Jacques, little dreamed
you, in that cruel moment, that one day before the King of France
and all the court, thy sounds would excite murmurs of surprise and
applause, and that in all the boxes around thee the loveliest
ladies would burst forth with, "What charming sounds! what
enchanting music! every strain reaches the heart!"

But what restored every one to good humor was the minuet. Scarcely
had they played a few measures than I heard bursts of laughter
break out on all hands. Every one congratulated me on my fine
musical taste; they assured me that this minuet would make me
spoken about, and that I merited the loudest praises. I need not
attempt depicting my agony, nor own that I well deserved it.

Readers have now had an opportunity to judge for themselves, by
specimen, of the style, both of the writer and of the man Jean Jacques
Rousseau. The writer's style they must have felt, even through the
medium of imperfect anonymous translation, to be a charming one. If they
have felt the style of the man to be contrasted, as squalor is
contrasted with splendor, that they must not suppose to be a contrast of
which Jean Jacques himself, the confessor, was in the least displacently
conscious. Far from it. In a later part of his "Confessions," a part
that deals with the author as one already now acknowledged a power in
the world of letters, though with all his chief works still to write,
Rousseau speaks thus of himself (he was considering at the time the ways
and means available to him of obtaining a livelihood):--

I felt that writing for bread would soon have extinguished my
genius, and destroyed my talents, which were less in my pen than in
my heart, and solely proceeded from an elevated and noble manner of
thinking.... It is too difficult to think nobly when we think for a
livelihood.

Is not that finely said? And one need not doubt that it was said with
perfect sincerity. For our own part, paradoxical though it be to declare
it, we are wholly willing to insist that Rousseau did think on a lofty
plane. The trouble with him was, not that he thus thought with his
heart, rather than with his head,--which, however, he did,--but that he
thought with his heart alone, and not at all with his conscience and his
will. In a word, his thought was sentiment rather than thought. He was a
sentimentalist instead of a thinker. One illustration of the divorc