inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic
arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed
nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth for
mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity,
self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was
the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to
cherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude. It was
the charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate effect of
Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It was the
Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than education
that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies to
that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter.
Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and
pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the
Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left;
and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which
the book itself had originally been an outcome.[325] But why try to
state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike the
account truly would be to write the history of the first French
Revolution.[326] All mothers, as Michelet says, were big with
Emilius. "It is not without good reason that people have noted the
children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superior
spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of
revolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science.
It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Ampere, La Place, Cuvier,
Geoffroy Saint Hilaire."[327]

In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the
extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we
have already spoken.[328] Herder, whom some have called the Rousseau
of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then beloved Caroline of
the "divine Emilius," and he never ceased to speak of Rousseau as his
inspirer and his master.[329] Basedow (1723), that strange, restless,
and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phrenetic
enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, translated them into
German, and repeated them in his works over and over again with an
incessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who differed from Basedow in
being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith, was thrown int