then at the prince’s ingenuous zeal, but his fervid respect and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought he had found the wisest man that ever lived, and who had at any rate spoken the word that kindled the love of virtue and truth in him, his eagerness to know what Rousseau thought right, and his equal eagerness in trying to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple and methodical way to please his master, his discipular patience when Rousseau told him that his verses were poor, or that he was too fond of his wife,—­all this is a little uncommon in a prince, and deserves a place among the ample mass of other evidence of the power which Rousseau’s pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and humane education had in the eighteenth century.  It gives us a glimpse, close and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places.  But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one, and Rousseau was the private victim of his public action.  His prince sent multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endless with their details of the nursery, may well have become a little tedious to a worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone.[145] The famous Prince Henry, Frederick’s brother, thought a man happy who could have the delight of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose.[146] People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unlucky philosopher found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friends whose curiosity makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of glory partakes of the nature of the pillory or the stocks.

It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon and Boswell in the list of the multitudes with whom he had to do at this time.[147] The former was now at Lausanne, whither he had just returned from that memorable visit to England which persuaded him that his father would never endure his alliance with the daughter of an obscure Swiss pastor.  He had just “yielded to his fate, sighed as a lover, and obeyed as a son.”  “How sorry I am for our poor Mademoiselle Curchod,” writes Moultou to Rousseau; “Gibbon whom she loves, and to whom she has sacrificed, as I know, some excellent matches, has come to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of his old passion as she is far from cure.  She has written me a letter that makes my heart ache.”  He then entreats Rousseau to use his influence with Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for Motiers, by extolling to him the lady’s worth and understanding.[148] “I hope Mr. Gibbon will not come,” replied the sage; “his coldness makes me think ill of him.  I have been looking over his book again [the Essai sur l’etude de la litterature, 1761]; he runs after brilliance too much, and is strained and stilted.  Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do not think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either."[149] Whether Gibbon went or not, we do not know.  He knew in after years what had been said of him by Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp that this extraordinary man should have been less precipitate in condemning the moral character and the conduct of a stranger.[150]