ROUSSEAUJean Baptiste (1670-1741), a poet of some merit and a wit of considerable dexterity, was born at Paris on the IOth April 1670; he died at Brussels on the 17th March 1741. The son of a shoemaker, he is said to have been ashamed of his parentage and relations when he acquired a certain popularity, but the abundance of literary quarrels in which he spent his life, and the malicious inventiveness of his chief enemy, Voltaire, make any such stories of small account. He was certainly well educated and early gained favour with Boileau, who did not regard many people favourably; but authentic intelligence as to his youth is very scarce. He does not seem to have attempted literature very young, and when he began he began with the theatre, for which at no part of his life does he seem to have had any aptitude. A one-act comedy, Le Cafe, failed in 1694, and he was not much happier with a more ambitious play, Les Flatteurs, or with the opera of Venus and Adonis. He would not take these warnings, and tried in 1700 another comedy, Le Capmcieujc, which had the same fate. By this time he had already (it is not quite clear how) obtained influential patrons, such as Breteuil and Tallard, had gone with Tallard as an attaché to London, and, in days when literature still led to high position, seemed likely to achieve success. To tell the whole story of his misfortunes would take far more space than can be spared him here. They began with what may be called a club squabble at a certain Café Laurent, which was much frequented by literary men, and where Rousseau indulged in lampoons on his companions. A shower of libellous and sometimes obscene verses was written by or attributed to him, and at last he was practically turned out of the café. At the same time his poems, as yet only singly printed or in manuscript, acquired him a great reputation, and not unjustly, for Rousseau is certainly the best French writer of serious lyrics between Racine and Chénier. He had in 1701 been made a member of the Académie des Inscriptions; he had been offered, though he had not accepted, profitable places in the revenue department; he had become a favourite of the libertine but not Uninfluential coterie of the Temple; and in 1710 he presented himself as a candidate for the Académie Française. Then began the second chapter (the first had lasted ten years) of a history of the animosities of authors which is almost the strangest though not the most important on record. A copy of verses, more offensive than ever, was handed to the original object of Rousseau’s jealousy, and, getting wind, occasioned the bastinadoing of the reputed author by a certain La Faye or La Faille, a soldier who was reflected on. Legal proceedings of various kinds followed, and Rousseau either had or thought he had ground for ascribing the lampoon to Joseph Saurin. More law ensued, and the end of it was that in 1712 Rousseau, not appearing, was condemned par contumace to perpetual exile. He actually suffered it, remaining for the rest of his life in foreign countries except for a short time in 1738, when he returned clandestinely to Paris to try for a recall. It should be said that he might have had this if he had not steadfastly protested his innocence and refused to accept a mere pardon. No one has ever completely cleared up the story, and it must be admitted that, except as exhibiting very strikingly the strange idiosyncrasies of the 18th century in France, and as having affected the fortunes of a man of letters of some eminence, it is not worth much attention.

Rousseau’s good and ill luck did not cease with his exile. First Prince Eugene and then other persons of distinction took him under their protection, and he printed at Soleure the first edition of his poetical works. But by fault or misfortune he still continued to quarrel. Voltaire and he met at Brussels in 1722, and, though Voltaire had hitherto pretended or felt a great admiration for him, something happened which turned this admiration into hatred. Voltaire’s Le Pour et Le Contre is said to have shocked Rousseau, who expressed his sentiments freely. At any rate the latter had thenceforward no fiercer enemy than Voltaire. Rousseau, however, was not much affected by Voltaire’s enmity, and pursued for nearly twenty years a life of literary work, of courtiership, and of rather obscure speculation and business. Although he never made his fortune, it does not seem that he was ever in want. When he died his death had the singular result of eliciting from a poetaster, Lefranc de Pompignan, an ode of real excellence and perhaps better than anything of Rousseau’s own work. That work, however, has high merits, and is divided, roughly speaking, into two strangely contrasted divisions. One consists of formal and partly sacred odes and cantates of the stiffest character, the other of brief epigrams, sometimes licentious and always or almost always ill-natured. In the latter class of work Rousseau is only inferior to his friend Piron. In the former he stands almost alone. The frigidity of conventional diction and the disuse of all really lyrical rhythm which characterize his period do not prevent his odes and cantates from showing true poetical faculty, grievously cramped no doubt, but still existing.

