of the improvement of the public taste); and was indeed at the height of its favour about the time that Warburton was hazarding those broad assertions on a subject of which he must have been, we are willing to suppose, but imperfectly informed. That Crebillon soon fell into disrepute with all persons of good morals and good taste-if indeed we can suppose that such persons could, even for a moment, have tolerated his works-we readily admit; but every one, at all acquainted with the popular literature of France, knows too well that they extended to a very late period their baneful influence in those classes_among which their contagion was most fatal to public morals. Indeed, it was not till the bolder, deeper, and more enthusiastic licentiousness of modern authors had made Crebillon appear fade' and tasteless that he ceased to be the delight of the youth of both sexes. Thirty years after the publication of Les Egaremens du Cœur et de l'Esprit, Sterne-(would that this were the only point in which this examination reminds us of Sterne !)-Sterne describes the fille de chambre of a lady of rank as asking for this work openly at a bookseller's; and so it continued down to the Revolution.

After Crebillon came Voltaire, who, though he can hardly be called a novelist in the limited sense in which we are now using the word, had a deplorable influence on this as on almost every other branch of literature. His Tales did not pretend to be representations of real life. They are not novels but satires, in which a fable-generally an extravagant one of Oriental features -is made the vehicle of all that wit, gaiety, and malignity could combine to ridicule, discredit, and destroy the civil and religious institutions of his country. The mischief, however, that they did was more political than moral,—they were calculated rather to pervert the mind than to inflame the passions; and though, as might be expected, his sedition and impiety were mixed up with gross indecencies, we cannot attribute to them anything like the same deleterious effect on individual morals that were produced by Crebillon, or by some nearly contemporaneous works of a graver character and less offensive style-we mean those of Rousseau.

We confess that we never could feel what has been called the magic of Rousseau; we even go so far as to own that-putting out of the question the moral depravity of his writings—we have the misfortune to be somewhat heretical in our opinion of his literary merit. The Nouvelle Héloïse, his great work, and that which is principally connected with our present subject, always wearied us-wearied us, even in our youth, by what we thought its false sensibility and verbose eloquence, as much as, in our mature age, it disgusts us by its false reasoning and its perverted principles. Is this mere bad taste on our parts? or is

it, as we of course are disposed to believe,' that Rousseau's literary merit has little to do with his present reputation, which may be rather attributed to the success of those revolutionary paradoxes on the nature of government and the constitution of society, which he first explained and familiarized, and which have since, by a disastrous combination of circumstances, obtained such an ascendency in the literary and political opinions of France. But why should the influence of Rousseau appearas it certainly has of late done-so much deeper and more permanent than that of Voltaire?-Voltaire is only read, quoted, and admired; but Rousseau has made a sect, and is followed and adored-Why?-Because Voltaire was only a genius, and Rousseau was a madman. For one who has pretended to ape Voltaire even in his lowest qualities, there are hundreds who have imitated Rousseau in his highest. Candide and Zadig have had-fortunately for society-nothing like a rival; Héloïse-as unfortunately-has had an hundred-exemplar vitiis imitabile. There is hardly one of the crowd of volumes enumerated at the head of this article which is not of the school of Rousseau; and M. de Balzac, the most fertile, and not the most offensive of the fraternity of French novelists, in a work (the very name of which we do not venture to specify) in which he pretends to examine some important questions of social life, refers us, at once, to Rousseau as the standard and text book of public morals—'Ouvrez,' he says, 'ouvrez Rousseau-car il ne s'agira aucune question de morale publique dont il n'ait, d'avance, indiqué la portée.' It cannot, therefore, be out of place or out of season to remind our readers of some portion of the personal history of this Apostle of Disorder.

A baser, meaner, filthier scoundrel never polluted society than M. de Balsac's standard of public morals,' nor one who better exemplified the divine warning-Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so a good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.'

We have called Rousseau a madman, and such he undoubtedly was. Originally mad, in some degree, from constitutional infirmity, but completely disordered with the drunken vanity of some accidental, and by no means creditable, successes which surprised and overset the course and projects of his earlier life. His father was a poor watchmaker at Geneva, (where watchmaking is the commonest trade,) who, not without pecuniary difficulty, sent him to an humble school, and endeavoured to give him an honest trade; but Rousseau-being detected in lying and thieving— eloped from his business, his family, and his country; and, after some experimental vagrancy, had recourse to apostacy to appease

his hunger he had been born a Protestant, and took his religion to market to a Roman Catholic Bishop in Savoy, who sent him to a convent for instruction, where, having abandoned his faith, aud being compensated with what we dare say was a liberal equivalent for such a faith as he had-the sum of 17s. 6d., he again became a wanderer. He entered successively two families as a footman; from the first he was dismissed for his old propensities of thieving and lying, which grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength' to an almost incredible degree of depravity. In the second place he was promoted, as he says, from being footman to be secretary; but he does not account, except by the plea of restlessness, for his having forfeited this extraordinary good fortune. Wandering again, he renewed a casual acquaintance with a sensual widow, who hired him as footboy, but eventually exalted him—the poor wretch thought it Olympic exaltation to be her paramour.

