to the realities of human nature. Of all the brilliant writers of our country, Burke was the least bewildered by his own brilliancy. He is not following a blaze which blinds him; the blaze emanates from himself, his flight is luminous, and every waving of the wings of his fine imagination at once shakes out light on all beneath, and bears him forward with new rapidity. The work is full of those powerful thoughts which form the frame-work of philosophy. Thus, the fragment on the uses of difficulty in public and private life. "The purpose (of the French Assembly) everywhere seems to have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty. This it has been the glory, of all the great masters in all the arts, to confront, and to overcome; and when they had overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties; thus to enable them to extend the empire of their science, and even to push forward beyond the reach of their original thoughts the landmarks of the human understanding. Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better too. Ipse pater colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial. It is the want of nerves of understanding for such a task, it is the degenerate fondness for tricking short cuts, and little fallacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers. They created the late arbitrary monarchy of France. They have created the arbitrary republic of Paris. With them, defects in wisdom are to be supplied by plenitude of force. They get nothing by it. Commencing their labours on a principle of sloth, they have the common fortune of the slothful. The difficulties which they rather eluded than escaped, meet them again in their course; they mul

tiply and thicken on them; they are involved, through a labyrinth of confused detail, in an industry without limit and without direction, and in conclusion, the whole of their work becomes feeble, vicious, and insecure."

In illustration of the vulgar precipitancy of the French legislature, he quotes a speech of one of its members, which now seems insanity, but which was then the soberest wisdom of all France. Rabaud St Etienne, a wellknown name in the revolutionary councils, thus pronounced the national principle: "All the establishments of France only consummate the calamities of the people; to render them happy, all must be renewed: we must change its ideas, change its laws, change its habits, change men, change things, change words; we must destroy every thing, yes, destroy every thing, since every thing must be new created." "This man," says Burke, contemptuously, "was chosen President of an Assembly, not sitting at Quinze Vingt or the Petits Maisons (the bedlams of Paris), and composed of persons giving themselves out to be rational beings!"

THE SPIRIT OF A LEGISLATOR."It seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart and an undoubting confidence are the only qualifications for a perfect legislator. Far different are my ideas of that high office. The true legislator ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself. It may be allowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object with an intuitive glance; but his movements towards it ought to be deliberate. Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be wrought only by social means. Mind must conspire with mind. Time is required to produce that union of minds, which alone can produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force. In my course, I have known, and according to my measure co-operated with, great men ; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding, to the persons who took the lead in

the business. When the great interests of mankind are concerned through a long succession of generatious, that succession ought to be admitted into some share in the councils which are so deeply to affect them. If justice requires this, the work itself requires the aid of more minds than one age can furnish. It is from this view of things, that the best legislators have been often satisfied with the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government, a power like that which some of the philosophers called a plastic nature; and having fixed the principle, they have left it afterwards to its own operation."

ROUSSEAU.-Burke's disgust for Rousseau was among the instances in which he had the start of his age. When he first came into society, Rousseau's volumes were in every hand, the fashionable model of feel ing, the philosophical model of education, the political model of revolt, and the sensual model of libertin ism. Burke had the sagacity to see the vice under the garb of the virtue, the manliness to denounce it, and the vigour to expose it. "Mr Hume," says he, "told me that he had from Rousseau himself the secret of his principles of composition. That acute, though eccentric observer, had perceived, that, to strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be produced; that the marvellous of the Heathen mythology had long since lost its effects; that giants, magicians, fairies, and heroes of romance, had exhausted the portion of credulity which belonged to their age; that now nothing was left to a writer but that species of the marvellous, which might still be produced, and with as great effect as ever, though in another way: that is, the marvellous in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations, giving rise to new and unlooked for strokes in politics and morals. I believe, that were Rousseau now alive, and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the practical frenzy of his scholars, who in their paradoxes are servile imitators, and even in their incredulity discover an implicit faith."

