the hands of people who will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception you gave him."1 As it happens, he was the means of sending Boswell to a place where his head was turned, though not very mischievously. Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican projects, of which this is the proper place for us very briefly to speak.

The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to assert their independence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, which had begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli (1726-1807) defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle the government of the island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said, "There is still in Europe one country capable of legislation, and that is the island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this brave people has succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty, entitle it to the good fortune of having some wise man to teach them how to preserve it. I have a presentiment that this little isle will one day astonish Europe," 2-a presentiment that in a sense came true enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man who was born on the little island seven years later than the publication of this passage. Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and in August 1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for the purpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political institutions and a code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in 2 Bk. ii. ch. x.

1 Streckeisen, ii. 111. Jan. 18, 1765.

the application of ideal systems, and we are assured that he had no intention of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only of inducing him to inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a history of their exploits.1 Rousseau, however, did not understand the invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the very idea of such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he entered into it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself with Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a year he would collect the necessary information as to the manners and opinions of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would produce a set of institutions that should be fit for a free and valorous people.2 In the midst of this enthusiasm (May 1765) he urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, with results which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica (1768), and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for many a long day afterwards. "Mind your own affairs," at length cried Johnson sternly to him, "and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I wish you would empty your head of Corsica."3 At the end of 1765, the immortal hero-worshipper on his return expected to come upon his hero at Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letter in 1 Boswell's Account of Corsica, p. 367.

2 The correspondence between Rousseau and Buttafuoco has been published in the Euvres et Corr. Inédites de J. J. R., 1861. See pp. 35, 43, etc.

3 Boswell's Life, 179, 193, etc. (Ed 1866).

...

wonderful French. "You will forget all your cares for many an evening, while I tell you what I have seen. I owe you the deepest obligation for sending me tc Corsica. The voyage has done me marvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch had sunk into my soul. . . . I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if you, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to help them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they have acquired with so much heroism-if you have cooled towards these gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can say."1

Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of Rousseau's mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some other enemy had spread the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus of Corsica was a practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temper found what he took for confirmation of this in some trifling incidents with which we

1 "Je suis tout homme de pouvoir vous regarder avec pitié!" Letter dated Jan. 4, 1766, and given by Musset-Pathay as from a Scotch lord, unnamed. Boswell had the honour of conducting Theresa to England, after Hume had taken Rousseau over. “This young gentleman," writes Hume, “very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad-has such a rage for literature that I dread some circumstance fatal to our friend's honour. You remember the story of Terentia, who was first married to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age married a young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some secret which would convey to him eloquence and genius." Burton's Life, ii. 307, 308. Boswell mentions that he met Rousseau in England (Account of Corsica, p. 340), and also gives Rousseau's letter introducing him to Paoli (p. 266).

certainly need not concern ourselves.1 Next, a very real storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new place of shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. For France having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance of the Genoese (1764), ended by buying the island from the Genoese senate, with a sort of equity of redemption (1768)—an iniquitous transaction, as Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking to justice, humanity, reason, and policy. Civilisation would have been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the acquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a state.3

2

The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his partisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was political rather than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protest against the oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the quarrel about Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the popular and aristocratic parties. This

1 To Buttafuoco, p. 48, etc. 2 Corr., vi. 176. Feb. 26, 1770. 3 It may be worth noticing, as a link between historic personages, that Napoleon Bonaparte's first piece was a Lettre à Matteo Buttafuoco (1791), the same Buttafuoco with whom Rousseau corresponded, who had been Choiseul's agent in the union of the island to France, was afterwards sent as deputy to the Constituent, and finally became the bitterest enemy of Paoli and the patriotic party.

strife, after coming to a height for the first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification of 1738, but the pacification was only effective for a time, and the roots of division were still full of vitality. The lawfulness of the authority and the regularity of the procedure by which Rousseau had been condemned, offered convenient ground for carrying on the dispute, and its warmth was made more intense by the suggestion on the popular side that perhaps the religion of the book which the oligarchs had condemned was more like Christianity than the religion of the oligarchs who condemned it.

Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved in its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were engaged in it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his ears. If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to fancy, they would have gone for very little in the life of the day. But Rousseau never stood on the heights whence a strong man surveys with clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or furious moods of the world. Such achievement is not hard for the creature who is wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the passions of men about him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not because he has measured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among the elements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his fellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and