e
that he decreed for himself, or rather--for we have used too positive a
form of expression--that he allowed to subsist, between sentiment and
conduct, will suffice. It was presently to be his fortune, as author of
a tract on education (the "Emile"), to change the habit of a nation in
the matter of nurture for babes. French mothers of the higher social
class in Rousseau's time almost universally gave up their infants to be
nursed at alien bosoms. Rousseau so eloquently denounced the
unnaturalness of this, that from his time it became the fashion for
French mothers to suckle their children themselves. Meantime, the
preacher himself of this beautiful humanity, living in unwedded union
with a woman (not Madame de Warens, but a woman of the laboring class,
found after Madame de Warens was abandoned), sent his illegitimate
children, against the mother's remonstrance, one after another, to the
number of five, to be brought up unknown at the hospital for foundlings!
He tells the story himself in his "Confessions." This course on his own
part he subsequently laments with many tears and many self-upbraidings.
But these, alas, he intermingles with self-justifications, nearly as
many,--so that at last it is hard to say whether the balance of his
judgment inclines for or against himself in the matter. A paradox of
inconsistencies and self-contradictions, this man,--a problem in human
character, of which the supposition of partial insanity in him, long
working subtly in the blood, seems the only solution. The occupation
finally adopted by Rousseau for obtaining subsistence, was the copying
of music. It extorts from one a measure of involuntary respect for
Rousseau, to see patiently toiling at this slavish work, to earn its
owner bread, the same pen that had lately set all Europe in ferment with
the "Emile" and "The Social Contract."

From Rousseau's "Confessions," we have not room to purvey further. It is
a melancholy book,--written under monomaniac suspicion on the part of
the author that he was the object of a wide-spread conspiracy against
his reputation, his peace of mind, and even his life. The poor,
shattered, self-consumed sensualist and sentimentalist paid dear in the
agonies of his closing years for the indulgences of an unregulated life.
The tender-hearted, really affectionate and loyal, friend came at length
to live in a world of his own imagination, full of treachery to himself.
David Hume, the Scotchman, tried to befri