Besides the Soleure edition mentioned above, Rousseau published (visiting England for the purpose) another issue of his work at London in 1723. The chief edition since is that of Amar in 1820. M. A. de Latour has published (Paris, Gamier, 1869) a useful though not complete edition, with notes of merit and a biographical introduction which would have been better if the facts had been more punctually and precisely stated.

ROUSSEAUJean Jacques (1712-1778), was born at Geneva on the 28th June.1712. His family had established themselves in that city at the time of the religious wars, but tlιey were of pure French origin. Rousseau’s father Isaac was a watchmaker; his mother, Suzanne Bernard, was the daughter of a minister; she died in childbirth, and Rousseau, who was the second son, was brought up in a very haphazard fashion, his father being a dissipated, violent-tempered, and foolish person. He, however, taught him to read early, and seems to have laid the foundation of the flighty sentimentalism in morals and politics which Rousseau afterwards illustrated with his genius. When the boy was ten years old his father got entangled in a disgraceful brawl and fled from Geneva, apparently without troubling himself about Jean Jacques. The father and son had little more to do with each other and rarely met. Rousseau was, however, taken charge of by his mother’s relations and was in the first place committed by them to the tutorship of a M. Lambercier, pastor at Bossey. Of these times as of the greater part of his life there are ample details in the Confessions, but it may be as well to remark at once that this famous book, however charming as literature, is to be used as documentary evidence only with great reserve. In 1724 he was removed from this school and taken into the house of his uncle Bernard, by whom he was shortly afterwards apprenticed to a notary. His master, however, found or thought him quite incapable and sent him back. After a short time (April 25, 1725) he was apprenticed afresh, this time to an engraver. He did not dislike the work, but was or thought himself cruelly treated by his master. At last in 1728, when he was sixteen, he ran away, the truancy being by his own account unintentional in the first instance, and due to the fact of the city gates being shut earlier than usual. Then began a very extraordinary series of wanderings and adventures, for much of which there is no authority but his own. He first fell in with some proselytizers of the Roman faith at Confignon in Savoy, and by them he was sent to Madame de Warens at Annecy, a young and pretty widow who was herself a convert. Her influence, however, which was to be so great, was not immediately exercised, and he was, so to speak, passed on to Turin, where there was an institution specially devoted to the reception of neophytes. His experiences here were (according to his own account, it must always be understood) sufficiently unsatisfactory, but he abjured duly and was rewarded by being presented with twenty francs and sent about his business. He wandered about in Turin for some time, and at last established himself as footman to a Madame de Vercellis. Here occurred the famous incident of the theft of a ribbon, of which he accused a fellow servant—a girl too. But, though he kept his place by this piece of cowardice, Madame de Vercellis died not long afterwards and he was turned off. He found, however, another place with the Comte de Gouvon, but lost this also through coxcombry. Then he resolved to return to Madame de Warens at Annecy. The chronology of all these events is somewhat obscure, but they seem to have occupied about three years.

Even then Rousseau did not settle at once in the anomalous but to him charming position of domestic lover to this lady, who, nominally a converted Protestant, was in reality, as many women of her time were, a kind of deist, with a theory of noble sentiment and a practice of libertinism tempered by good nature. It used to be held that in her conjugal relations she was even more sinned against than sinning. But recent investigations seem to show that M. de Vuarrens (which is said to be the correct spelling of the name) was a very unfortunate husband, and was deserted and robbed by his wife. However, she welcomed Rousseau kindly, thought it necessary to complete his education, and he was sent to the seminarists of St Lazare to be improved in classics, and also to a music master. In one of his incomprehensible freaks he set off for Lyons, and, after abandoning his companion in an epileptic fit, returned to Annecy to find Madame de Warens gone no one knew whither. Then for some months he relapsed into the life of vagabondage, varied by improbable adventures, which (according to his own statement) he so often pursued. Hardly knowing anything of music, he attempted to give lessons and a concert at Lausanne; and he actually taught at Neuchâtel. Then he became or says he became secretary to a Greek archimandrite who was travelling in Switzerland to collect subscriptions for the rebuilding of the Holy Sepulchre; then he went to Paris, and, with recommendations from the French ambassador at Soleure, saw something of good society; then he returned on foot through Lyons to Savoy, hearing that Madame de Warens was at Chambéry. This was in 1732, and Rousseau, who for a time had unimportant employments in the service of the Sardinian crown, - was shortly installed by Madame de Warens, whom he still called Maman, as amant en titre in her singular household, wherein she diverted herself with him, with music, and with chemistry. In 1736 Madame de Warens, partly for Rousseau’s health, took a country house, Les Charmettes, a short distance from Chambéry. Here in summer, and in the town during winter, Rousseau led a delightful life, which he has delightfully described. In a desultory way he did a good deal of reading, but in 1738 his health again became bad, and he was recommended to go to Montpellier. By his own account this journey to Montpellier was in reality a voyage à Cythere in company with a certain Madame de Larnage. This being so, he could hardly complain when on returning he found that his official position in Madame de Warens’s household had been taken by a person named Vintzenried. He was, however, less likely than most men to endure the position of second in command, and in 1740 he became tutor at Lyons to the children of M. de Mably, not the well-known writer of that name, but his and Condillac’s elder brother. But Rousseau did not like teaching and was a bad teacher, and after a visit to Les Charmettes, finding that his place there was finally occupied, he once more went to Paris in 1741. He was not "without recommendations. But a new system of musical notation which he thought he had discovered was unfavourably received by the Académie des Sciences, where it was read in August 1742, and he was unable to obtain pupils. Madame Dupin, however, to whose house he had obtained the entry, procured him the honourable if not very lucrative post of secretary to M. de Montaigu, ambassador at Venice. With him he stayed for about eighteen months, and has as usual infinite complaints to make of his employer and some strange stories to tell. At length he threw up his situation and returned to Paris (1745).

