o
company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him in the cause
of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.[330] Pestalozzi
(1746-1827), the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful
of all the educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his
principles mainly from the Emilius, though he gave larger extension
and more intelligent exactitude to their application. Jean Paul the
Unique, in the preface to his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806),
one of the most excellent of all books on the subject, declares that
among previous works to which he owes a debt, "first and last he names
Rousseau's Emilius; no preceding work can be compared to his; in no
previous work on education was the ideal so richly combined with the
actual," and so forth.[331] It was not merely a Goethe, a Schiller, a
Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The smaller men, such
as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration. The
worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched every degree
of intelligence.[332]

In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and
must have been widely read, for a second version of the translation
was called for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey gives
one a right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is
not very perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time to
come, excite much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations
on society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted
more attention. Reference has already been made to Paley.[333] Adam
Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has
many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.[334] Kames's
Sketches of the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in
references to Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often
to cite him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crude
notions about women are cited with special acceptance.[335] Cowper was
probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic
lines in the Task, beginning "Haste now, philosopher, and set him
free," scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.[336] Nor
should we omit what was counted so important a book in its day as
Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps
more French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence in
our literature of politics, and in its c