No man of his volatile age ex

hibits more vividly the passing nature of popular fame than Rousseau. The times were evil, and were made for the eminence of profligacy. Rousseau shot up in that region of busy darkness like a firework, glittered for a moment with a lustre that fixed all eyes, and was extinguished with the rapidity of the firework. He has been charged with labouring to overthrow the French Government: the charge fails only in its want of breadth. He laboured to overthrow all governments, for he laboured to overthrow all society. His whole life was a series of hostility against the peace of mankind. He assailed it in all its forms. In his Emilius, he broke down the principles of filial obedience; in his Nouvelle Heloise, he corrupted the union of husband and wife; in his Contrat Social, he dissolved the allegiance of the subject to his King; in his Confessions, he insulted all sense of religion by the blasphemy of invoking the Divine Being to be a witness of the deepest violation of his laws. Thus appealing to every evil propensity of man, and assailing every good, he prepared for himself all the notoriety that belongs to violent partisanship on the one side, and to the resentment of authority on the other. The leader who enlisted under his banner the whole profligacy of Europe for the time, must become conspicuous; the victim who concentrated upon his head the wrath of all the great constituted interests of Europe, the priesthood, the tribunals, and the cabinets, must become memorable even by the powers employed in binding him to the horns of the altar. This sinister fame was his grand object, and he sought persecution with the eagerness of a man seeking for the nutriment of his existence. He fled from land to land, delighted at the flashes of royal and religious wrath which followed him. compounded with their keenness for their illustration. When they had at length died away, he became his own persecutor. He loved so inveterately to think himself an object of universal fear, that all his artifice was employed to prolong the semblance of persecution. He now fled where none followed. He saw visionary swords pursuing him to his pillow, and exclaimed against op

He

pression, when even justice had forgotten him. At length artifice itself failed; he found that he could neither sting the Continental Governments into giving him the celebrity of a martyr, nor persuade mankind into the conviction that he was born to be hunted down by a conspiracy of Kings. He had now no farther business in existence. He married his mistress, sent his foundlings to an hospital; made one desperate grasp at fame, by predicting the hour of his death; and shot himself, to accomplish the prediction. The only epitaph upon his tomb shall be, "Here lies the Slave of Vanity."

It is to be lamented that we have never had a life of Rousseau; not a life of panegyric-of those we have had a superfluity-but of truth; not of the sickly affectations of sentiment, nor of the insolence of vice; not a French life, but a British one. It would have been a service worthy even of the pen of Burke. We should then have seen the hypocrite of sensibility stripped of his skin, and the working of every muscle of his shrinking economy laid bare. The infinite heartlessness, the elaborate fiction, the habitual vice, the native imposture, would be opened to the general eye. The idol of the age would have been cast from its pedes tal, and every man would have seen for himself the worthless compound, the remnants and tinsel, that from its artificial stand, once figured in the popular gaze, like the garments of a descended deity. It is perhaps now too late for this. The subject has sunk into the natural oblivion belonging to all things worshipped with extravagance. In this great masquerade of the world, before we can catch the true voice of one folly under its vizard, it is superseded by another, or the former folly has shifted its disguise. Still the exposure of hypocrisy can never be a service thrown away. The age of the sentimental Rousseaus is with the years beyond the flood; but we still have the hypocrites of public virtue, the Rousseaus of philanthropy, the Rousseaus of faction; the men of feeling, who project their feelings to the Antipodes, while they have not a pulse for the pauperism of England; the mourners over every deathbed of revolt in the

circumference of the globe,-tongues pouring out their periodical sermons, and hearts bleeding at every pore for every bruise on the head of Jacobinism in France, or every stain on the charter of the Goth and the Hun; but frigid as stone to the miseries round their feet;-political romancers, enthusiasts in faction, selfdeniers of the things of this world in the very heat and struggle for all that this world can give; the meek protestors against the Mammon to which they cling, the true Scribes and Pharisees of the time, broadening their phylacteries, and deepening the hem of their garments, in pious horror of the ostentation which is the business of their lives; the political crusaders, with the scallop on their fronts and Jerusalem in their eyes, yet hurrying on in the common, mixed multitude of the vices and passions, and sharing every revel and rapine by the way.

