for anybody; who round a full table maintain that it is not true that the people are hungry.  As criticism, one cannot value this kind of analysis.  D’Alembert replied with a much more rational interpretation of the great comedy, but finding himself seized with the critic’s besetting impertinence of improving masterpieces, he suddenly stopped with the becoming reflection—­“But I perceive, sir, that I am giving lessons to Moliere."[351]

The constant thought of Paris gave Rousseau an admirable occasion of painting two pictures in violent contrast, each as over-coloured as the other by his mixed conceptions of the Plutarchian antique and imaginary pastoral.  We forget the depravation of the stage and the ill living of comedians in magnificent descriptions of the manly exercises and cheerful festivities of the free people on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, and in scornful satire on the Parisian seraglios, where some woman assembles a number of men who are more like women than their entertainers.  We see on the one side the rude sons of the republic, boxing, wrestling, running, in generous emulation, and on the other the coxcombs of cultivated Paris imprisoned in a drawing-room, “rising up, sitting down, incessantly going and coming to the fire-place, to the window, taking up a screen and putting it down again a hundred times, turning over books, flitting from picture to picture, turning and pirouetting about the room, while the idol stretched motionless on a couch all the time is only alive in her tongue and eyes” (p. 161).  If the rough patriots of the Lake are less polished in speech, they are all the weightier in reason; they do not escape by a pleasantry or a compliment; each feeling himself attacked by all the forces of his adversary, he is obliged to employ all his own to defend himself, and this is how a mind acquires strength and precision.  There may be here and there a licentious phrase, but there is no ground for alarm in that.  It is not the least rude who are always the most pure, and even a rather clownish speech is better than that artificial style in which the two sexes seduce one another, and familiarise themselves decently with vice.  ’Tis true our Swiss drinks too much, but after all let us not calumniate even vice; as a rule drinkers are cordial and frank, good, upright, just, loyal, brave, and worthy folk.  Wherever people have most abhorrence of drunkenness, be sure they have most reason to fear lest its indiscretion should betray intrigue and treachery.  In Switzerland it is almost thought well of, while at Naples they hold it in horror; but at bottom which is the more to be dreaded, the intemperance of the Swiss or the reserve of the Italian?  It is hardly surprising to learn that the people of Geneva were as little gratified by this well-meant panegyric on their jollity as they had been by another writer’s friendly eulogy on their Socinianism.[352]