formalistic arts.  It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed nurseries and schoolrooms.  It effected the substitution of growth for mechanism.  A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity, self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to cherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude.  It was the charter of youthful deliverance.  The first immediate effect of Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side.  It was the Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than education that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies to that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter.  Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left; and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which the book itself had originally been an outcome.[325] But why try to state the influence of Emilius on France in this way?  To strike the account truly would be to write the history of the first French Revolution.[326] All mothers, as Michelet says, were big with Emilius.  “It is not without good reason that people have noted the children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superior spirit, by a gift of flame and genius.  It is the generation of revolutionary Titans:  the other generation not less hardy in science.  It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Ampere, La Place, Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire."[327]

In Germany Emilius had great power.  There it fell in with the extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we have already spoken.[328] Herder, whom some have called the Rousseau of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then beloved Caroline of the “divine Emilius,” and he never ceased to speak of Rousseau as his inspirer and his master.[329] Basedow (1723), that strange, restless, and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phrenetic enthusiasm for Rousseau’s educational theories, translated them into German, and repeated them in his works over and over again with an incessant iteration.  Lavater (1741-1801), who differed from Basedow in being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith, was thrown into company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him in the cause of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.[330] Pestalozzi (1746-1827), the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful of all the educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his principles mainly from the Emilius, though he gave larger extension and more intelligent exactitude to their application.  Jean Paul the Unique, in the preface to his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806), one of the most excellent of all books on the subject, declares that among previous works to which he owes a debt, “first and last