older brother and the paternal indulgence of
himself:--

If this poor lad was carelessly brought up, it was quite otherwise
with his brother.... My desires were so little excited, and so
little crossed, that it never came into my head to have any. I can
solemnly aver, that, till the time when I was bound to a master, I
never knew what it was to have a whim.

Poor lad! "Never knew what it was to have a whim!" It well might be,
however--his boy's life all one whim uncrossed, unchecked; no contrast
of saving restraint, to make him know that he was living by whim alone!
The "Confessions" truly say:--

Thus commenced the formation or the manifestation in me of that
heart at once so haughty and so tender, of that effeminate and yet
unconquerable character which, ever vacillating between courage and
weakness, between virtue and yielding to temptation, has all along
set me in contradiction to myself, and has resulted in my failing
both of abstinence and enjoyment, both of prudence and pleasure.

The half-orphan becomes orphan entire, not by the death, but by the
withdrawing, of the father. That father, having been accused of a
misdemeanor, "preferred," Rousseau somewhat vaguely says, "to quit
Geneva for the remainder of his life, rather than give up a point
wherein honor and liberty appeared to him compromised." Jean Jacques was
sent to board with a parson, who taught him Latin, and, along with
Latin, supplied, Rousseau scornfully says, "all the accompanying mass of
paltry rubbish styled education." He adds:--

The country was so entirely new to me, that I could never grow
weary in my enjoyment of it; and I acquired so strong a liking for
it, that it has never become extinguished.

Young Jean Jacques was at length apprenticed to an engraver. He
describes the contrast of his new situation and the effect of the
contrast upon his own character and career:--

I learned to covet in silence, to dissemble, to dissimulate, to
lie, and at last to steal,--a propensity for which I had never
hitherto had the slightest inclination, and of which I have never
since been able quite to cure myself....

My first theft was the result of complaisance, but it opened the
door to others which had not so laudable a motive.

My master had a journeyman named M. Verrat.... [He] took it into
his head to rob his mother of some of her earl