of Rousseau for the excesses of the Revolution, and suggested that Burke had not made himself acquainted with the Contrat Social. Rousseau was vindicated as one of the immortal band of sages "who unshackled and emancipated the human mind," and he was assured a place in eternal glory, by the side of Locke and Franklin.

All that was generous, all that was enthusiastic in English opinion, was still marshalled on the side of Rousseau, but Burke's measured attack, so universally considered, was the gradual cause of an ever-increasing defection. For the time being, however, this was confined to the more timid and the less intelligent part of the community. Burke had assailed in Rousseau the politician and the moralist, but although it was evident that he was out of sympathy with the imaginative writer, his diatribe did little at first to weaken the spell of Rousseau's sentimental and literary writings. There was no sign, in 1800, that the Nouvelle Héloïse had lost its magic for English readers, though it may be doubted whether these were so numerous as they had been twenty years earlier. The famous romance had been the direct precursor of the school of romantic-sentimental novels in England, but it would take us too far back to consider in any detail its influence on Holcroft, whose Hugh Trevor dates from 1797; on Bage, in such romances as Hermsprong (1796); on Mrs. Inchbold, in Nature and Art (1796); and on Charlotte Smith. But it must be remembered that these popular novelists lived well on into the nineteenth century, and that their romances were still widely read, and by advanced thinkers warmly accepted, long after our period begins. Moreover, in William Godwin (17561836), once known as "the immortal Godwin," we have the most pronounced example in English literature of the novelist started and supported by a

devotion to the principles of Rousseau. Caleb Williams (1794) is still a minor English classic, and Fleetwood (1804) is an example of a Rousseau novel actually written within the confines of our century. But with these names the list of the novelists directly inspired by the Nouvelle Héloïse, and in a much lesser degree by Emile, practically ceases, and the advent of Walter Scott gave the survivors their coup de grâce.

We

The excessive admiration of Englishmen for the imaginative writings of Rousseau was already on the wane, or rather it was beginning to be oldfashioned. That very remarkable work The Diary of a Lover of Literature, by Thomas Green (1769-1825), gives us a valuable insight into critical opinion during the opening years of the nineteenth century. It was published in 1810, but it reflects the feeling of a slightly earlier time. It represents the views of an independent and transitional thinker, remote from all the literary cliques, who read extensively in his hermitage at Ipswich, and it mirrors the mind of the average educated Englishman between 1795 and 1805. discover that there were persons of cultivation in England at that time who did not hesitate deliberately to pronounce that Rousseau was, "without exception, the greatest genius and the finest writer that ever lived." This opinion the judicious Green is by no means able to endorse; but he makes a very curious confession which throws a strong light on the best English opinion in 1800. The Lover of Literature says that Rousseau is a character "who has by turns transported me with the most violent and opposite emotions of delight and disgust, admiration and contempt, indignation and pity." He points out, with great acumen, the peculiar conditions of Rousseau's "distempered sensibility," and says that his wrath against

growing suspicion. They looked back

It is necessary to note that the earliest objections made to Rousseau's influence by Englishmen were political. They were not directed against the Nouvelle Héloïse, nor Emile, nor the Confessions, but against the Contrat Social.

The name of Rousseau had been used, in connection with this work, to justify the horrors of the French Revolution, the jacquerics, the September massacres. Serious English people, whom Burke had originally awakened to suspicion, became more and more deeply persuaded that it was the doctrine of Rousseau which had conducted Louis XVI, to the scaffold. The book itself was never much read in England, but it formed part of a tradition. It was understood to have consecrated the violent acts of the Revolution, and English people began to shrink from a title-page so tainted with blood. This view found a striking exponent in the opening number of the Edinburgh Review, where Jeffrey, reviewing Monnier's Influence attribuée aux philosophes, warned his readers with earnest unction against "the presumptuous and audacious maxims" of Rousseau, which had a natural tendency to do harm. The arguments of the Contrat Social were exposed by the Whig critic as unsettling the foundations of political duty, and as teaching the citizens of every established Government that they were enslaved, and had the power of becoming free. Whatever influence Rousseau still had, and in 1802 it was already waning, the Edinburgh Review solemnly declared to be "unquestionably pernicious."

By English politicians of the Tory

to first causes, and found him at the end of the vista. They blamed him all the more because they still lay under the spell of his style and his sentiment. He was beginning to be regarded with more disapproval than other and more definitely revolutionary philosophers, than Condorcet, for instance, as being more presumptuous and less logical, more "improvident," to use the expression of an early English critic. There was no considerable desire in England for the subversion of monarchy, and it was only in countries where there was a wish to believe that kings were toppling from their thrones that the political writings of the arch-agitator could expect to find a welcome. All such speculation had been pleasant enough before the great revolution set in in France, but England, thrilled for a moment by Quixotic hopes, had turned into another path, where Rousseau had not led her, nor could ever be her companion. He appeared as a demagogue and a disturber of the public peace, as an apostle of change and crisis and unrest. In England everyone, or almost everyone, craved a respite from such ideas, and his prestige began to sink. Let us note, then, that beyond question the earliest objection to Rousseau came from the political side.

