PREFACE. Vll 



that individual as a great benefactor of his species, 

 and as having waged a war against tyranny equally 

 successful with Voltaire's against priestcraft. Rous- 

 seau's political works are wholly beneath contempt. 

 No proofs are required to shew the ignorance and 

 even incapacity of a writer whose notions of the 

 representative system the greatest political im- 

 provement of modern times are such, that he holds 

 a people to be enslaved during the whole interval 

 between one election and another a dogma which 

 makes it utterly impossible for any free state to 

 exist whose inhabitants amount to more than fifteen 

 hundred or two thousand. But, in truth, it is not as a 

 political writer that Rousseau now retains any portion 

 of the reputation which he once enjoyed. His fame 

 rests upon a paradoxical discourse against all know- 

 ledge, a second-rate novel, and an admirably written, 

 but degrading, and even disgusting autobiography. 

 The critic is very indignant at the grave censure 

 which I pronounced on this last work, and on the 

 vices by which it showed the author to have been 

 contaminated. I deliberately re-affirm my opinion 

 as formerly expressed on the subject ; nor can I ima- 

 gine a more reprehensible use of faculties, such as 

 Eousseau certainly possessed, than the composition 

 of a narrative, some parts of which cannot be read 

 without horror and disgust by any person whose mind 

 is ordinarily pure. 



The Lives in the present volume require little 

 prefatory remark, because they embrace hardly any 



