[377] _Ib._ v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p. 137, etc.

[378] _Corr._, v. 37.

[379] _Corr._, v. 88.

[380] See the letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April 1767.
_Corr._, v. 140-147.

[381] Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371.

[382] J.J.R. to Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767. _Corr._,
v. 66, 152.

[383] Burton, 369, 375.

[384] _Corr._, v. 153.

CHAPTER VII.

THE END.

Before leaving England, Rousseau had received more than one
long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest of
mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of
Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire
of a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau
were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's
originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is
less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in
him than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many
other headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions
of philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force of
temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral
formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be,
with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without
native strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken
up the trade of friendship for man and adopted the phrases of
perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a
Fenelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils.

Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked
tenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its
formulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in
private life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race.
Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in
Rousseau's books: "I know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it
strikes like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of
truth, for you are always true, according to your notions for the
moment." He wrote to tell him so, but he told him at the same time at
great length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency less academic
than Rabelaisian, that he had behaved absurdly in his quarrel with
Hume. There is nothing more quaint than the appearance of a few of the