“s 
; 
‘ 
, 
1828. ] his Eloise, and €cnfessions. 613 
when he was taken under the especial protection of the august family of 
Montmorenci. Shortly after his introduction to this family, at their 
express desire, conveyed to him in the most flattering terms, Rousseau 
quitted Paris, and went to reside with them at a small cottage, built for 
him near their own mansion ; where, partly to beguile leisure, partly to 
put forth his peculiar notions on all subjects where the heart is concerned, 
he engaged in the composition of Eloise, which, when published one or 
two years afterwards, turned the hearts and heads of France, and ren- 
dered its author an object of universal attraction. 
It was about this period that the fatal warp in judgment, of which we 
have before spoken, put forth in Rousseau’s mind all its most diseased 
and humiliating eccentricities. Nursed in solitude, he had formed notions 
of friendship which reality was sure to disappoint. He had expected to 
meet in life with the “ faultless monsters’ of fancy. Every fresh 
acquaintance was accordingly hailed at first with the utmost enthusiasm, 
which, however, soon subsided ; disgust ensued, then suspicion, then 
alienation, and, finally, invincible aversion. It was in this way that his 
connexion with Diderot, D’Alembert, Voltaire, Saint Lambert, Grimm 
(to whose gossiping memoirs we owe so much delightful scandal), and 
a hundred others, began: in this way, too, it terminated. Even the 
noble family of the High Constable—to whom Rousseau was indebted 
for almost every comfort his hypochondriacal temperament would permit 
him to enjoy—were not secure in his mind from reproach. This evinced 
itself in the most petty and humiliating manner. If they ever invited 
him to the chateau, it was, he said, to make a butt of him; if they 
respected his infirmities and his solitude, they treated him, he would add, 
with contempt: either way, they were sure to be wrong, and himself 
the injured party. Such feelings—which, though carried to the extreme 
in Rousseau, are by no means restricted to him—are the necessary results 
of an ill-balanced temperament. While youth lasts, they are in some 
degree kept under by the generous buoyancy, and freedom from distrust, 
of that age ; but as years roll on, and the simplicity of life becomes dis- 
coloured with the taint of the world, the counteracting power is lost, and 
the mind compelled to drift headlong at the mercy of a wild, capricious, 
and jaundiced disposition. Rousseau’s invariable defect was the substi- 
tution of feeling for principle. He had few speculative opinions inde- 
pendently of sentiment: this with him was every thing ; it made him the 
leading writer of his age, and it made him a wretch. He seemed altogether 
to throw overboard the notion that man is as much a creature of reason 
as of sensibility ; he objected to Hume that he was dispassionate, and to 
Voltaire that he was a wit—as if such peculiarities were not strictly 
within the province of nature, as much, and even more so, than his own 
forced and heated fancy. But he paid the penalty—and a dreadful 
- penalty it was—of this infirm quality of mind. After hurrying from 
place to place—from Geneva to the Hermitage, from the Hermitage to 
the Boromean islands ; after being driven from one country with con- 
‘tempt, and received in another with enthusiasm ; after wandering for 
years over Europe, and even venturing into the extreme recesses of 
Wales—this poor, wretched misanthrope—alone, forlorn, deserted in his 
age, owning kindred with none, rejecting pity with scorn, and repaying 
kindness with distrust; a pensioner, yet professing independence ; a 
slave, yet a braggart of his freedom—returned once again to Paris, from 
which, after a brief, restless stay, he finally set out for one of the adjacent 
provinces, there to close his eyes and die. 
