."

Rousseau's declining health and the fear of his friends that he was on
the borders of insanity led to his last retreat, offered by a
munificent friend, at Ermenonville, near Paris, where he died at
sixty-six years of age, in 1778, as some think from poison administered
by his own hand. The revolutionary National Assembly of France in 1790
bestowed a pension of fifteen hundred francs on his worthless widow, who
had married a stable-boy soon after the death of her husband.

Such was the checkered life of Rousseau. As to his character, Lord
Brougham says that "never was so much genius before united with so much
weakness." The leading spring of his life was egotism. He never felt
himself wrong, and the sophistries he used to justify his immoralities
are both ludicrous and pitiable. His treatment of Madame de Warens, his
first benefactor, was heartless, while the abandonment of his children
was infamous. He twice changed his religion without convictions, for the
advancement of his fortunes. He pretended to be poor when he was
independent in his circumstances. He supposed himself to be without
vanity, while he was notoriously the most conceited man in France. He
quarrelled with all his friends. He made war on society itself. He
declared himself a believer in Christianity, but denied all revelation,
all miracles, all inspiration, all supernaturalism, and everything he
could not reconcile with his reason. His bitterest enemies were the
atheists themselves, who regarded him as a hypocrite, since he professed
to believe in what he undermined. The hostility of the Church was
excited against him, not because he directly assailed Christianity, but
because he denied all its declarations and sapped its authority.

Rousseau was, however, a sentimentalist rather than a rationalist, an
artist rather than a philosopher. He was not a learned man, but a bold
thinker. He would root out all distinctions in society, because they
could not be reconciled with his sense of justice. He preached a gospel
of human rights, based not on Christianity but on instinct. He was full
of impracticable theories. He would have no war, no suffering, no
hardship, no bondage, no fear, and even no labor, since these were
evils, and, according to his notions of moral government, unnecessary.
But in all his grand theories he ignored the settled laws of
Providence,--even those of that "Nature" he so fervently
worshipped,--all that is decreed concerning man or w