at his desk, spinning his ceaseless web of tracts, letters, tragedies, and farces.  In the evening he would discharge the functions of a munificent host, entertain the whole neighbourhood with balls and suppers, and take part in one of his own tragedies on the stage of his private theatre.  Then a veritable frenzy would seize upon him; shutting himself up in his room for days together, he would devote every particle of his terrific energies to the concoction of some devastating dialogue, or some insidious piece of profanation for his Dictionnaire Philosophique.  At length his fragile form would sink exhausted—­he would be dying—­he would be dead; and next morning he would be up again as brisk as ever, directing the cutting of the crops.

One day, quite suddenly, he appeared in Paris, which he had not visited for nearly thirty years.  His arrival was the signal for one of the most extraordinary manifestations of enthusiasm that the world has ever seen.  For some weeks he reigned in the capital, visible and glorious, the undisputed lord of the civilized universe.  The climax came when he appeared in a box at the Theatre Francais, to witness a performance of the latest of his tragedies, and the whole house rose as one man to greet him.  His triumph seemed to be something more than the mere personal triumph of a frail old mortal; it seemed to be the triumph of all that was noblest in the aspirations of the human race.  But the fatigue and excitement of those weeks proved too much even for Voltaire in the full flush of his eighty-fourth year.  An overdose of opium completed what Nature had begun; and the amazing being rested at last.

French literature during the latter half of the eighteenth century was rich in striking personalities.  It might have been expected that an age which had produced both Diderot and Voltaire would hardly be able to boast of yet another star of equal magnitude.  But, in JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, there appeared a man in some ways even more remarkable than either of his great contemporaries.  The peculiar distinction of Rousseau was his originality.  Neither Voltaire nor Diderot possessed this quality in a supreme degree.  Voltaire, indeed, can only claim to be original by virtue of his overwhelming common sense, which enabled him to see clearly what others could only see confusedly, to strike without fear where others were only willing to wound; but the whole bulk of his thought really rested on the same foundation as that which supported the ordinary conceptions of the average man of the day.  Diderot was a far bolder, a far more speculative thinker; but yet, though he led the very van of the age, he was always in it; his originality was never more than a development—­though it was often an extreme development—­of the ideas that lay around him.  Rousseau’s originality went infinitely further than this.  He neither represented his age, nor led it; he opposed it.  His outlook upon the world was truly revolutionary.  In his