162 ROUSSEAU. 



ungrateful office. But the conception of the piece is, 

 for its simplicity and nature, happy, with the excep- 

 tion which may he taken especially to the unnatural 

 situations of the lovers on meeting after Julie's mar- 

 riage, to the extravagant as well as dull deathbed scene, 

 and to the episode, the adventures of the English Lord. 

 The descriptions of natural scenery are admirable far 

 superior to the moral painting ; for Rousseau's taste in 

 landscape was excellent, while with his moral taste, 

 his perverted sentiments, so wide from truth and 

 nature, always interfered. The interest of the story 

 is quite well sustained, and the turns in it are well 

 represented by the successive letters. The passions are 

 vividly painted, and as by one who had felt their force, 

 though they are not touched with a delicate pencil. 

 The feelings are ill rendered, partly because they are 

 mixed with the perverted sentiments of the ill-regu- 

 lated, and even diseased mind, in which they are 

 hatched into life, partly because they are given in the 

 diction of rhetoric, and not of nature. The love which 

 he plumes himself on exhibiting beyond all his prede- 

 cessors, nay, as if he first had portrayed, and almost 

 alone had felt it, is a mixture of the sensual and the 

 declamatory, with something of the grossness of the 

 one, much of the other's exaggeration. As this is the 

 main object of the book, therefore, the book must be 

 allowed to be a failure. It charmed many ; it en- 

 chanted both the Bishops Warburton and Hurd, as 

 we see in their published correspondence ; it still holds 

 a high place among the works which prudent mothers 

 withhold from their daughters, and which many daugh- 

 ters contrive to enjoy in secret ; it makes a deep im- 