Up to this time—that is to say, till his thirty-third year— Rousseau’s life, though continuously described by himself, was of the kind called subterranean, and the account of it must be taken with considerable allowances. There are, to say the least, grave improbabilities in it; there are some chronological difficulties; and in one or two instances his accounts have been flatly denied by persons more or less entitled to be heard. He had written nothing, and if he was known at all it was as an eccentric vagabond. From this time, however, he is more or less in view; and, though at least two events of his life—his quarrel with Diderot and his death—are and are likely long to be subjects of dispute, its general history can be checked and followed with reasonable confidence. On his return to Paris he renewed his relations with the Dupin family and with the literary group of Diderot, to which he had already been introduced by M. de Mably’s letters. He had an opera, Les Muses Galantes, privately represented; he copied music for money, and received from Madame Dupin and her son-in-law M. de Francueil a small but regular salary as secretary. He lived at the Hotel St Quentin for a time, and once more arranged for himself an equivocal domestic establishment. His mistress, whom towards the close of his life he married after a fashion, was Thérèse le Vasseur, a servant at the inn. She had little beauty, no education or understanding, and few charms of any kind that his friends could discover, besides which she had a detestable mother, who was the bane of Rousseau’s life. But he made himself at any rate for a time quite happy with her, and (according to Rousseau’s account, the accuracy of which has been questioned) five children were born to them, who were all consigned to the foundling hospital. This disregard of responsibility was partly punished by the use his critics made of it when he became celebrated as a writer on education and a preacher of the domestic affections. Diderot, with whom he became more and more familiar, admitted him as a contributor to the Encyclopédie. He formed new musical projects, and he was introduced by degrees to many people of rank and influence, among whom his warmest patron for a time was Madame d’Épinay. It was not, however, till 1749 that Rousseau made his mark. The academy of Dijon offered a prize for an essay on the effect of the progress of civilization on morals. Rousseau took up the subject, developed his famous paradox of the superiority of the savage state, won the prize, and, publishing his essay next year, became famous. The anecdotage as to the origin of this famous essay is voluminous. It is agreed that the idea was suggested when Rousseau went to pay a visit to Diderot, who was in prison at Vincennes for his Lettre sur les Aveugles. Rousseau says he thought of the paradox on his way down; Morellet and others say that he thought of treating the subject in the ordinary fashion and was laughed at by Diderot, who showed him the advantages of the less obvious treatment. Diderot himself, who in such matters is almost absolutely trustworthy, does not claim the suggestion, but uses words which imply that it was at least partly his. It is very like him. The essay, however, took the artificial and crotchety society of the day by storm. Francueil gave Rousseau a valuable post as cashier in the receiver general’s office. But he resigned it either from conscientiousness, or crotchet, or nervousness at responsibility, or indolence, or more probably from a mixture of all four. He went back to his music copying, but the salons of the day were determined to have his society, and for a time they had it. In 1752 he brought out at Fontainebleau an operetta) Devindu Village, which was very successful. He received a hundred louis for it, and he was ordered to come to court next day. This meant the certainty of a pension. But Rousseau’s shyness or his perversity (as before, probably both) made him disobey the command. His comedy Narcisse, written long before, was also acted, but unsuccessfully. In the same year, however, a letter Sur la Musique Française again had a great vogue. Finally, for this was an important

