of widening them. Jean
Jacques, he said, "is a madman who is very clever, and who is only
clever when he is in a fever; it is best therefore neither to cure nor
to insult him."

Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion for a
proclamation of his final breach with Diderot. "I once," he said,
"possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no longer, and
wish for him no longer." To this he added in a footnote a passage from
Ecclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn a sword on a friend
there still remains a way open, and if you have spoken cheerless words
to him concord is still possible, but malicious reproach and the
betrayal of a secret--these things banish friendship beyond return. This
was the end of his personal connection with the men whom he always
contemptuously called the Holbachians. After 1760 the great stream
divided into two; the rationalist and the emotional schools became
visibly antipathetic, and the voice of the epoch was no longer single or
undistracted.

FOOTNOTES:

[331] See above p. 149.

[332] Voltaire to Rousseau. Aug. 30, 1755.

[333] _Corr._, i. 237. Sept. 10, 1755.

[334] _La Loi Naturelle._

[335] In 1754 the Berlin Academy proposed for a prize essay, An
Examination of Pope's System, and Lessing the next year wrote a
pamphlet to show that Pope had no system, but only a patchwork. See
Mr. Pattison's _Introduction to Pope's Essay on Man_, p. 12. Sime's
_Lessing_, i. 128.

[336] _Conf._ ix. 276.

[337] _Corr._, i. 289-316. Aug. 18, 1756.

[338] Joseph De Maistre put all this much more acutely; _Soirees_, iv.

[339] Madame d'Epinay, _Mem._, i. 380.

[340] _Conf._, ix. 277. Also _Corr._, iii. 326. March 11, 1764.
Tronchin's long letter, to which Rousseau refers in this passage, is
given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 323, and is
interesting to people who care to know how Voltaire looked to a doctor
who saw him closely.

[341] _Corr._, ii. 132. June 17, 1760. Also _Conf._, x. 91.

[342] Some other interesting references to Voltaire in Rousseau's
letters are--ii. 170 (Nov. 29, 1760), denouncing Voltaire as "that
trumpet of impiety, that fine genius, and that low soul," and so
forth; iii. 29 (Oct. 30, 1762), accusing Voltaire of malicious
intrigues against him in Switzerland; iii. 168 (Mar. 21, 1763), that
if there is to be any reconciliation, Voltaire must make first
advances; iii. 280 (Dec., 1763), described a trick played by