The life of Rousseau might be the history of the eighteenth century. It touched upon all its features, religious, political, and literary. He was a Genevese, and from his infancy was wayward and insubordinate. At school he would learn nothing. Put to a trade, he was equally unmanageable. His father, a watchmaker, probably found him too unsteady for his own pursuit, and bound him to a solicitor. By him he was soon sent back for indolence. Exhibiting some turn for the arts, he was next bound to an engraver. From him he ran away. But he was now a youth; and to return to the parental jurisdiction, would have been too formidable an encroachment on his natural liberty. He became a rambler through the mountain country round the lake. When he was on the point of starving, he threw himself into the hands of a Popish priest in Savoy, to whom he probably gave some hopes of his becoming a proselyte from the "heresies of Calvin;" and the priest, who probably thought that conversion was good, let the means be what they may, put him into the hands of the handsome and well-known Madame de Warens, a new-made" convertite." This shewy libertine, at the age of twenty-eight, having run the round of female passion, had concluded it in the usual foreign mode, by turning dévote. Her attentions,

reinforced by the humbler influence of twenty florins, completed his new profession of faith at Turin. He again became a rambler, was dismissed from various households, and again returned to Madame. He now adopted music, and remained at Chamberry as a teacher, for the longest stationary period of his life, eight years, of habitual profligacy. Disgust on both sides dissolved the connexion of the devotee and the proselyte, and Rousseau went to Paris, the common refuge of intelligence, poverty, and profligacy. There, in 1743, some accidental influence made him Secretary to the French Legation at Venice. But his old temperament prevailed. He became restless, involved himself in the ambassador's displeasure, and again returned to Paris-to starve. For a while he obtained some scanty provision by copying music; but he was at length about to start upon the world. The question which he has made so memorable was, in 1750, proposed by the Academy of Dijon Whether the re-establishment of the arts and sciences has contributed to purify morals?" The circumstances of his famous essay on this subject are among the most striking instances of the slight hinges on which the fortunes of individuals, and perhaps of nations, sometimes turn. Rousseau sketched a paper in the affirmative. He had been employed in writing articles on music, for the Encyclopédie. Diderot, its conductor, one day came into the room while he was busied with the essay. He took it up. "What is this?" said he. "It is eloquent nay, true; but it is foolish! You will never gain any thing by it but a prize in Dijon. Write it for Paris -for Europe." Rousseau remonstrated, but his adviser persevered. "Write truth, and you will soon be forgotten, perhaps never read; write paradox-startle old opinions-ridicule the past-flatter the presentbe sublime and absurd-leave the world in doubt, whether they should laugh at you, or fall down and worship at your feet, and you will make your fortune." He took the subtle advice-threw his essay into the fire -produced a new one-won the prize at Dijon-became the talk of Paris and from that moment com

menced the brilliant, disturbed, and guilty publicity, which made his life a curse and a wonder to Europe.

He now devoted himself exclusively to the cultivation of his new popularity, and wrote for the French stage his stage his "Devin du Village," a little opera, whose Swiss airs delighted the Parisian audiences. He was now in the way to his predicted fortune; but his vanity again threw him back. He wrote a pamphlet to prove to the French amateurs, that, from the nature of their language, they were incapable of vocal music. He now found the hazard of returning to truth. The whole nation felt the imputation as a mortal affront, and he was actually forced to fly beyond the frontiers. He took refuge in Geneva; and as his faith was not firmer than his morality, he attempted to propitiate public opinion by renouncing Popery.

But he was now to signalize himself by a production which combined all his talent and all his profligacy. Its groundwork was an event of his early life, in which, having basely abused the trust reposed in him as a tutor, he had been expelled the family with scorn and shame. This work was his "Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise." Diderot's advice had made a powerful impression. It never quitted him during his life. He prefaced his volumes by a declaration worthy of the highest flight of paradox ;-that the female who read a page of them was inevitably undone; that he looked upon it as a misfortune that the age no longer existed in which such works were the subject of public justice; and that every woman should, as an act of essential precaution, throw the book instantly into the fire. If Diderot knew mankind in general, Rousseau shewed in this instance that he knew the nature of Frenchwomen well. The prohibition, the danger, and the romance in one, formed a stimulant which the national curiosity found irresistible. The Nouvelle Heloise was instantly in every female hand in France; it was universally adopted as the model of manners, feelings, and language; and the author of a work, infamous in all its objects, was blazoned by all the voices of a profligate people, as the first writer of Europe.