Oe Ss ee 
1828.] ( 611 ) 
ROUSSZAU: HIS ELOISE, AND CONFESSIONS. 
THERE never yet existed an author who so completely divided the suf- 
frages of the literary world as Rousseau. By one party, he has been cried 
up as an angel ; by another, he has been written down a demon. One 
class says he is above all praise ; another, beneath all contempt. This 
reader finds in his ethics the very perfection of nature ; that, the utmost 
plausibility of art. Meanwhile, all agree in this one point—namely, that, 
whether justly or unjustly, he has exercised a despotic influence over his 
age; taught the most indifferent to feel, the shallowest to think, the 
most abject to stickle for freedom of thought and action. Unlike Vol- 
taire—who disseminated his most pestilent doctrines, and broke down 
the barriers of truth, reason, and moral and religious rectitude, by dint 
of searching irony—Rousseau enforces his opinions by the most winning 
and specious sensibility. He reaches the reason through the heart, or 
as he himself says, in his mistaken character of Lord Edouard, “ C’est 
le chemin des passions qui m’a conduit a la philosophie.” We do not, in 
the following cursory sketch, intend to be the apologists of this extraor- 
dinary writer—to palliate his glaring obliquities of thought, his insidious 
sentiments, or distorted truisms: these sufficiently condemn themselves 
without our aid; all that we here profess to do is to account for their 
origin, to trace their progress, and to shew how, notwithstanding their 
apparent moral beauty, they led, as they must always lead, from sophis- 
try to doubt, from doubt to despair, from despair to utter, irretrievable 
desolation. 
From his earliest infancy, Rousseau, who inherited from nature the 
utmost fragility of constitution—which, by the way, is one of the strong- 
est fosterers of intellect—was, by the force of circumstances, thrown 
upon himself for his amusements. At an early age, he was apprenticed 
toa clock-maker at Geneva, whom he describes, in his Confessions, as a 
man just sufficiently intellectual for his occupation, but nothing more. 
With this person he could of course hold no communion—no interchange 
of thought or sentiment ; his extreme delicacy of frame, nervous to a 
degree bordering at times upon madness, equally forbade his engaging in 
the usual sports of childhood, and he was consequently thrown upon 
books for his recreation ; which books, had they been supplied to him 
by some sound, well-ordered, and enlightened individual, might, in due 
course of time, have given a philosopher instead of a sophist to the 
world. Unluckily, they were all, with one or two exceptions, of a chival- 
rous and romantic cast—there was little or no equipoise to counteract 
their effect; and it may readily be conceived what impression such 
works, fascinating at any period of life, must have made upon the 
unformed mind of a youth, who had never known the salutary restraints 
of scholastic discipline, had never been taught to bridle his passion, to 
tame his enthusiasm, or square his imagination agreeably to the dictates 
of a healthy judgment. Of course, the first effect produced by such 
books was a disgust for his mechanical occupation. We do not remember 
the precise way in which this aversion shewed itself, or whether Rous- 
seau’s father were living at the time ; but we distinctly recollect that the 
embryo sophist ran away from his employer, and pursued his course, 
unaccompanied, except by a bounding heart, and a slight—a very slight 
—stock of money, over the heaths and mountains of his native land. 
In one of these excursions, he chanced to light upon two young ladies, 
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