Expelled from this filthy elysium by the jealousy of his rival-the gardener he again took to a vagabond life, till he found himself, at a mature age, upon the pavé of Paris. During all his vicissitudes, however, he had read whatever came in his way, particu→ larly romances, and acquired what was thought, for a person in his circumstances, a surprising degree of literature; he had also a natural though it is said a false--taste for music, and proposed to exist by his discoveries and compositions in that art: he failed, indeed, in these musical projects, but contrived, while prosecuting them, to make some respectable acquaintance, and obtained what he impudently calls the secretaryship of the French mission at Venice-a gross exaggeration of the dignity of his employment; for it turns out that he had no diplomatic character whatsoever, but was only a kind of upper servant, who, knowing how to read and write, and copy and even compose music, was treated on a footing superior to the other domestics. Be that as it may, he contrived to be dismissed from this situation also; and had now, at near forty years of age, no resource but to return to Paris; where he existed at first ou a clerkship in the office of one of the farmers-general of the revenue, and subsequently by some literary and musical efforts, which at length brought him into notice-particularly a little dramatic scene of Le Devin du Village,' which had a great success in Paris, and which Dr. Burney introduced, without any success, on the English stage by the title of The Cunning Man.'

During this time Rousseau formed a connexion with the vulgar, stupid, and ugly maid-servant of the obscure house in which he lodged; by her he had five children, whom, with a diabolical egotism and inhumanity of which we know no parallel, he abandoned as soon as they were born to the foundling-hospital, taking

irrevocable

irrevocable precautions to prevent the possibility of their being ever recognized. This atrocity he defended in his writings by an excuse still more atrocious-All the world persecutes me, and if I had brought up these children, there is no crime which they might not have been suborned to commit against me.' These mean amours he diversified, as he boasts, by some adulterous intrigues of a higher order, for which the extreme profligacy of the philosophical society of Paris afforded too much opportunity. The reputation of one of his exalted flames, who was not sufficiently complying, he endeavoured to bring down to his own level by calummiating her in anonymous letters, which he had the additional baseness of attributing to the lady's sister-in-law-his own best friend.

These disorders probably suggested to him his celebrated novel of La Nouvelle Héloïse, which appeared in 1759, when its author was near fifty, and may be characterized in three words as an apology for incontinence and adultery. Two years after appeared his Contrat Social-to which, more than all his other works, we attribute his influence over revolutionary France. In this he first promulgated his equally absurd and fatal doctrine of the practical sovereignty of the people. This was, after a short interval, followed by Emile, a wild paradox on education, in which he episodically introduced an attack on Christianity, so offensive that the Parliament of Paris, already startled by the disorganizing doctrines of the Contrat Social, felt itself obliged to order proceedings against the author, who fled into Switzerland to escape the storm. There he published other works of the same tendency, so grossly insulting to all sense and feeling, that even the mob of the little village in which he resided rose against him, and expelled their crazy and mischievous guest.

David Hume-whose constitutional goodnature was perhaps somewhat stimulated by sympathy for a persecuted deist-now obtained for him an asylum in England; but by this time Rousseau seems to have become entirely mad, and he exhibited that most common and infallible symptom, of believing that all mankind was conspiring against him-his English friends being, in his disordered imagination, the chief conspirators. He broke away from them in a frenzy of indignation; and at length was permitted to return to France, where he was received with kindness by his philosophical admirers, one of whom, M. Girardin, established him in a cottage at his seat of Ermenonville. Here he put the last hand to the extraordinary work published after his death, called his "Confessions,' in which he avows with maniacal effrontery most of the turpitudes to which we have alluded; and here, in 1788before he had time to quarrel with M. Girardin, which he assuredly would soon have done, as he did with every other bene

factor

factor he ever had-he died suddenly, but whether by his own hand or not, is a still litigated question? *

'What,' it has been asked, 'must be the priest, when a monkey is the god?' What must be the sect of which a devil is the idol? Rousseau's most devoted disciple was Robespierre! The Contrat Social was the text book of Jacobin policy: the Héloïse and Emile, the guides of Jacobin morals; and the benign influence of the Man of Nature,' as he was called, was piously evoked during all the atrocities of the Reign of Terror! His bones were removed from Ermenonville, and enshrined-the National Assembly attending in a body the impious procession-with those of Marat in the PANTHEON-(as by a characteristic blunder it was called) of a people who acknowledged no GoD, and canonized only the most worthless of mankind. The same spirit which carried Rousseau to the Pantheon, during the horrors of the first Revolution, has revived his reputation in the impudent profligacy of the last; and we shall see, by-and-by, that even the least offensive of the recent publications of the Parisian press are exaggerations of the worst faults of Rousseau-for odious as was his private life, and mischievous as were his writings, there is, even in the Héloïse, a certain decency of language-a semi-opaque veil which diminishes the deformities of the subject-a kind of involuntary tribute paid to good manners, if not to virtue-which forbids us to rank that work in the more disgraceful class of which we shall have occasion to speak.

Crebillon had for a long time none but very obscure imitatorsDiderot is hardly an exception, for his Novels, like Voltaire's, were politics; but on the approach of the Revolution appeared the work of La Clos, one of the creatures and confidants of Egalité-Orleans, of which we will only say, that it is characteristic and worthy of the society which produced it; and that of Louvet, published soon after, and which was the sole recommendation of that adventurer to the rank of a legislator in regenerated France.

Thus we see, that during the eighteenth century, which gave birth to the NOVEL, properly so called, and which produced thousands of the class, we can cite-previous to the Revolutionbut three authors of any note,-Crebillon-La Clos-and Louvet, -who can be stigmatised as having written what can be strictly

His admirers often speak with rapture of a colloquy supposed to have occurred between him and his wife immediately previous to his death, in which the unhappy man is made to exclaim in a frenzy of triumphant blasphemy, 'Eternal Being! the soul I am now going to give thee back is as pure at this moment as it was when it proceeded from thee.' This is certainly very characteristic; but there seems reason to doubt how far the stupid Thérèse, with whom the whole dialogue purports to have passed, can be received as credible evidence of feelings and expressions, which she assuredly was not capable of comprehending.

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