ued to be in an excessive
degree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs the
imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the
strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the
age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the
personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him
with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to
heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of
Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a
hot chafing-dish.[8]

Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in
ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean
Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away
into Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen
for ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,[9] and he
commemorates the homely tenderness and care with which his early years
were surrounded. Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the
side of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying
curiosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busy
about affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contented
interest, as she sang the simple airs of the common people. The
impression of this kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to
the end; her tone of voice, her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair.
The constant recollection of her shows, among many other signs, how he
cherished that conception of the true unity of a man's life, which
places it in a closely-linked chain of active memories, and which most
of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor fragmentariness
of days. When the years came in which he might well say, I have no
pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion and
diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could still
often surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of his
aunt's old songs, with many tears in his eyes.[10]

This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau in
the course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed that
he saw unfairness in the operation of the law, for the offender had
kinsfolk in the Great Council. He resolved to leave his country rather
than give way, in circumstances which compromis