder to Palissot's comedy _( Les Philosophes_), 1760, which had brought the chiefs of the rationalistic school upon the stage, and presented them as enemies of the human race.

A fourth suspects that the personal and dramatic portions are no more than a setting for the discussion of the comparative merits of the French and Italian schools of music.