1742, was ingenious, but practically worse than useless, and failed to attract attention, though the paper was published in 1743 under the title of Dissertation sur la musique moderne. Iu the famous ‘ ‘ guerre des buffons,” he took the part of the “buffonists,” so named in consequence of their attachment to the Italian “opera buffa,” as opposed to the true French opera; and, in his Lettre sur la musique Française, published in 1753, he indulged in a violent tirade against French music, which he declared to be so contemptible as to lead to the conclusion “that the French neither have, nor ever will have, any music -----

of their own, or at least that, if they ever do have any, it will be so the house of La Popeliniere, attracted very little attention; but Le much the worse for them.” Thissillylibelsoenragedtheperformers Devin du Village, given at Fontainebleau in 1752, and at the at the Opera that they hanged and burned its author in effigy. Académie in 1753, achieved a great and well-deserved success. Rousseau revenged himself by printing his clever satire entitled Though very unequal, and exceedingly simple both in style and con- Lettre Jun symphoniste de l'Académie Royale de Musique à ses cama- struction, it contains some charming melodies, and is written through- rαdes de l’orchestre. His Lettre à M. Burney is of a very different out in the most refined taste. His Pygmalion (1775) is a melodrama type, and does full justice to the genius of Gluck. His articles on without singing. Some posthumous fragments of another opera, music in the Encyclopédie deal very superficially with the subject; Daphnis et Chloé, were printed in 1780; and in 1781 appeared Les and his Dictionnaire de Micsique (Geneva, 1767), though admirably Consolations des Misères de ma Vie, a collection of about one hundred written, is not trustworthy, either as a record of facts or as a col-songs and other fugitive pieces of very unequal merit. The popular lection of critical essays. In all these works the imperfection of air known as RousseaJs Dream is not contained in this collection, his musical education is painfully apparent, and his compositions and cannot be traced back farther than J. B. Cramer s celebrated betray an equal lack of knowledge, though his refined taste is as “Variations.” M. Castil-Blaze has accused Rousseau of extensive clearly displayed there as is his literary power in the Letters and Die- plagiarisms (or worse) in Le Devin du Village and Pygmalion, but timary. His first opera, Les Muses Galantes, privately prepared at apparently without sufficient cause. (W. S. R.)

year with him, the Dijon academy, which had founded his fame, announced the subject of “The Origin of Inequality,” on which he wrote a discourse which was unsuccessful, but at least equal to the former in merit. During a visit to Geneva in 1754 Rousseau saw his old friend and love Madame de Warens (now reduced in circumstances and having lost all her charms), while after abjuring his abjuration of Protestantism he was enabled to take up his freedom as citizen of Geneva, to which his birth entitled him and of which he was proud. Some time afterwards, returning to Paris, he accepted a cottage near Montmorency (the celebrated Hermitage) which Madame d’Épinay had fitted up for him, and established himself there in April 1756. He spent little more than a year there, but it was a very important year. Here he wrote La Nouvelle Heldise ; here he indulged in the passion which that novel partly represents, his love for Madame d’Houdetot, sister-in-law of Madame d’Épinay, a lady still young and extremely amiable but very plain, who had a husband and a lover (St Lambert), and whom Rousseau’s burning devotion seems to have partly pleased and partly annoyed. Here too arose the incomprehensible triangular quarrel between Diderot, Rousseau, and Grimm which ended Rousseau’s sojourn at the Hermitage. It is impossible to discuss this at length here. The supposition least favourable to Rousseau is that it was due to one of his numerous fits of half-insane petulance and indignation at the obligations which he was nevertheless always ready to incur. That most favourable to him is that he was expected to lend himself in a more or less complaisant manner to assist and cover Madame d’Épinay’s adulterous affection for Grimm. It need only be said that Madame d’Épinay’s morals and Rousseau’s temper are equally indefensible by anyone who knows anything about either, but that the evidence as to the exact influence of both on this particular transaction is hopelessly inconclusive. Diderot seems to have been guilty of nothing but thoughtlessness (if of that) in lending himself to a scheme of the Le Vasseurs, mother and daughter, for getting Rousseau out of the solitude of the Hermitage. At any rate Rousseau quitted the Hermitage in the winter, and established himself at Montlouis in the neighbourhood.

