"Ils partent par le temps le plus noir; ils s'acheminent; un guide les éclairait avec sa lanterne, meuble assez singulier pour chercher le soleil! Enfin, après deux heures d'excursion fatigante, le jour commence à peindre. Voltaire frappe ses mains avec un véritable joie d'enfant. Ils étaient alors dans un creux. Ils grimpent assez péniblement vers les hauteurs: les 81 ans du philosophe pesant sur lui, on n'avançait guère, et la clarté arrivait vite; déjà quelques teintes vives et rougeâtres se projetait à l'horizon. Voltaire s'accroche au bras du guide, se soutient sur M. de Latour, et les contemplateurs s'arrêtent sur la sommet d'une petite montagne. De là le spectacle était magnifique! les roches pères du Jura, les sapins verts, se découpant sur le bleu du ciel dans les cimes, ou sur le jaune chaud et apre des terres; au loin des prairies, des ruisseaux; les milles accidents de ce suave passage qui précède la Suisse, et l'annonce si bien, et enfin la vue se prolonge encore dans un horizon sans bornes, un immense cercle de feu empourprant tout le ciel. Devant cette sublimité de la nature, Voltaire est saisi de respect: il se découvre, se prosterne, et quand il peut parler ses paroles sont un hymne! Je crois, je crois en Toi!' s'écriat-il avec enthousiasme; puis décrivant, avec son génie de poète, et la force de son âme, le tableau que reveillait en lui tant d'émotions, au but de chacun des véritables strophes qu'il improvisait, 'Dieu puissant! je crois!' répétait-il encore. Mais tout-à-coup se relevant, il remit son chapeau, sécoua la poussière de ses genoux, reprit sa figure plissée, et regardant le ciel comme il regardait quelquefois le Marquis de Villette lorsque ce dernier disait une naïveté, il ajoute vivement, 'Quand à Monsieur le Fils, et à Madame sa Mère, c'est une autre affaire.""

ROUSSEAU.

THE life of Rousseau neither requires so full a consideration as that of Voltaire, nor affords the materials for it. Mankind are not divided upon his character and his merits, nor ever were. That he was a person of rare genius within limited, nay, somewhat confined, bounds, of a lively imagination, wholly deficient in judgment, capable of great vices as well as virtues, and of a mind so diseased that it may possibly be doubted if he was accountable for his actions, is the opinion which his contemporaries formed of him during his life, which has ever since prevailed, and which, indeed, was confirmed by his own testimony, produced after his decease, and calculated to show that he would not have dissented from the sentence or even have hesitated to join in pronouncing it. His history and his writings are of a kind that unavoidably interest us; but the one affords too few events, the other too little variety, to detain us very long in examining either.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, on the 28th of June, 1712. His father was a watchmaker; his mother the daughter of M. Bertrand, a Protestant minister; and her brother, an engineer, married the sister of old Rousseau, who appears to have been a man of exemplary virtue, of considerable abilities, of some information, and of a very feeling heart. had gone to Constantinople about seven years after the birth of his eldest and then his only son, but he returned on being apprized by his wife that she was

He

* The edition of Rousseau referred to in the text is that of Lefèvre, Paris, 1839, in eight large volumes.

