and
jokes with children, he rallies his housekeeper."[139] He was not so
civil to all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with
a word of most sardonic roughness.[140] But he could also be very
generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an
outcast adventurer, and warning him, "When I lend (which happens
rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment,
nor to exact it."[141] He received hundreds of letters, some seeking
an application of his views on education to a special case, others
craving further exposition of his religious doctrines. Before he had
been at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis for the postage of
letters, which after all contained little more than reproaches,
insults, menaces, imbecilities.[142]

Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that with
the Prince of Wuertemberg, then living near Lausanne.[143] The prince
had a little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that her
upbringing should be carried on as the author of Emilius might please
to direct. Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend to
direct the education of princes or princesses.[144] His undaunted
correspondent sent him full details of his babe's habits and
faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with the
fondness of a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested,
and took some trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture and
admonition. One may smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal,
but his fervid respect and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought
he had found the wisest man that ever lived, and who had at any rate
spoken the word that kindled the love of virtue and truth in him, his
eagerness to know what Rousseau thought right, and his equal eagerness
in trying to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple and
methodical way to please his master, his discipular patience when
Rousseau told him that his verses were poor, or that he was too fond
of his wife,--all this is a little uncommon in a prince, and deserves
a place among the ample mass of other evidence of the power which
Rousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and humane
education had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse, close
and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places.
But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one,
and Rousseau was the private victim of hi