The personal character of the Genevese philosopher was still little known. It was revealed, in certain unfavorable aspects, by several collections of memoirs, which now began to be published. These of Marmontel, in 1805, were widely read in England, and were recommended to a large circle of readers by Jeffrey in a famous essay. The anecdotes, so amusing and often so piquant, appeared to the Scotch critic and to his British audience more discreditable than Marmontel, who be longed to an earlier and looser gener

ation, had intended them to seem. From 1805 began to arise in England the conception of a Rousseau full of cruel vanity, implacable, calumnious, and wholly wanting in that frankness and bluff candor upon which John Bull delights to pride himself. But the splendor of his writings was still uncontested. In 1809, the Edinburgh Review said even of the Contrat Social that "it contains some deep observations, and many brilliant and elevated thoughts, along with a good deal, we admit, of impracticable and very questionable theory." The Confessions was not much read, but the precise Jeffrey did not hesitate to recommend it, in 1806, as in some respects the most interesting of books, and in 1807 Capel Lofft declared, "If I had five millions of years to live upon the earth, I would read Rousseau daily with increasing delight."

It would take us too far to consider how the sentimental Pantisocracy of the youthful Lake Poets coincided with the direct influence of Rousseau. That movement, moreover, belongs to the eighteenth, not the nineteenth century, since it was all over by 1794. But so far as it was an outcome of the teaching of Rousseau, the reaction which followed it was not favorable to the prestige of works which now came to seem almost hateful to the Lake Poets. Wordsworth branched away irrevocably, and his account of the Saturnian Reign in The Excursion (finished in 1805) would have given little satisfaction to Rousseau. Southey was early, and permanently, disgusted with himself for having supposed that the millennium would be ushered in from Geneva. But perhaps the best example of the revulsion of opinion which followed the juvenile raptures of the Lake Poets is to be found in the pages of the The Friend (1809-10), where Coleridge derides

Rousseau, the dreamer of love-sick

tales, and the spinner of speculative cobwebs; shy of light as the mole, but quick-eared, too, for every whisper of the public opinion; the teacher of stoic pride in his principles, yet the victim of morbid vanity in his feelings and conduct.

Yet this was premature, as an expression of general critical disapprobation. In November, 1809, the high Tory organ, the Quarterly Review," spoke, without a shade of disapproval, of "the tremendous fidelity" of the picture of life in the Confessions. In 1812, the same severe periodical, then forming the most dreaded tribunal of British intellectual taste, devoted several pages to an examination of the moral character of Rousseau, and the result was by no means unfavorable. The writer was John Herman Merivale (1779-1844), who declared that "Rousseau's system of morality is as little practicable as would be a system of politics invented by one who had always lived in a state of savage independence," and suggested, but without bitterness, that portions of the Nouvelle Héloïse betrayed "a certain lack of just moral taste and feeling." The Confessions are described in faltering terms which suggest that Merivale had not read them with any attention. On the whole, we find, up to this point, no difference between the views of Englishmen and of similarly placed Frenchmen. Even Shelley, in his Proposals for an Association (1812), blames the tendency of some of Rousseau's political writings in exactly the conventional Continental tone.

But a brief and limited, though splendid revival was now approaching, the last which the reputation of Rousseau was to enjoy in England. We must note the sphere within which this es

2 The writer, as I am courteously informed by the present editor of the Quarterly Review, was James Pillans (1778-1864), the Scottish educational reformer, the "paltry Pillans" of Byron's satire in English Bards and Scotish Reviewers.

oteric celebration of his genius was confined; it was not an explosion of national enthusiasm, but the defiant glorification of a power which had already begun to decline; it was not a general expression of approval, but the spasm of a group of revolutionaries. It was roused, no doubt, by the attitude of the official critics who were affecting to think that the influence of Rousseau was exploded. The Quarterly had said in 1813, "As it is probable that we may not soon be again in the company of this extraordinary man, we would willingly take leave of him in good humor," and though it was quite unable to keep up this attitude of dignified dismissal, and returned to the attack in April, 1814, nevertheless that was the tone adopted towards Rousseau, as of a man played out, and rapidly being forgotten.

The publication of the voluminous Correspondence of Grimm, which was much read in England, led Englishmen to review the subject of the character and writings of Rousseau, and in the remarks which contemporaries made in 1813 and 1814 we may trace a rapid cooling of their enthusiasm. The scorn of all French habits of thought and conduct, which immediately succeeded the anxious and wearisome period of the Napoleonic wars, now made itself particularly felt in the English attitude towards Rousseau, who was regarded as the source from which all the revolutionary sorrows of Europe had directly proceeded. The Quarterly Review for April, 1814, pronounced a judgment upon Rousseau's moral tendency, of which a portion must be quoted here, since it may be considered as the original indictment, the document which served to start the unfavorable opinion which now became more and more that which sober and conservative Englishmen were to adopt during the next fifty years. The opening lines give a new warning, which was to gain

steadily in emphasis, while the end repeats praise which was conventional in 1814, but was already fading, and was soon to disappear.