beset by the attentions of the French Resident, to whom she had given every possible repulse. This gentleman, M. de la Closure, showed, at a distance of thirty years, some kindness to the son, and was moved to tears in speaking of his mother, who died when she had given him birth, ten months after her husband's return from the East. His grief was excessive; and he used for some years after to take a mournful pleasure in speaking of her, and weeping over her memory with his child. He read with him all her books, which were chiefly novels and romances, and in devouring these they would frequently sit up whole nights. The stock being exhausted, they betook themselves to a more wholesome food; the library of her father having, on his death, come to them, and containing historical and other useful books. An extraordinary enthusiasm for the Greek and Roman characters, and especially the eager perusal of Plutarch's Lives,' and the Roman history, was the consequence of this new course of reading. Young Rousseau could not abstain from the subject, and one day alarmed the family at dinner, while he was relating the fable of Scævola, by running to the chafing-dish and holding his hand on it. When he was eight or nine years old, his father had a quarrel with a French officer, and to avoid being cast into prison, left Geneva and settled at Lausanne, where he afterwards married a second wife advanced in years, and had no children by her. His eldest son, seven or eight years older than Jean Jacques, had never been the favourite, though bred to his father's business; he took a dissipated course, left the place, and went into Germany. Little pains were taken to stop or to trace him; he never wrote to any one after his flight, and what became of him is not known. In all probability, he died before his brother attracted much notice, else he probably would have discovered himself.

Beside the love of modern romances and of ancient

history, accident gave him a fondness for music, which, with the other passion, accompanied him through life. His aunt, who took care of him, sang a great number of simple airs, chiefly popular ones, with a sweet small voice, which, aided by his attachment to her, made & deep impression upon him, and formed his taste in song as well as imbued him with a sensibility to its charms. After his father's departure for Lausanne, he was left to the care of his uncle Bertrand, who sent him for two years to Boissy, near Geneva, where he remained under the tuition of M. Lambercier, a pastor, and appears to have learnt a little Latin; but when the Abbé Gouvon, in whose service he afterwards was, at Turin, treated him rather as a secretary than a footman, and read Latin with him, he was found to be very ill grounded, and wholly unable to construe Virgil. He acknowledges, indeed, that he never was tolerably acquainted with the language, though he repeatedly attempted to gain it. His statement to this effect, twelve years after he had translated the first book of Tacitus's History,' and translated it exceedingly well, in most passages correctly, in some with great felicity, is one of the exaggerations in which he indulges both of his merits and his defects. But he learnt whatever he knew comparatively late. Nothing could possibly be worse than the education of a man who made it a principle through life to cry down learning, not because he never possessed it, but because he fancied it was hurtful to the character and inconsistent with sound wisdom and true virtue.

After quitting the school at Boissy, he was apprenticed to an engraver, who seems to have treated him harshly. But his conduct was already bad. He had a habit of lying on all occasions, whether moved by fear to conceal some misconduct, or incited by some appetite he wished to gratify, or actuated by some other equally sordid motive. A strong disposition to thieving was likewise among his propensities, and this

continued to abide by him long after he grew up, and even when he lived in society he never could entirely shake it off. His temperament, too, was vehement, and his timidity and shyness equally strong. The indulgences into which he was thus seduced, he has himself described; but to embellish such subjects, or even to veil them so as to hide their disgusting aspect, would require the magic of that diction in which he has clothed his own story, and of which he never seems to have been a master in any of his other writings. After serving through half his apprenticeship, he was surprised one Sunday evening in an excursion with his companions, out of the town, by the shutting of the gates; and there wanted no more to make him elope. He went to the parsonage of a Savoyard curé (rector) at Carouges, two leagues from Geneva, who received him hospitably in the hopes of converting him, and gave him letters of introduction* to Madame de Warens, a Swiss lady, who having left her husband, had become a Catholic, and lived on a pension from the devout King of Sardinia. She received him kindly, and sent him to Turin, where he was entertained at the seminary of Catechists, established for converting heretics. In this religious establishment he found manners of the most dissolute and even abominable kind; he was feebly reasoned with by the brethren on the errors of his belief; he does not seem in reality to have been convinced; but a provision in the Church had been placed before his eyes as the probable reward of his apostacy, and he embraced publicly the Catholic religion. It was, however, soon discovered by the officers of the Inquisition that he was not sufficiently orthodox in his faith; for he would not avow his belief that his mother had been numbered among the damned. He was, therefore, turned out of the seminary, with a present of twenty francs from

* The common accounts say that the Bishop of Annecy gave him this introduction. It was M. de Pontverre, Romish curé, in Savoy.