69, began his career at the close of the age
of Louis Quatorze, died at Brussels, March 17, 1741. He had been
banished from France, by an intrigue, on a false charge, as now seems
clear, of having composed and distributed defamatory verses, in 1712;
and it was engraved upon his tomb that he was 'thirty years an object of
envy and thirty of compassion.' Belonging to the classical school of the
17th century, of which he was the last survivor, he came somewhat into
conflict with the spirit of the 18th, which was preparing a new vintage,
and would have none but new wine in new bottles. Rousseau, however, was
a very finished writer in his way, and has been compared to Pindar,
Horace, Anacreon and Malherbe. His ode to _M. le Comte du Luc_ is as
fine an example as I know of the modern classical style. This is quite
different from that which is exemplified in Wordsworth's Laodamia and
Serjeant Talfourd's Ion; for in them the subjects only are ancient,
while both the form and spirit are modern; whereas in the odes of
Rousseau a modern subject is treated, as far as difference of times and
language will allow, in the manner and tone of the Ancients. Samson
Agonistes and Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris are conformed to ancient
modes of thought, but in them the subject also is taken from antiquity.
Rousseau's works consist of Odes, Epistles in verse, Cantatas, Epigrams,
&c. &c. He wrote for the stage at the beginning of his literary life,
but with no great success. S.C.)

He recommended me to read his HERMANN before I read either THE MESSIAH
or the odes. He flattered himself that some time or other his dramatic
poems would be known in England. He had not heard of Cowper. He thought
that Voss in his translation of THE ILIAD had done violence to the idiom
of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the Greeks, not remembering
sufficiently that each language has its particular spirit and
genius.[231] He said Lessing was the first of their dramatic writers. I
complained of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was not enough of action
in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of their writers. He spoke
favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS OF WERTER was his best
work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred the first written to
the rest of Goethe's dramas. Schiller's ROBBERS he found so extravagant,
that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of the setting sun.[232]
He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live. He though