world of his dreams. If any man called practical is tempted to despise this dreaming creature, as he fares in his chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one making that journey through France less than thirty years later might have seen the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from the land to which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of improvement, and inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of toilers with eyes blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with passionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thought of as justice and right. And this was what Rousseau both partially foresaw and helped to prepare,' while the common politicians, like Choiseul or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game-the elemental forces rising unseen into tempest around them.

He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at the house of an old friend at Yverdun,2 where native air, the beauty of the spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired all weariness and fatigue. Friends at Geneva wrote letters of sincere feeling, joyful that he had not followed the precedent of Socrates too closely by remaining in the power of a government eager to destroy him. A post or two later brought worse news. The Council at Geneva ordered not only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to be publicly burnt, and issued a warrant of arrest against their author, if he should set foot in the territory of the republic (June 19). Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the free government which he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could have condemned him unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristic manner to chide severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken his part. Within a fortnight this blow was followed by another. His two books were reported to the senate of Berne, and Rousseau was informed by one of the authorities that a notification was on its way admonishing him to

1 For a remarkable anticipation of the ruin of France, see Conf., xi. 136. 2 M. Roguin. June 14, 1762.

4 Streckeisen, i. 35.

5 His friend Moultou wrote him the news.

3 Corr., ii. 347.

Streckeisen, i. 43. Geneva was

6 Corr., ii. 356.

the only place at which the Social Contract was burnt. Here there were

peculiar reasons, as we shall see.

quit the canton within the space of fifteen days.' This stroke he avoided by flight to Motiers, a village in the principality of Neuchâtel (July 10), then part of the dominions of the King of Prussia. 2 Rousseau had some antipathy to Frederick, both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, and because his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under foot respect for the natural law and not a few human duties. He had composed a verse to the effect that Frederick thought like a philosopher and acted like a king, philosopher and king notoriously being words of equally evil sense in his dialect. There was also a passage in Emilius about Adrastus, King of the Daunians, which was commonly understood to mean Frederick, King of the Prussians. Still Rousseau was acute enough to know that mean passions usually only rule the weak, and have little hold over the strong. He boldly wrote both to the king and to Lord Marischal, the governor of the principality, informing them that he was there, and asking permission to remain in the only asylum left for him upon the earth. He compared himself loftily to Coriolanus among the Volscians, and wrote to the king in a vein that must have amused the strong man. "I have said much ill of you, perhaps I shall still say more; yet driven from France, from Geneva, from the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter in your states. Perhaps I was wrong in not beginning there; this is eulogy of which you are worthy. Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and I seek none, but I thought it my duty to inform your majesty that I am in your power, and that I am so of set design. Your majesty will

1 Corr., ii. 358, 369, &c.

2 The principality of Neuchâtel had fallen by marriage (1504) to the French house of Orleans-Longueville, which with certain interruptions retained it until the extinction of the line by the death of Marie, Duchess of Nemours (1707). Fifteen claimants arose with fifteen varieties of far-off title, as well as a party for constituting Neuchâtel a Republic and making it a fourteenth cantón. (Saint Simon, v. 276.) The Estates adjudged the sovereignty to the Protestant house of Prussia (Nov. 3, 1707). Lewis XIV., as heir of the pretensions of the extinct line, protested. Finally, at the peace of Utrecht (1713), Lewis surrendered his claim in exchange for the cession by Prussia of the Principality of Orange, and Prussia held it until 1806. The disturbed history of the connexion between Prussia and Neuchâtel from 1814, when it became the twenty-first canton of the Swiss Confederation, down to 1857, does not here 3 Corr., ii. 370.

concern us.

3

4

dispose of me as shall seem good to you." Frederick, though no admirer of Rousseau or his writings, readily granted the required permission. He also, says Lord Marischal, "gave me orders to furnish him his small necessaries if he would accept them; and though that king's philosophy be very different from that of Jean Jacques, yet he does not think that a man of an irreproachable life is to be persecuted because his sentiments are singular. He designs to build him a hermitage with a little garden, which I find he will not accept, nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered him." When the offer of the flour, wine, and firewood was at length made in as delicate terms as possible, Rousseau declined the gift on grounds which may raise a smile, but which are not without a rather touching simplicity. "I have enough to live on for two or three years," he said, "but if I were dying of hunger, I would rather in the present condition of your good prince, and not being of any service to him, go and eat grass and grub up roots, than accept a morsel of bread from him.” Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world of letters, and one very honourable for the person concerned. And we recognise its dignity the more when we contrast it with the baseness of Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of Prussia while Frederick was in his most urgent straits, and while the poet was sportively exulting to all his correspondents in the malicious expectation that he would one day have to allow the King of Prussia himself a pension.' And Rousseau was a poor man, living among the poor and in their style. His annual outlay at this time was covered by the modest sum of sixty louis. What stamps his refusal of Frederick's gifts as true dignity, is the fact that he not only did not refuse money for any work done, but expected and asked for it. Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect plants for him.

