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"I see on every side," he says, "enormous establishments where youth is brought up at great expense to learn everything but its duties. What, then, should they learn? A fine question surely! The First Discourse not only took the prize at Dijon, but attracted a great deal of notice in Paris, and immediately gave Rousseau a distinguished place among men of letters.

There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply condemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is often changed in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right.

The certainty of this confused, but real, feeling in souls who are not illuminated by that celestial light, nor perfumed with that holy essence from which the performance of sentiment springs, doubtless suggested to Rousseau the adventures of Lord Edward, which conclude the letters of the Nouvelle Heloise.

Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's originality was in some respects the more salient of the two.

Lindsley, do you know why Miss Lindsley has become so suddenly displeased with me?" asked the trapper, trembling. "Miss Lindsley, sir, is perverse. It is the one evil trait that my enlightened system of education, drawn from Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Herbert Spencer, and combined by my own genius it is the one evil trait that my system has failed to eradicate. She is perverse.

'It was after the Revolution had fairly begun, as a contemporary says, 'that they sought in Mably and Rousseau for arms to sustain the system towards which the effervescence of some hardy spirits was dragging affairs. It was not the above-named authors who set people's heads aflame. M. Necker alone produced this effect, and determined the explosion.

Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presence created, but whether this was so or not, he was very impatient to be away from it as soon as possible. In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January 1766. They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a passage that lasted twelve hours.

And if there are no relations among men, their inequalities will trouble them very little. Where there is no love, what is the use of beauty? What advantage can people who do not speak derive from wit; or those who have no dealings from craft? "I constantly hear it said," cries Rousseau, "that the strong will oppress the weak. But explain to me what is meant by the word "oppression."

Exaggerated as the above story probably is, we may reasonably believe that it comes nearer the truth than that told by Diderot in after years, when he and Rousseau had quarreled. In that version, Rousseau, desiring to compete for the prize, consulted Diderot as to which side he should take, and was advised to assume that which other people would avoid. Diderot, Oeuvres, xi. 148.

The educational doctrines of Rousseau had then brought into fashion a régime of open-air exercise and freedom for the young, such as we commonly associate with English, rather than French, child-life; and Aurore's early years when domestic hostilities and nursery tyrannies, from which, like most sensitive children, she suffered inordinately, were suspended were passed in the careless, healthy fashion approved in this country.