he used to read to his father during the hours of work, and read over again to himself during all hours, those stories of free and indomitable souls which are so proper to kindle the glow of generous fire.  Plutarch was dear to him to the end of his life; he read him in the late days when he had almost ceased to read, and he always declared Plutarch to be nearly the only author to whom he had never gone without profit."[6] “I think I see my father now,” he wrote when he had begun to make his mark in Paris, “living by the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths.  I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along with the tools of his craft.  I see at his side a cherished son receiving instruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too little fruit."[7] This did little to implant the needed impressions of the actual world.  Rousseau’s first training continued to be in an excessive degree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs the imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the strait pen of present and visible reality.  The reader of Plutarch at the age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to heroic pitch.  Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a hot chafing-dish.[8]

Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean Jacques.  He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away into Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen for ever.  Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,[9] and he commemorates the homely tenderness and care with which his early years were surrounded.  Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the side of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying curiosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busy about affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contented interest, as she sang the simple airs of the common people.  The impression of this kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to the end; her tone of voice, her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair.  The constant recollection of her shows, among many other signs, how he cherished that conception of the true unity of a man’s life, which places it in a closely-linked chain of active memories, and which most of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor fragmentariness of days.  When the years came in which he might well say, I have no pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion and diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could still often surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of his aunt’s old songs, with many tears in his eyes.[10]