410 ROUS 
education, will be admitted by every candid and enlightened 
reader; and he deserves great applause for the manly inde¬ 
pendent spirit, the contempt of luxurious Indulgences and 
idle parade, that he everywhere inculcates. But the experi¬ 
ment of leaving education to the wishes of children, however 
plausible and agreeable, and however well supported by a 
few brilliant instances of success, will be found impracticable 
on a general scale. Rousseau is himself an instance of its 
disadvantages. The great corruption of his mind in early 
life, the pettyness of his conduct in youth and age, his bad 
taste, and his unskilful method of attacking falsehood, are not 
compensated either by the force of his reasonings or the 
extent of his information. 
In the work under consideration, Rousseau indisposed 
against him almost all the religious world, by the manner in 
which he spoke of the attempts to furnish the youthful mind 
with theological ideas; and he made enemies of the different 
sects of Christians by a profession of faith put into the mouth 
of a Savoyard vicar, which was little more than a system of 
theism. No one, indeed, could more eloquently extol the 
morality of the Gospel than he has done; but by this praise, 
and his sentiments of piety, he displeased the French 
philosophers; so that there was scarcely a party of men to 
whom he did not stand in opposition. Of these, however, 
by much the most formidable were his antagonists possessed 
of authority. The “ Emile” was anathematised by the 
Archbishop of Paris in an express mandemant, and ordered 
to be burnt by the parliament of Paris, which proceeded 
criminally against the author; and about the same time it 
was burnt at Geneva. Rousseau fled from France, and was 
protected at Yverdun, till the sovereigns of Berne ordered him 
to quit their territory. He then took refuge at Motiers- 
Travers, in the principality of Neufchatel, where he received 
the hospitable protection of the governor, marshal Kieth. 
He there published a very eloquent and forcible “ Letter to 
the Archbishop of Paris, Christopher de Beaumont,” in 
answer to his “ Mandement.” His “ Lettres de la 
Montaigne,” published in 1764, were a remonstrance against 
the proceedings of the republieof Geneva in his condemnation, 
the citizenship of which state he formally renounced. A 
passage of these Letters contains a remarkable proof of the 
high idea he entertained of his own merit in the work for 
which he underwent so much obloquy and persecution. 
“ How (says he) can I resolve to enter into a justification of 
this work ? I, who think that I have effaced by it the faults 
of my whole life; I, who place the evils it has drawn upon 
me as a balance to those which I have committed ; I, who 
filled with confidence, hope one day to say to the Supreme 
Arbiter, Deign in thy clemency to judge a weak mortal; I 
have done ill upon the earth, but I have published this 
writing.” In these letters he again expressed his sentiments 
concerning revealed religion, in a manner which excited 
great indignation among the clergy of Neufchatel. A con¬ 
sistory was assembled to take his opinions into consideration, 
but its proceedings were stopt by the government. The 
ferment, however, which they had raised in the minds of the 
people, occasioned some popular insults to be offered to 
Rousseau, who, under the apprehension of more serious 
outrages, requested the magistrates of Berne to permit him to 
retire to an island in the lake of Bienne, promising not to 
leave it, nor to publish any more; but his request was refused. 
Driven to seek another asylum, he arrived at Strasburg, 
where the marshal de Contades gave him a very kind 
reception. After hesitating for a time upon an intention to 
go to Berlin, he suddenly changed his plan, and wentto Paris, 
where he appeared in an Armenian habit. The celebrated 
Hume was at this period in that capital, in the quality of 
charge d’affaires from the English court; and, having been 
applied to in favour of Rousseau, who was desirous of making 
England his asylum, he willingly undertook the charge of 
conducting him hither in the beginning of 1766. 
At this period, the real persecutions he had undergone, the 
hostility with which he had been hunted from country to 
country, the acrimony of his numerous opponents, and the 
ferment his presence had excited in the different places of his 
S E A U. 
residence, had so agitated his susceptible mind, and inflamed 
his vanity, that he imagined himself to be the most important 
object in Europe, and fancied that a general confederacy 
was formed against him of all sects and parties. This notion 
filled him with absurd suspicions, and rendered him prone 
to view every thing in a wrong light, apd to magnify trifles 
into matters of great moment. In short, he was under the 
influence of a perversion of temper and intellect, nearly 
amounting to mental derangement —a malady which, in¬ 
deed, in a certain degree seems to have attended him through 
life, and which alone can account for his singularities and 
inconsistencies. Without this clue, his conduct to Hume 
must appear the extreme of baseness and ingratitude. That 
gentleman had employed himself w'ith the most friendly 
assiduity in finding an agreeable retreat for the unhappy 
wanderer, and had at length obtained from Mr. Davenport, 
a gentleman of fortune and family, the gratuitous use for him 
of his house at Wooton in Derbyshire, where he and the 
gouvernante who had long lived with him, were boarded at 
a very moderate expense. He farther made use of his 
interest with the ministers to procure for Rousseau a royal 
pension; and the consent of the king to this measure was 
obtained on the condition of its being kept a secret. It 
happened that in the preceding winter, Mr. Horace Walpole, 
then at Pans, had amused himself with writing a letter in the 
name of the King of Prussia, for the purpose of throwing 
ridicule upon Rousseau. This piece of pleasantry had been 
widely circulated, and at length appeared in an English 
newspaper. The poor man immediately took it into his 
head that Hume had sent it to the press; and his diseased 
mind connected this supposed fact (which was wholly 
groundless) with a plot formed by a pretended friend, in 
conjunction with his enemies, to ruin his reputation and 
bring him to dishonour. It was impossible to convince 
him of the falsehood and absurdity of this suspicion. I*e 
solemnly renounced friendship with Hume, and declined 
accepting the offered pension, which he seems to have 
considered as the instrument by which his character for 
independence was to be destroyed. There were those who 
in this transaction charged him with acting a part, and 
purposely taking occasion to throw off the burden of an 
obligation to his friend, and make a parade of refusing a 
favour from a crowned head; but the extravagance of this 
conduct, and the weakness of the suppositions on which he 
grounded his charges, seem to prove that he really laboured 
under a mental delusion, favoured, indeed, by habitual pride 
and self-consequence. 
He did not remain much longer in England, where he 
probably had been mortified by the small degreein which he 
excited the public attention; for neither freedom in writing, 
nor eccentricity of manners or thinking, were novelties here. 
He left the counlry in 1767, and went to France, where he 
met with various protectors, with whom he passed his time 
in different provinces. In this year he published his “ Dic- 
tionnaire de Musique,” a performance displaying much taste 
«nd science; but as he repeated in it his attacks upon French 
music, it brought upon him some severe criticism. It tended 
more to harmonize his mind that he resumed his botanical 
pursuits, and in the summer of 1768 collected plants on the 
mountains of Dauphine. In the following year he married 
his gouvernante, or mistress, for he had had five children by 
her, all of whom he sent to the orphan hospital—a dereliction 
of duty that is perhaps the greatest stain upon his character. 
This woman was a vulgar and mean person, who employed 
her ascendancy over him in fomenting his quarrels with his 
friends. She was, however, a faithful and valuable nurse to 
him under his infirmities. During the summer of 1770 he 
appeared at a coffee-house in Paris in his ordinary dress, and 
.received with pleasure the plaudits of the surrounding crowd. 
It was one of the inconsistencies of this extraordinary man, 
to effect a love of solitude and a misanthropical dislike of 
society, and yet never to be easy without occupying the 
public attention. He could neither accommodate himself to 
the world, nor live out of it. On this point Madame de Gen- 
lis in her polix memoirs, records an interesting circumstance. 