Hitherto Rousseau’s behaviour had frequently made him enemies, but his writings had for the most part made him friends. The quarrel with Madame d’Épinay, with Diderot, and through them with the philosophe party reversed this. In 1758 appeared his Lettre à d’Alembert contre les Spectacles, written in the winter of the previous year at Montlouis. This was at once an attack on Voltaire, who was giving theatrical representations at Les Délices, on D’Alembert, who had condemned the prejudice against the stage in the Encyclopedic, and on one of the favourite amusements of the society of the day. Diderot personally would have been forgiving enough. But Voltaire’s strong point was not forgiveness, and, though Rousseau no doubt exaggerated the efforts of his “enemies,” he was certainly henceforward as obnoxious to the philosophe coterie as to the orthodox party. He still, however, had no lack of patrons—lie never had—though his unsurpassable perversity made him quarrel with all in turn. The amiable duke and duchess of Luxembourg, who were his neighbours at Montlouis, made his acquaintance, or rather forced theirs upon him, and he was eagerly industrious in his literary work—indeed most of his best books were produced during his stay in the neighbourhood of Montmorency. A letter to Voltaire on his poem about the Lisbon earthquake embittered the dislike between the two, being surreptitiously published. La Nouvelle Heloise appeared in the same year (1760), and it was immensely popular. In 1662 appeared the Contrat Social at Amsterdam, and Émile, which was published both in the Low Countries and at Paris. For the latter the author received 6000 livres, for the Contrat 1000.

Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heldise, is a novel λvritten in letters describing the loves of a man of low position and a girl of rank, her subsequent marriage to a respectable freethinker of her own station, the mental agonies of her lover, and the partial appeasing of the distresses of the lovers by the influence of noble sentiment and the good offices of a philanthropic Englishman. It is too long, the sentiment is overstrained, and severe moralists have accused it of a certain complaisance in dealing with amatory errors; but it is full of pathos and knowledge of the human heart. The Contrat Social, as its title implies, endeavours to base all government on the consent, direct or implied, of the governed, and indulges in much ingenious argument to get rid of the practical inconveniences of such a suggestion. Emde, the second title of which is De l , Education, is much more of a treatise than of a novel, though a certain amount of narrative interest is kept up throughout.

