Rousseau is now regarded as an enemy to Christian doctrine, even as he was a foe to the existing institutions of society.  In Geneva his books are publicly burned.  Henceforth his life is embittered by constant persecution.  He flies from canton to canton in the freest country in Europe, obnoxious not only for his opinions but for his habits of life.  He affectedly adopts the Armenian dress, with its big fur bonnet and long girdled caftan, among the Swiss peasantry.  He is as full of personal eccentricities as he is of intellectual crotchets.  He becomes a sort of literary vagabond, with every man’s hand against him.  He now writes a series of essays, called “Letters from the Mountain,” full of bitterness and anti-Christian sentiments.  So incensed by these writings are the country people among whom he dwells that he is again forced to fly.

David Hume, regarding him as a mild, affectionate, and persecuted man, gives Rousseau a shelter in England.  The wretched man retires to Derbyshire, and there writes his “Confessions,”—­the most interesting and most dangerous of his books, showing a diseased and irritable mind, and most sophistical views on the immutable principles of both morality and religion.  A victim of mistrust and jealousy, he quarrels with Hume, who learns to despise his character, while pitying the sensitive sufferings of one whom he calls “a man born without a skin.”

Rousseau returns to France at the age of fifty-five.  After various wanderings he is permitted to settle in Paris, where he lives with great frugality in a single room, poorly furnished,—­supporting himself by again copying music, sought still in high society, yet shy, reserved, forlorn, bitter; occasionally making new friends, who are attracted by the infantine simplicity of his manners and apparent amiability, but losing them almost as soon as made by his petty jealousies and irritability, being “equally indignant at neglect and intolerant of attention.”

Rousseau’s declining health and the fear of his friends that he was on the borders of insanity led to his last retreat, offered by a munificent friend, at Ermenonville, near Paris, where he died at sixty-six years of age, in 1778, as some think from poison administered by his own hand.  The revolutionary National Assembly of France in 1790 bestowed a pension of fifteen hundred francs on his worthless widow, who had married a stable-boy soon after the death of her husband.

Such was the checkered life of Rousseau.  As to his character, Lord Brougham says that “never was so much genius before united with so much weakness.”  The leading spring of his life was egotism.  He never felt himself wrong, and the sophistries he used to justify his immoralities are both ludicrous and pitiable.  His treatment of Madame de Warens, his first benefactor, was heartless, while the abandonment of his children was infamous.  He twice changed his religion without convictions, for the advancement