in an advertisement that a prize had been offered by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay on the question, Whether the progress of sciences and of the arts has been favourable to the morals of mankind? He at once resolved to write for the prize, and apparently without having ever before considered the subject, made up his mind to take the negative side of the question. Diderot encouraged, but did not, as has been commonly said, originate this determination. He supported his position, that science, literature, and art, have been fatal to the virtues and happiness of mankind, with a glowing eloquence; and the Academy awarded him the prize. His success confirmed him in a turn for paradox and exaggeration; and he seems to have adopted, as a general principle, the doctrine that the extreme opposite to wrong must necessarily be right, At the same time his reputation as an author became established, and in a few years after his first essay he was acknowledged to be one of the most, or rather the most, eloquent writer among his contemporaries. Meantime he persevered in his attempts at musical composition, and wrote 'Le Devin du Village,' an opera which was played before the king at the Court Theatre of Fontainebleau, and met with the royal approbation. Rousseau was in one of the boxes with a gentleman belonging to the court. The king having expressed a desire to see the composer of the opera, Rousseau became alarmed or ashamed at the slovenly condition of his dress, and instead of repairing to the royal presence, he ran out of the house and hastened back to Paris. Naturally shy, he possessed neither ease of manners nor facility of address, and he could never throughout life subdue his own acute feeling of these deficiencies; a feeling which of course tended to perpetuate and increase his awkwardness. This was

the secret spring of most of his eccentricities. In order to hide his imperfections, he resorted to the plan of affecting to disregard manners altogether; he put on the appearance of a cynic, of a misanthropist, which he was not in reality.

It was about the year 1750, soon after writing his dissertation for the Dijon prize, that he made a total change in his habits and mode of living. He gave up all refinement about his dress, laid aside his sword, bag, and silk stockings, sold his watch, but kept his linen apparel, which however was stolen from him shortly after. He spent one-half of the day in copying music as a means of subsistence, and he found constant employment. Several persons who knew his circumstances offered him three or four times the value of his labour, but he would never accept more than the usual remuneration. In 1753 he wrote his 'Lettre sur la Musique Française,' in which he asserted that the French had no music deserving the name, that they could not possibly have any, and then added, that were they ever to have any it would be all the worse for them;" a sentence unintelligible to his readers, and probably to himself also. When, years after this, he heard Gluck, with whose music he was delighted, he observed to some one, "this man is setting French words to very good music, as if on purpose to contradict me;" and upon this reflection he broke off acquaintance with Gluck. However, his letter on French music sorely wounded the national vanity, and he was exposed to a sort of petty persecution in consequence of it. Rousseau wrote next his letter to D'Alembert, Sur les Spectacles,' which led to a controversy between them. He wrote also the

Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inégalité parmi les Hommes,' for another prize of the Academy of Dijon, with a dedication to the magistrates of his native

town Geneva, which was much admired as a specimen of dignified eloquence. The discourse itself is composed in his accustomed paradoxical vein. He maintains that men are not intended to be sociable beings; that they have a natural bias for a solitary existence; that the condition of the savage, untutored and free in his native wilds, is the natural and proper state of man; and that every system of society is an infraction of man's rights, and a subversion of the order of nature. He assumes that men are all born equal by nature, disregarding the daily evidence of the contrary, in respect both of their physical and moral powers. His idea of the equal rights of men, which he afterwards developed in the Contrat Social,' instead of being founded upon enlightened reason, religion, and morality, rests upon the base of his favourite theory, of man's equality in a state of nature; while we know from experience, that those savage tribes who approach nearest to this imaginary natural state, acknowledge no other right than that of the strongest. Most of Rousseau's paradoxes proceed from the false position assumed in his first dissertation, that a savage, unsocial state, is the very perfection of man's exist

ence.

After the publication of this discourse Rousseau repaired to Geneva, where he was well received by his countrymen. He there abjured Catholicism and resumed the profession of the reformed religion. But he soon returned to Paris; and, at the invitation of Madame d'Epinay, in 1756, took up his residence at the house called L'Hermitage, in the valley of Montmorency, near Paris. It was in this pleasant retirement that he began his celebrated novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloïse,' which he finished in 1759. As a work of imagination and invention it is little worth; but as a model of im

passioned eloquence, it will be admired as long as the French language shall continue to be spoken or read by men. Rousseau, while he wrote it, was himself under the influence of a passion which he had conceived for the beautiful Madame d'Houdetot, Madame d'Epinay's sister-in-law, a love totally hopeless and ridiculous on his part, but which no doubt inspired him while engaged in the composition of this work. When it appeared, many people, especially women, thought that Julie was a real living object of his attachment, and the supposition being favourable to the popularity of the book and its author, Rousseau was not very anxious to undeceive them. He esteemed the fourth portion of the work the best. "The first two parts are but the desultory verbiage of feverish excitement, and yet I could never alter them after I had once written them. The fifth and the sixth are comparatively weak, but I let them remain out of consideration of their moral utility. . . My imagination cannot embellish the objects I see; it must create its own objects. If I am to paint the spring, I must do it in winter; if to describe a landscape, I must be shut up within walls: were I confined in the Bastille, I should then write best on the charms of liberty. I never could write as a matter of business, I can only do it through impulse or passion." (Rousseau's 'Notes to the Nouvelle Heloïse,' in Mercier and Le Tourneur's edition.) He had great difficulty in constructing his periods: he turned them and he altered them repeatedly in his head, often while in bed, before he attempted to put them on paper.

La Nouvelle Heloïse has been censured for the dangerous example it affords, and for the interest it throws upon seduction and frailty. The character of St. Preux is decidedly faulty, and even base, in spite of all his sophistry, which however has

probably led other young men placed in a similar situation to forget the relative duties of society, and the obligations of hospitality. Here we perceive also the influence of Rousseau's favourite paradox; for in a state of nature, such as Rousseau has fancied it, the intimacy of St. Preux and Julie would have been unobjectionable. But then the relative position. of the teacher, his pupil, and her parents, would not have been the same as in the novel, for they would have been all savages together. Rousseau has however redeemed the character of Julie after she becomes a wife, and he has thus paid a sincere homage to the sacredness of the marriage bond, and to the importance of conjugal duties, the basis of all society. Rousseau was not a contemner of virtue ; he felt its beauty, though his practice was by no means modelled on its dictates. He tells us himself the workings of his mind on this subject. "After much observation I thought I perceived nothing but error and folly among philosophers, oppression and misery in the social order. In the delusion of my foolish pride I fancied myself born to dissipate all prejudices; but then I thought that, in order to have my advice listened to, my conduct ought to correspond to my principles. I had been till then good-hearted, I now became virtuous. Whoever has the courage of showing himself such as he is, must, if he be not totally depraved, become such as he ought to be." It was probably in compliance with his growing sense of moral duty, that he married at last the woman he had so long been living with, when she was forty-seven years of age, and, as he himself acknowledges, was not possessed of any attractions of either mind or person, having nothing to recommend her except her attention to him, especially in his frequent fits of illness or despondency. He seems also to have bitterly repented,