Rousseau’s reputation was now higher than ever, but the term of the comparative prosperity which he had enjoyed foe nearly ten years was at hand. The Contrat Social was obviously anti-monarchic; the Nouvelle Heldise was said to be immoral; the sentimental deism of the “Profession du vicaire Savoyard” in Emile irritated equally the philosophe party and the church. On June 11, 1662, Emile was condemned by the parlement of Paris, and two days previously Madame de Luxembourg and the Prince de Conti gave the author information that he would be arrested if he did not fly. They also furnished him with means of flight, and he made for Yverdun in the territory of Bern, whence he transferred himself to Motiers in Neuchâtel, which then belonged to Prussia. Frederick II. was not indisposed to protect the persecuted when it cost him nothing aud might bring him fame, and in Marshal Keith, the governor of Neuchâtel, Rousseau found a true and firm friend. He was, however, unable to be quiet or to practise any of those more or less pious frauds which, were customary at the time with the unorthodox. . The archbishop of Paris had published a pastoral against him, and Rousseau did not let the year pass without a Lettre à M. de Beaumont. The council of Geneva had joined in the condemnation of Emile, and Rousseau first solemnly renounced his citizenship, and then, in the Lettres de la Montagne (1763), attacked the council and the Genevan constitution unsparingly. AU this excited public opinion against him, and gradually he grew unpopular in his own neighbourhood. This unpopularity is said on very uncertain authority to have culminated in a nocturnal attack on his house, which reminds the reader remarkably of an incident in the life of the greatest French man of letters of the present century. At any rate he thought he was menaced if he was not, and migrated to the île St Pierre in the Lake of Bienne, where he once more for a short, and the last, time enjoyed that idyUic existence which he loved. But the Bernese Government ordered him to quit its territory. He was for some time uncertain where to go, and thought of Corsica (to join Paoli) and Berhn. But finally David Hume offered him, late in 1765, an asylum in England, and he accepted. He passed through Paris, where his presence w ’ as tolerated for a time, and landed in England on January 13, 1766. Thérèse travelled separately, and was entrusted to the charge of James Boswell, who had already made Rousseau’s acquaintance. Here he had once more a chance of settling peaceably. Severe English moralists like Johnson thought but ill of him, but the public generally was not unwilling to testify against French intolerance, and regarded his sentimentalism with favour. He was lionized in London to his heart’s content and discontent, for it may truly be said of Rousseau that he was equally indignant at neglect and intolerant of attention. When, after not a few displays of his strange humour, he professed himself tired of the capital, Hume procured him a country abode in the house of Mr Davenport at Wootton in Derbyshire. Here, though the place w ’ as bleak and lonely, he might have been happy enough, and he actually employed himself in writing the greater part of his Confessiotis. But his habit of self-tormenting and tormenting others never left him. His own caprices interposed some delay in the conferring of a pension which George III. was induced to grant him, and he took this as a crime of Hume’s. The publication of a spiteful letter (really by Horace Walpole, one of whose worst deeds it was) in the name of the king of Prussia made Rousseau believe that plots of the most terrible kind were on foot against him. Finally he quarrelled with Hume because the latter would not acknowledge all his own friends and Rousseau’s supposed enemie3 of the philosophe circle to be rascals. He remained, however, at Wootton during the year and through the winter. In May 1767 he fled to France, addressing letters to the lord chancellor and to General Conway, which can only be described as the letters of a lunatic. He was received in France by the Marquis de Mirabeau (father of the great Mirabeau), of whom he soon had enough, then by the Prince de Conti at Trye. From this place he again fled and wandered about for some time in a wretched fashion, still writing the Confessions, constantly receiving generous help, and always quarrelling with, or at least suspecting, the helpers. In the summer of 1770 he returned to Paris, resumed music copying, and was on the whole happier than he had been since he had to leave Montlouis. He had by this time married Thérèse le Vasseur, or had at least gone through some form of marriage with her.

Many of the best-known stories of Rousseau’s life date from this last time, when he was tolerably accessible to visitors, though clearly half-insane. He finished his Confessions, wrote his Dialogues (the interest of which is not quite equal to the promise of their curious sub-title Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques), and began his Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire, intended as a sequel and complement to the Confessions, and one of the best of all his books. It should be said that besides these, which complete the list of his principal works, he has left a very large number of minor w τ orks and a considerable correspondence. During this time he lived in the Rue Platière, which is now named after him. But his suspicions of secret enemies grew stronger rather than weaker, and at the beginning of 1778 he was glad to accept the offer of M. de Girardin, a rich financier, and occupy a cottage at Ermenonville. The country w τ as beautiful; but his old terrors revived, and his woes were complicated by the alleged inclination of Thérèse for one of M. de Girardin’s stable boys. On July 2d he died in a manner which has been much discussed, suspicions of suicide having at the time and since been frequent. On the whole the theory of a natural death due to a fit of apoplexy and perhaps to injuries inflicted accidentally during that fit seems most probable. He had always sufiered from internal and constitutional ailments not unlikely to bring about such an end.

Rousseau’s character, the history of his reputation, and the intrin si P. value of his literary work are all subjects of much interest. There is little doubt that for the last ten or fifteen years of his life, if not from the time of his quarrel with Diderot and Madame d’Épinay, he was not wholly sane—the combined influence of late and unexpected literary fame and of constant solitude and discomfort acting upon his excitable temperament so as to overthrow the balance, never very stable, of his fine and acute but unrobust intellect. He was by no means the only man of letters of his time who'had to submit to something like persecution. Freron on the orthodox side had his share of it, as well as Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot, and Montesquieu on that of the innovators. But Rousseau had not, like Montesquieu,.a position which guaranteed him from serious danger; he was not wealthy like Helvétius; he had not the wonderful suppleness and trickiness which even without his wealth would probably have defended Voltaire himself; and he lacked entirely the “bottom” of Fréron and Diderot. When he was molested he could only shriek at his enemies and suspect his friends, and, being more given than any man whom Iiistorymentions to this latter weakness, lie suffered intensely from it. His moral character was undoubtedly weak in other ways than this, but it is fair to remember that but for his astounding Confessions the more disgusting parts of it would not have been known, and that these Confesswns were written, if not under hallucination, at any rate in circumstances entitling the self-condemned criminal to the benefit of very considerable doubt. If Rousseau had held his tongue, he might have stood lower as a man of letters; he would pretty certainly have stood higher as a man. He was, moreover, really sinned against, if still more sinning. The conduct of Grimm to him was certainly very bad; and, though Walpole was not his personal friend, a worse action than his famous letter, considering the well-known idiosyncrasy of the subject, would be difficult to find. It was his own fault that he saddled himself with the Le Vasseurs, but their conduct was probably if not certainly ungrateful in the extreme. Only excuses can be made for him; but the excuses for a man born, as Hume after the quarrel said of him, “without a skin” are numerous and strong.

