and an exposition of the mischief that society has done to human nature at large.  The romance treated one set of emotions in human nature particularly, though it also touches the whole emotional sphere indirectly.  And this limitation of the field was accompanied by a total revolution in the method.  Polemic was abandoned; the presence of hostility was forgotten in appearance, if not in the heart of the writer; instead of discussion, presentation; instead of abstract analysis of principles, concrete drawing of persons and dramatic delineation of passion.  There is, it is true, a monstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful value, but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of the time.  All people in those days with any pretensions to use their minds, wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violently translated the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality.  The important thing to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain is present, but that there is much less of it, and that it takes a far more subordinate place, than the subject and the reigning taste would have led us to expect.  It is true, also, that Rousseau declared his intention in the two characters of Julie and of Wolmar, who eventually became Julie’s husband, of leading to a reconciliation between the two great opposing parties, the devout and the rationalistic; of teaching them the lesson of reciprocal esteem, by showing the one that it is possible to believe in a God without being a hypocrite, and the other that it is possible to be an unbeliever without being a scoundrel.[39] This intention, if it was really present to Rousseau’s mind while he was writing, and not an afterthought characteristically welcomed for the sake of giving loftiness and gravity to a composition of which he was always a little ashamed, must at any rate have been of a very pale kind.  It would hardly have occurred to a critic, unless Rousseau had so emphatically pointed it out, that such a design had presided over the composition, and contemporary readers saw nothing of it.  In the first part of the story, which is wholly passionate, it is certainly not visible, and in the second part neither of the two contending factions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the other.  Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christian dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the wheel, and cut off La Barre’s head.

French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Heloisa in France except deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly few in this generation read it in our own country.[40] The action is very slight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with the ingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychological analysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident or excited humour to another, which mark the modern writer of sentimental