The reviewer says:

A writer who professes to instruct mankind is bound to deliver precepts of morality. But it is by inflaming the passions, and by blotting out the line which separates virtue from vice, that Rousseau undertakes to teach young ladies to be chaste, and young men to respect the rights of hospitality. His heroine, indeed, in conformity to his own example, is always prating about virtue, even at the time when she deviates most essentially from its precepts; but to dogmatize is not to be innocent. Yet, with all its defects, there are numerous passages in this celebrated work which astonish by their eloquence. Language, perhaps, never painted the conflicts of love in colors more animated and captivating than in the letter written by St. Preux when wandering among the rocks of Meilleraye.

Unfortunately, the name of this critic is unknown.

But the charm was not to be broken without a violent effort being made to restore to Rousseau his earlier supremacy. It came from the group of brilliant Radical writers, who had not accepted the Toryism of the ruling classes, to whom the discredited principles of the Revolution were more dear than they had ever been, and who pinned their attractive and enthusiastic æsthetic reforms to the voluptuous ecstasy of the Nouvelle Héloïse and the chimerical sentiment of Emile. Already, in The Round Table (1814), Hazlitt had recommended the Confessions as the "most valuable" of all Rousseau's writings; he was presently in his Liber Amoris (1823) to produce the work which of all important books of the English nineteenth century was to reproduce most closely the manner of the Genevese master. Two years later, having made a very careful examina

tion of the works, Hazlitt published his essay On the Character of Rousseau, which was not surpassed, or approached, as a study of the great writer until the appearance of Lord Morley's monograph, nearly sixty years afterwards.

Hazlitt exposes the baneful effect of Burke's attacks, while acknowledging that from his own, the Tory point of view, Burke was justified in taking the line that he did. It is perfectly true that "the genius of Rousseau levelled the towers of the Bastile with the dust," but Hazlitt, an intellectual revolutionary, exults in the admission, Hazlitt acknowledges, nevertheless, that the exaggerated hopes founded upon such books as the Contrat Social have been followed by inevitable disappointment. It was, however, not the fault of Rousseau, but of his sanguine and absurd disciples, that Europe, or particularly England, has "lost confidence in social man." Ecstatic admirers of his inspired visions had expected the advent of Rousseau to bring in a millennium, and in the disappointment founded on the excesses of the French Revolution they had turned, with ingratitude, upon the pure and Utopian dreamer who had drawn things as they should be, not as it was humanly possible that they ever could be. The writings of Rousseau, Hazlitt declares, are looked up to with admiration by friends and foes alike as possessing "the true revolutionary leaven," but it needs political foresight and a rare capacity of imagination to perceive that this operates, through temporary upheaval and distraction, to produce an ultimate harmony and a beneficent beauty. In the course of his writings, Hazlitt frequently quotes Rousseau, and always with admiration. He is the most illuminated and the most thoughtful of all Rousseau's early English critics.

In the summer of 1816 the two young

poets of the day who displayed the most extraordinary genius in England, or perhaps in Europe, made acquaintance with one another for the first time, and instantly determined to travel together. They met in Switzerland, intoxicated with the unfamiliar beauty around them, and Byron took the Villa Diodati close to Geneva, where he and Shelley steeped themselves in the Nouvelle Héloïse under the shadow of Mont Blanc. In June they started together round the lake on a journey, which turned into a pilgrimage. In Shelley's Letters may be read the enthusiastic account of the poets' visit to Meillerie. He refrained from gathering acacia and roses from Gibbon's garden at Lausanne, "fearing to outrage the greater and more sacred name of Rousseau, the contemplation of whose imperishable creations had left no vacancy in his heart for mortal things." As they sauntered along the shores of the enchanted Leman, the friends "read Julie all day." They lived, with the characters of the great romance, in an endless melancholy transport. Byron's enthusiasm took the form of the famous stanzas in "Childe Harold III.," beginning:Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau.

It is a remarkable instance of the complete decline of the prestige of Rousseau in England that Byron's editor of 1899 is astonished that Byron and Shelley "should not only worship at the shrine of Rousseau, but take delight in reverently tracing the footsteps of St. Preux and Julie." He is so completely disconcerted that he can only exclaim, "But to each age its own humor!" The age of 1899 was certainly not in the humor for Rousseau, but it was almost to go beyond the boundaries of good taste to denounce, as this editor did, beneath the very text of Byron's raptures, "the unspeakable philanderings" of Rousseau. Such