Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco.  These, we may be sure, concerned religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith which stirred France far more than the upbringing of the natural man in things temporal.  Let us pass to that eloquent document which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as the expression of the religious opinion that best befits the man of nature—­a document most hyperbolically counted by some French enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the religion of sentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century.

FOOTNOTES: 

[273] Mem. de Mdme. d’Epinay, ii. 276, 278.

[274] Lettres a mon Fils (1758), and Les Conversations d’Emilie (1783).

[275] Lettres Peruviennes.

[276] Oeuv., ii. 785-794.

[277] Corr.  Lit., iii. 65.

[278] Emile, I. 27.

[279] It is interesting to recall a similar movement in the Roman society of the second century of our era.  See the advice of Favorinus to mothers, in Aulus Gellius, xii. 1.  M. Boissier, contrasting the solicitude of Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the infant young with the brutality of Cicero, remarks that in the time of Seneca men discussed in the schools the educational theories of Rousseau’s Emilius. (La Relig.  Romaine, ii. 202.)

[280] See also his diatribe against whalebone and tight-lacing for girls, V. 27.

[281] Emile, I. 93, etc.

[282] Emile, II. 141.

[283] Emile, II. 156-160.

[284] Emile, III. 338-345.

[285] III. 358, etc.

[286] Emile, II. 263-267.

[287] Levana, ch. iii.  Sec. 54.

[288] Emile, II. 163.

[289] The Ninth Promenade (Reveries, 309).

[290] Emile, I. 23.

[291] II. 109.

[292] II. 111.

[293] Emile, II. 113-117.

[294] II. 121.

[295] II. 143.

[296] Emile, III. 382.

[297] II. 227.

[298] IV. 10.

[299] Emile, III. 394.

[300] V. 199.

[301] The reader will not forget the famous supper-party of princes in Candide.

[302] Emile, III. 392, and note.  A still more remarkable passage, as far as it goes, is that in the Confessions (xi. 136):—­“The disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault of the government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the continual dissensions of the administration, divided as it was among two or three ministers at open war with one another, and who for the sake of hurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the general discontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state; the obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her better judgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the most capable from office, to make room for her favourites ... all this prospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter elsewhere.”