omposition the author was
avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of the members of the
materialistic school.

In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that
democratic tendency in education, which political and other
circumstances gradually made general alike in England, France, and
Germany; a tendency, that is, to look on education as a process
concerning others besides the rich and the well-born. As has often
been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke, Fenelon, busy themselves about
the instruction of young gentlemen and gentlewomen. The rest of the
world are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by the education of
circumstance. Since the middle of the eighteenth century this
monopolising conception has vanished, along with and through the same
general agencies as the corresponding conception of social monopoly.
Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and self-sufficing man
as the object of education, and showed, or did his best to show, the
infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural
cultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that such
a capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope
of producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had
every external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor
self-sufficing.

Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it
contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, we
may be sure, concerned religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's
profession of faith which stirred France far more than the upbringing
of the natural man in things temporal. Let us pass to that eloquent
document which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as the
expression of the religious opinion that best befits the man of
nature--a document most hyperbolically counted by some French
enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the religion of
sentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century.

FOOTNOTES:

[273] _Mem. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, ii. 276, 278.

[274] _Lettres a mon Fils_ (1758), and _Les Conversations d'Emilie_
(1783).

[275] _Lettres Peruviennes._

[276] _Oeuv._, ii. 785-794.

[277] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 65.

[278] _Emile_, I. 27.

[279] It is interesting to recall a similar movement in the Roman
society of the second century of our era. See the advice of Favorinus
to mothers, in Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier, contrasting t