fiction.  As the title warns us, it is a story of a youthful tutor and a too fair disciple, straying away from the lessons of calm philosophy into the heated places of passion.  The high pride of Julie’s father forbade all hope of their union, and in very desperation the unhappy pair lost the self-control of virtue, and threw themselves into the pit that lies so ready to our feet.  Remorse followed with quick step, for Julie had with her purity lost none of the other lovelinesses of a dutiful character.  Her lover was hurried away from the country by the generous solicitude of an English nobleman, one of the bravest, tenderest, and best of men.  Julie, left undisturbed by her lover’s presence, stricken with affliction at the death of a sweet and affectionate mother, and pressed by the importunities of a father whom she dearly loved, in spite of all the disasters which his will had brought upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron from some northern court.  Wolmar was much older than she was; a devotee of calm reason, without a system and without prejudices, benevolent, orderly, above all things judicious.  The lover meditated suicide, from which he was only diverted by the arguments of Lord Edward, who did more than argue; he hurried the forlorn man on board the ship of Admiral Anson, then just starting for his famous voyage round the world.  And this marks the end of the first episode.

Rousseau always urged that his story was dangerous for young girls, and maintained that Richardson was grievously mistaken in supposing that they could be instructed by romances.  It was like setting fire to the house, he said, for the sake of making the pumps play.[41] As he admitted so much, he is not open to attack on this side, except from those who hold the theory that no books ought to be written which may not prudently be put into the hands of the young,—­a puerile and contemptible doctrine that must emasculate all literature and all art, by excluding the most interesting of human relations and the most powerful of human passions.  There is not a single composition of the first rank outside of science, from the Bible downwards, that could undergo the test.  The most useful standard for measuring the significance of a book in this respect is found in the manners of the time, and the prevailing tone of contemporary literature.  In trying to appreciate the meaning of the New Heloisa and its popularity, it is well to think of it as a delineation of love, in connection not only with such a book as the Pucelle, where there is at least wit, but with a story like Duclos’s, which all ladies both read and were not in the least ashamed to acknowledge that they had read; or still worse, such an abomination as Diderot’s first stories; or a story like Laclos’s, which came a generation later, and with its infinite briskness and devilry carried the tradition of artistic impurity to as vigorous a manifestation as it is capable of reaching.[42] To a generation whose literature is as pure as the best English, American, and German literature is in the present day, the New Heloisa might without doubt be corrupting.  To the people who read Crebillon and the Pucelle, it was without doubt elevating.