618 Rousseau : (Dec. 
de Warrens through the same neighbourhood, he had gathered that 
very flower. Time had nearly effaced the circumstance from his mind ~ 
—age had crept over him—the object of his unceasing attachment had 
been long since consigned to earth ; but here was a talisman to recal the 
past ; this little simple mountain-plant bore about with it a magic power 
that could roll back the wheels of time, and array a haggard soul in the 
same sweet freshness which it wore in the morning of existence. As 
regards the pervading spirit of the Confessions, it is a work which sets 
‘out in a pensive vein of reflection, and terminates in the darkest, the 
fiercest misanthropy. Yet, whether for good or evil—whether to sear with 
scorn, or melt with tenderness—the spirit of a mighty genius moves along 
each page, free, undisguised, and unchartered as the wind. Indeed, had 
Rousseau shewn but half as much talent in palliating misery as he has 
shewn in forestalling and aggravating it, he would have been the greatest 
man that ever existed. But baneful as is the character of his produc- 
tions, they inculcate—the Confessions more especially—an impressive, but 
unconscious moral. They convince the unformed, wavering mind, that 
true happiness is only to be found where it holds in respect the social 
and the moral duties ; that sensibility, without principle, is like the tower 
built by the fool upon the sands, which the very first wave swept into 
annihilation ; and that every departure from reason is a departure from 
enjoyment, even though companioned by supreme abilities. 
Having thus discussed impartially the character of Rousseau’s chief 
works, it remains, as some slight apology for their obliquities, to say a 
few words respecting the age in which he flourished. He wrote at a 
period when the French mind, drugged with a long course of anodyne 
literature, made up from prescriptions unchanged through a tedious 
succession of ages, was eagerly prepared to receive any alterative that 
might exhilarate its intellectual constitution. Previous to his time, France 
was trammelled by Aristotelian regulations, which, whether for the 
drama, the closet, or the senate, prescribed one uniform style of compo- 
sition—correct, but cold—polished, but insipid; founded essentially on 
the imitative, and deprecating—as was the case with the Augustan age 
in England, which derived its mental character from the French court— 
any departure from the old established classics of Greece and Rome as 
downright unadulterated heresy. Voltaire was the first to break through 
the ice of this formality: he threw a vivifying power into literature, 
which sparkled with a thousand coruscations, and drew forth the dormant 
energies of others. Rousseau was one of the master-spirits thus warmed 
into life: his predecessor, by his novel and brilliant paradoxes, had 
triumphantly led the way ; France was henceforth prepared to be asto- 
nished—overwhelmed—electrified ; and Rousseau answered every expec- 
tation. This, perhaps, is but a poor apology for vice, that it adapts 
itself to the taste of the day ; nevertheless, every man is more or less 
fashioned by the age in which he lives—few having, like our divine, 
unsullied Milton, the fortitude to precede it ;—and if the gross immorali- 
ties of Beaumont and Fletcher, and still worse, of Congreve, Vanburgh, 
and Farquhar, are excused from consideration of the period in which they 
flourished, surely the same extenuating principle may with justice be 
applied to Rousseau? In addition to this, it must not be forgotten that 
his sentiments, however revolting they may appear to Englishmen, were, 
literally speaking, the received opinions of his country. They grew out 
of a courtly system of fashion which winked at adultery, discovered the 
