to Mrs. Macdonald’s account, of having the rough draft of the Memoires copied out by his secretary.  Whatever his object, it is certain that the copy—­that from which ultimately the Memoires were printed—­was made either at that time, or earlier; and that there was nothing on earth to prevent him, during the four months of his stay in Paris, from destroying the draft.  Mrs. Macdonald’s explanation of this difficulty is lamentably weak.  Grimm, she says, must have wished to get away from Paris ’without arousing suspicion by destroying papers.’  This is indeed an ‘exquisite reason,’ which would have delighted that good knight Sir Andrew Aguecheek.  Grimm had four months at his disposal; he was undisturbed in his own house; why should he not have burnt the draft page by page as it was copied out?  There can be only one reply:  Why should he?

If it is possible to suggest some fairly plausible motives which might conceivably have induced Grimm to blacken Rousseau’s character, the case of Diderot presents difficulties which are quite insurmountable.  Mrs. Macdonald asserts that Diderot was jealous of Rousseau.  Why?  Because he was tired of hearing Rousseau described as ‘the virtuous’; that is all.  Surely Mrs. Macdonald should have been the first to recognise that such an argument is a little too ‘psychological.’  The truth is that Diderot had nothing to gain by attacking Rousseau.  He was not, like Grimm, in love with Madame d’Epinay; he was not a newcomer who had still to win for himself a position in the Parisian world.  His acquaintance with Madame d’Epinay was slight; and, if there were any advances, they were from her side, for he was one of the most distinguished men of the day.  In fact, the only reason that he could have had for abusing Rousseau was that he believed Rousseau deserved abuse.  Whether he was right in believing so is a very different question.  Most readers, at the present day, now that the whole noisy controversy has long taken its quiet place in the perspective of Time, would, I think, agree that Diderot and the rest of the Encyclopaedists were mistaken.  As we see him now, in that long vista, Rousseau was not a wicked man; he was an unfortunate, a distracted, a deeply sensitive, a strangely complex, creature; and, above all else, he possessed one quality which cut him off from his contemporaries, which set an immense gulf betwixt him and them:  he was modern.  Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world—­to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart.  Who can wonder that he was misunderstood, and buffeted, and driven mad?  Who can wonder that, in his agitations, his perplexities, his writhings, he seemed, to the pupils of Voltaire, little less than a frenzied fiend?  ‘Cet homme est un