1 Corr., ii. 371. July, 1762.

D'Alembert, who knew Frederick better than any of the philosophers, to Voltaire, Nov. 22, 1765.

3 Letter to Hume; Burton's Life of Hume, ii. 105, corroborating Conf., xii. 196.

4 Marischal to J. J. R.; Streckeisen, ii. 70. 5 Corr., iii. 40. Nov. 1, 1762.

6 Burton's Life, ii. 113.

7 Voltaire's Corresp. (1758). Euv., lxxv. pp. 31 and 80.

Conf., xii. 237.

Joyfully, replied Rousseau, “but as I cannot subsist without the aid of my own labour, I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that it might otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of my time for nothing." In the same year, we may add, when the tremendous struggle of the Seven Years' War was closing, the philosopher wrote a second terse epistle to the king, and with this their direct communication came to an end. "Sire, you are my protector and my benefactor; I would fain repay you if I can. You wish to give me bread; is there none of your own subjects in want of it? Take that sword away from my sight, it dazzles and pains me. It has done its work only too well; the sceptre is abandoned. Great is the career for kings of your stuff, and you are still far from the term; time presses, you have not a moment to lose. Fathom well your heart, O Frederick! Can you dare to die without having been the greatest of men? Would that I could see Frederick, the just and the redoubtable, covering his states with multitudes of men to whom he should be a father; then will J. J. Rousseau, the foe of kings, hasten to die at the foot of his throne." Frederick, strong as his interest was in all curious persons who could amuse him, was too busy to answer this, and Rousseau was not yet recognised as Voltaire's rival in power and popularity.

Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages standing in the flat bottom of the Val de Travers, a widish. valley that lies between the gorges of the Jura and the Lake of Neuchâtel, and is famous in our day for its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The flat of the valley, with the Reuss making a bald and colourless way through the midst of it, is nearly treeless, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. In winter the climate is most rigorous, for the level is high, and the surrounding hills admit the sun's rays late and cut them off early. Rousseau's description, accurate and recognisable as it is, strikes an impartial tourist as too favourable. But when a piece of scenery is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand outlines, changes of light, soft variations of colour; the landscape lives for him with an unspoken suggestion and intimate association, to all of which the swift passing stranger is very cold.

1 Corr., iii. 41.

Nov. 11, 1762.

3 Ibid., iii. 110-115.

2 Ibid., iii. 38. Oct. 30, 1762. Jan. 28, 1763.

His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst of the other houses, and his walks, which were at least as important to him as the home in which he dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streaming cascades. The country abounded in natural curiosities of a humble sort, and here that interest in plants which had always been strong in him, began to grow into a passion. Rousseau had so curious a feeling about them, that when in his botanical expeditions he came across a single flower of its kind, he could never bring himself to pluck it. His sight, though not good for distant objects, was of the very finest for things held close; his sense of smell was so acute and subtle that, according to a good witness, he might have classified plants by odours, if language furnished as many names as nature supplies varieties of fragrance. He insisted in all botanizing and other walking excursions on going bareheaded, even in the heat of the dog-days; he declared that the action of the sun did him good. When the days began to turn, the summer was straightway at an end for him: "My imagination," he said, in a phrase which went further through his life than he supposed, "at once brings winter." He hated rain as much as he loved sun, so he must once have lost all the mystic fascination of the green Savoy lakes gleaming luminous through pale showers, and now again must have lost the sombre majesty of the pines of his valley dripping in torn edges of cloud, and all those other sights in landscape that touch subtler parts of us than comforted sense.

One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier, the summer retreat of Lord Marischal. For him he rapidly conceived the same warm friendship which he felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just left. And the sagacious, moderate, silent Scot had as warm a liking for the strange refugee who had come to him for shelter, or shall we call it a kind of shaggy compassion as of a faithful inarticulate creature. His letters, which are numerous enough, abound in expressions of hearty good-will. These, if we reflect on the genuine worth, veracity, penetration, and experience, of the old man who wrote them, may fairly be counted the best testimony that remains to the existence of something sterling at the bottom of

1 Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 103, 59, &c.