the remainder of the night in reading.  In Germany the effect was just as astonishing.  Kant only once in his life failed to take his afternoon walk, and this unexampled omission was due to the witchery of the New Heloisa.  Gallantry was succeeded by passion, expansion, exaltation; moods far more dangerous for society, as all enthusiasm is dangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with better hopes for character.  To move the sympathetic faculties is the first step towards kindling all the other energies which make life wiser and more fruitful.  It is especially worth noticing that nothing in the character of Julie concentrates this outburst of sympathy in subjective broodings.  Julie is the representative of one recalled to the straight path by practical, wholesome, objective sympathy for others, not of one expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathy of others for herself, and in moonstruck subjective aspirations.  The women who wept over her romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of whimpering introspection.  The danger lay in the mischievous intellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to this effusion.

The stir which the Julie communicated to the affections in so many ways, marked progress, but in all the elements of reason she was the most perilous of reactionaries.  So hard it is with the human mind, constituted as it is, to march forward a space further to the light, without making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness.  The great effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the New Heloisa appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels.  One beautiful character, Vauven argues (1715-1747), had begun to teach the culture of emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweetness and moderation, as that “Great thoughts come from the heart.”  But he came too soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made no mark.  Moderation never can make a mark in the epochs when men are beginning to feel the urgent spirit of a new time.  Diderot strove with more powerful efforts, in the midst of all his herculean labours for the acquisition and ordering of knowledge, in the same direction towards the great outer world of nature, and towards the great inner world of nature in the human breast.  His criticisms on the paintings of each year, mediocre as the paintings were, are admirable even now for their richness and freshness.  If Diderot had been endowed with emotional tenacity, as he was with tenacity of understanding and of purpose, the student of the eighteenth century would probably have been spared the not perfectly agreeable task of threading a way along the sinuosities of the character and work of Rousseau.  But Rousseau had what Diderot lacked—­sustained ecstatic moods, and fervid trances; his literary gesture was so commanding, his apparel so glistening, his voice so rich in long-drawn notes of plangent vibration.  His words are the words of a prophet; a prophet, it is understood, who had lived in Paris, and belonged