It was to be expected that his peculiar reputation would increase rather than diminish after his death; and it did so. During his life his personal peculiarities and the fact that his opinions were nearly as obnoxious to the one party as to the other worked against him, but it was not so after his death. The men of the Revolution regarded him with something like idolatry, and his literary merits conciliated many who were very far from idolizing him as a revolutionist. His style was taken up by Bernardin de Saint Pierre and by Chateaubriand. It was employed for purposes quite different from those to which he had himself applied it, and the reaction triumphed by the very arms which had been most powerful in the hands of the Revolution. Byron’s fervid panegyric enlisted on his side all who admired Byron—that is to say, the majority of the younger men and women of Europe between 1820 and 1850—and thus different sides of his tradition were continued for a full century after the publication of his chief books. His religious unorthodox}* was condoned because he never scoffed; his political heresies, after their first effect was over, seemed harmless from the very want of logic and practical spirit in them, while part at least of his literary secret was the common property of almost everyone who attempted literature. At the present day persons as different as M. Renan and Mr Ruskin are children of Rousseau.

It is therefore important to characterize this influence which was and is so powerful, and there are three points of view—those of religion, politics, and literature—which it is necessary to take in doing this. In religion Rousseau was undoubtedly what he has been called above—a sentimental deist; but no one who reads him with the smallest attention can fail to see that sentimentalism was the essence, deism the accident of his creed. In his time orthodoxy at once generous and intelligent hardly existed in France. There were ignorant persons who were sincerely orthodox; there were intelligent persons who pretended to be so. But between the time of Massillon and D’Aguesseau and the time of Lamennais and Joseph de Maistre the class of men of whom in England Berkeley, Butler, and Johnson were representatives simply did not exist in France. Little inclined by nature to any but the emotional side of religion, and utterly undisciplined in any other by education, course of life, or the general tendency of public opinion, Rousseau naturally took refuge in the nebulous kind of natural religion which was at once fashionable and convenient. If his practice fell very far short even of his own very arbitrary standard of morality as much may be said of persons far more dogmatically orthodox.

In politics, on the other hand

ROUSSEAUThéodore (1812-1867), a distinguished landscape painter, was born at Paris, and studied in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, after which he spent some time in travelling and making studies of landscape and sky effects. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1834, obtained gold medals in 1849 and 1854, and in 1852 received the Legion of Honour. His paintings became very popular in France, and Rousseau grew to be the acknowledged founder of the modern realistic school of landscape. He was largely influenced in style by Constable and Turner, the former of whom was perhaps more thoroughly appreciated in France than in England. The influence of Turner is clearly seen in some of Rousseau’s pictures, with striking effects of cloud or storm,—as, for example, in his Effet de Soleil and Après la Pluie (1852), in the Matinée Orageuse (1857), the Coucher de Soleil (1866), and one of his last works, the Soleil par un Temps Orageux, which appeared in the exhibition of 1867. Rousseau’s study of Constable is more especially apparent in some of his fine forest scenes near Fontainebleau, and in some magnificently painted views on the banks of the Loire and other French rivers. His execution was of extraordinary brilliance, and he was a thorough master of atmospheric effect and glowing sunset colours. Though in some respects a realistic painter, he treated nature in a strongly dramatic way and showed great imaginative power. His style is broad and dashing, with rapid and at times apparently careless handling. His fame has increased rather than diminished since his death in 1867; and one of his paintings has recently received the high distinction of being transferred from the Luxembourg Palace to the Louvre, an honour which is but rarely conferred. It is not, however, one of the best specimens of his work. Most of Théodore Rousseau’s pictures are in private collections in Paris and elsewhere in France.