ess was marked
enough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One day in his rambles
falling in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversing
Europe in search of subscriptions for the restoration of the Holy
Sepulchre, he at once attached himself to him in the capacity of
interpreter. In this position he remained for a few weeks, until the
French minister at Soleure took him away from the Greek monk, and
despatched him to Paris to be the attendant of a young officer.[62] A
few days in the famous city, which he now saw for the first time, and
which disappointed his expectations just as the sea and all other
wonders disappointed them,[63] convinced him that here was not what he
sought, and he again turned his face southwards in search of Madame de
Warens and more familiar lands.

The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, and
which we may date in the summer of 1732,[64] was always counted by
Rousseau among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seem
grievously wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas of
redeeming the time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money.
He travelled alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris back
again to Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him in
the stead of books. Scarcely any great writer since the revival of
letters has been so little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to
literature for the most characteristic part of his work. He was formed
by life; not by life in the sense of contact with a great number of
active and important persons, or with a great number of persons of any
kind, but in the rarer sense of free surrender to the plenitude of his
own impressions. A world composed of such people, all dispensing with
the inherited portion of human experience, and living independently on
their own stock, would rapidly fall backwards into dissolution. But
there is no more rash idea of the right composition of a society than
one which leads us to denounce a type of character for no better reason
than that, if it were universal, society would go to pieces. There is
very little danger of Rousseau's type becoming common, unless lunar or
other great physical influences arise to work a vast change in the
cerebral constitution of the species. We may safely trust the prodigious
_vis inertioe_ of human nature to ward off the peril of an eccentricity
beyond bounds spreading too far. At presen