ually been counted a demonstration of a turned brain.
Rousseau had as good cause for going about in a caftan as Chatham had
for coming to the House of Parliament wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a
desire to attract notice may, we admit, have had something to do with
Rousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of dressing. Shrewd wits like
the Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not suppose that it was so.
We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly know whether it was
so or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange character would be
very little worth forming, if it only turned on petty singularities of
this kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the quality of
articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by
reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations
on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of
experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about
unknowable trifles.

During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own.
Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or by
curiosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments,
came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sending
people to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. "I
had never been free from strangers for six weeks," he writes. "Two
days after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six days
later, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese,
recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell ill
again, and he has only just gone away."[138] One visitor, writing home
to his wife of the philosopher to whom he had come on a pilgrimage,
describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch us with
surprise:--"Thou hast no idea how charming his society is, what true
politeness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity and
cheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a different
picture, and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave and
sometimes even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of great
mildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the like
of which never was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takes
an interest, then his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about him
speaks. You would be quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting
grumbler. Not at all; he laughs with those who laugh, he chats