tt! He who has once
seen into this, has seen the difference of the True from the
Sham-True, and will discriminate them ever afterwards.

We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all
disadvantages and disorganisations, can accomplish for the world. In
Rousseau we are called to look rather at the fearful amount of evil
which, under such disorganisation, may accompany the good.
Historically it is a most pregnant spectacle, that of Rousseau.
Banished into Paris garrets, in the gloomy company of his own Thoughts
and Necessities there; driven from post to pillar; fretted,
exasperated till the heart of him went mad, he had grown to feel
deeply that the world was not his friend nor the world's law. It was
expedient, if anyway possible, that such a man should _not_ have been
set in flat hostility with the world. He could be cooped into garrets,
laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild beast in his
cage;--but he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire.
The French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His
semi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilised life, the
preferability of the savage to the civilised, and suchlike, helped
well to produce a whole delirium in France generally. True, you may
well ask, What could the world, the governors of the world, do with
such a man? Difficult to say what the governors of the world could do
with him! What he could do with them is unhappily clear
enough,--_guillotine_ a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau.

* * * * *

It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving, secondhand
Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up, among the artificial
pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns.
Like a little well in the rocky desert places,--like a sudden
splendour of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not what
to make of it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work;
alas, it _let_ itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, as
in bitterness of death, against that! Perhaps no man had such a false
reception from his fellow-men. Once more a very wasteful life-drama
was enacted under the sun.

The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all of you. Surely we may say,
if discrepancy between place held and place merited constitute
perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse than
Burns's. Among those secondhand acting-figures, _mi