inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would produce a set of institutions that should be fit for a free and valorous people.[155] In the midst of this enthusiasm (May 1765) he urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, with results which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica (1768), and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for many a long day afterwards.  “Mind your own affairs,” at length cried Johnson sternly to him, “and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I wish you would empty your head of Corsica."[156] At the end of 1765, the immortal hero-worshipper on his return expected to come upon his hero at Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letter in wonderful French.  “You will forget all your cares for many an evening, while I tell you what I have seen.  I owe you the deepest obligation for sending me to Corsica.  The voyage has done me marvellous good.  It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch had sunk into my soul....  I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if you, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to help them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they have acquired with so much heroism—­if you have cooled towards these gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can say."[157]

Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of Rousseau’s mind by personal mishaps.  First, Voltaire or some other enemy had spread the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus of Corsica was a practical joke, and Rousseau’s suspicious temper found what he took for confirmation of this in some trifling incidents with which we certainly need not concern ourselves.[158] Next, a very real storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new place of shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops.  For France having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance of the Genoese (1764), ended by buying the island from the Genoese senate, with a sort of equity of redemption (1768)—­an iniquitous transaction, as Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking to justice, humanity, reason, and policy.[159] Civilisation would have been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the acquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a state.[160]

The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his partisans and his enemies.  The root of the contention was political rather than theological.  To take Rousseau’s side was to protest against the oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the quarrel about Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the popular and aristocratic parties.  This strife, after coming to a height for the first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification of 1738, but the pacification