isantly assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew the
fire of Rousseau's critical enemies.

Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm. When people are
weary of a certain way of surveying life, and have their faces eagerly
set in some new direction, they read in a book what it pleases them to
read; they assimilate as much as falls in with their dominant mood,
and the rest passes away unseen. The French public were bewitched by
Julie, and were no more capable of criticising her than Julie was
capable of criticising Saint Preux in the height of her passion for
him. When we say that Rousseau was the author of this movement, all we
mean is that his book and its chief personage awoke emotion to
self-consciousness, gave it a dialect, communicated an impulse in
favour of social order, and then very calamitously at the same moment
divorced it from the fundamental conditions of progress, by divorcing
it from disciplined intelligence and scientific reason.

Apart from the general tendency of the New Heloisa in numberless
indirect ways to bring the manners of the great into contempt, by the
presentation of the happiness of a simple and worthy life, thrifty,
self-sufficing, and homely, there is one direct protest of singular
eloquence and gravity. Julie's father is deeply revolted at the bare
notion of marrying his daughter to a teacher. Rousseau puts his
vigorous remonstrance against pride of birth into the mouth of an
English nobleman. This is perhaps an infelicitous piece of
prosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative of the idea of
England in the eighteenth century as the home of stout-hearted
freedom. We may quote one piece from the numerous bits of very
straightforward speaking in which our representative expressed his
mind as to the significance of birth. "My friend has nobility," cried
Lord Edward, "not written in ink on mouldering parchments, but graven
in his heart in characters that can never be effaced. For my own part,
by God, I should be sorry to have no other proof of my merit but that
of a man who has been in his grave these five hundred years. If you
know the English nobility, you know that it is the most enlightened,
the best informed, the wisest, the bravest in Europe. That being so, I
don't care to ask whether it is the oldest or not. We are not, it is
true, the slaves of the prince, but his friends; nor the tyrants of
the people, but their leaders. We hold the balance true between
peop