and unamiable, but it was not without an element of uprightness and veracity.  As in his greater themes, so in his paradoxes upon private relations, he hid wholesome ingredients of rebuke to the unquestioning acceptance of common form.  “I am well pleased,” he said to a friend, “both with thee and thy letters, except the end, where thou say’st thou art more mine than thine own.  For there thou liest, and it is not worth while to take the trouble to thee and thou a man as thine intimate, only to tell him untruths."[29] Chesterfield was for people with much self-love of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meet than Doctor Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion for a man.

Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen take the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one fresh from Voltaire.  “So you have chosen for yourself a tender and virtuous mistress!  I am not surprised; all mistresses are that.  You have chosen her in Paris!  To find a tender and virtuous mistress in Paris is to have not such bad luck.  You have made her a promise of marriage?  My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you continue to love, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it is no avail.  You have signed it with your blood?  That is all but tragic; but I don’t know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, gives anything to the fidelity of the man who signs."[30]

We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possibly excuse the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was now as always the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made him distraught.  “My sufferings are not very excruciating just now,” he wrote on a later occasion, “but they are incessant, and I am not out of pain a single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad.  I feel bitterly my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; but if anything can excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness,” and so on.[31] This prolonged physical anguish, which was made more intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of a surgical instrument,[32] sometimes so nearly wore his fortitude away as to make him think of suicide.[33] In Lord Edward’s famous letter on suicide in the New Heloisa, while denying in forcible terms the right of ending one’s days merely to escape from intolerable mental distress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders only grow incessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse for a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human being before dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes his release from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul no longer.[34] The thought was often present to him in this form.  Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew very deliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously looked upon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward’s exception.[35] It is difficult, in the face of outspoken declarations like these, to know what writers can be thinking of when, with respect to the controversy on the manner of Rousseau’s death, they pronounce him incapable of such a dereliction of his own most cherished principles as anything like self-destruction would have been.