From the opening of Europe's great public galleries—the British Museum in 1750, the Hermitage in 1764, the Uffizi in 1765, and the Louvre in 1793—to Diderot and d’Alembert's Encyclopédie des Sciences, des Arts, et des Métiers, the Enlightenment's instinct to collect, preserve, and make public all forms of knowledge dominated the eighteenth century's cultural productivity. Now, as then, the public space of the museum hosts a systematized eclecticism, one that informs and entertains its visitors, that preserves and disseminates its contents, and that boldly creates a comprehensive experience through singular representative examples. Despite the proliferation of museum culture since the eighteenth century, however, a descriptive series of texts imitating a collection of exhibits in the style of Diderot's intimate and quirky Salons essays has fallen out of style. There are any number of reasons for this, as Diderot flippantly points out: this kind of textual museum is built on curatorial principles that include spontaneity and subjective impressions. The resulting collage is sometimes “false” because hypothetical, likely controversial because biased, and risks putting the author at odds with even his friendliest readers now and then. All this seems too perilous even for today's adventurous theorizing.