It was this spirit of reckless innovation, promulgated by atheists and drawn logically from some principles of the "Social Contract" of which Rousseau was the author, which excited the ire of Burke.

Ossian would be naturally offensive to Johnson, as one of the earliest and most remarkable manifestations of that growing taste for what was called "Nature," as opposed to civilization, of which Rousseau was the great mouthpiece.

More dangerous still than these ribald blasphemers were those sentimental and morbid expounders of humanity of whom Rousseau was the type,a man of more genius perhaps than any I have named, but the most egotistical of that whole generation of dreamers and sensualists who prepared the way for revolution.

'Your Rousseau, chère Madame, is a very poor affair indeed!

He wrote to the municipality, acknowledged his own error, and the merits of Rousseau; yet, says he, if Rousseau were a god, you ought not to sacrifice human victims to him.

Francis Rousseau, a native of Auxerres, who travelled a long time in Persia, Pegu, and other parts of the East Indies, and who, in 1692, resided at St. Domingo, was the inventer of sealing-wax.

Rousseau was, however, a sentimentalist rather than a rationalist, an artist rather than a philosopher.

The important question isdid Grimm know that Rousseau was in reality an honourable man, and, knowing this, did he deliberately defame him in order to drive him out of Madame d'Epinay's affections?

Rousseau was not a Frenchman: French society always felt that, in consequence of certain impressions of his early youth which were never to be effaced.

Taken at his best, however, Rousseau was the Saint John of the Revolutionary Gospel, though the bloody complement of its Apocalypse was left for other hands than his to trace.

Charles Lamb once declared that Rousseau was a good enough Jesus Christ for the French, and he was capable of declaring Tom Paine a good enough Milton for the Yankees.

Rousseau might be really a fanatic, and, though eccentric, honest; yet his power of adorning impracticable systems, it must be acknowledged, has been more mischievous to society than a thousand such gross impostors as Marat.

Rousseau, perhaps the ablest, certainly the most popular, of those who preceded the Revolution, is an example.

Here Rousseau was a disguised seducer, a poisoner of the moral sentiments, a foe to what is most sacred; and he was the more dangerous from his irresistible eloquence.

Rousseau was no Calvinist, but the principles of religious and civil liberty are so closely connected that he may have caught their spirit at Geneva, in spite of his hideous immorality and his cynical unbelief.

Rousseau was the conscience of France, which rebelled against the negations and the bald emptiness of the materialistic and atheistic doctrines.

The latter flew into a rage; he wrote to Baron d'Holbach: "My dear Baron, Rousseau is a scoundrel." Rousseau was by this time mad.

A hundred years ago this apology for error was met by those high-minded and interesting men, the French believers in human perfectibility, with their characteristic dogma,of which Rousseau was the ardent expounder,that man is born with a clear and unsophisticated spirit, perfectly able to discern all the simple truths necessary for common conduct by its own unaided light.

Rousseau was a most instructive talker on art, beyond the sphere of which he hardly seemed to care to go in his thinking.