will treat you well, if you
will let me. But if you persist in refusing my help, do not reckon
upon my telling any one that you did so. If you are bent on tormenting
your spirit to find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. I
am a king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure; and what
will certainly never happen to you in respect of your enemies, I will
cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take a pride in being
persecuted. Your good friend, FREDERICK."

[361] _Corr._, iv. 313, 343, 388, 398.

[362] _Ib._ 395.

[363] _Ib._ 389, etc.

[364] _Ib._ 384.

[365] _Ib._ 343, 344, 387, etc.

[366] _Corr._, iv. 346.

[367] _Ib._ 390. A letter from Hume to Blair, long before the rupture
overt, shows the former to have been by no means so phlegmatic on this
occasion as he may have seemed. "I hope," he writes, "you have not so
bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion; I
assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a
plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more
affecting." Burton, ii. 315. The great doubters of the eighteenth
century could without fear have accepted the test of the ancient
saying, that men without tears are worth little.

[368] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 79.

[369] Walpole's _Letters_, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For other
letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp. 23-28. A
corroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the letter
until he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to Madame
de Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and _n._ 2.

[370] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 79.

[371] To Adam Smith. Burton, 380.

[372] Burton, 381.

[373] A very common but random opinion traces Rousseau's insanity to
certain disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions. They may have
contributed in some small degree to depression of vital energies,
though for that matter Rousseau's strength and power of endurance were
remarkable to the end. But they certainly did not produce a mental
state in the least corresponding to that particular variety of
insanity, which possesses definitely marked features.

[374] Burton, ii. 314.

[375] For an instructive and, as it appears to me, a thoroughly
trustworthy account of the temper in which the Confessions were
written, see the 4th of the _Reveries_.

[376] Letter to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. _Corr._, v. 98:
also 118.