side of a character towards diseased exaggeration is a fact of daily observation.  The ruin which the excess of strong religious imagination works in natures without the quality of energetic objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau’s contemporary, Cowper.  This gentle poet’s delusions about the wrath of God were equally pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with Rousseau’s delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters among men.  We must call such a condition unsound, but the important thing is to remember that insanity was only a modification of certain specially marked tendencies of the sufferer’s sanity.

The desire to protect himself against the defamation of his enemies led him at this time to compose that account of his own life, which is probably the only one of his writings that continues to be generally read.  He composed the first part of the Confessions at Wootton, during the autumn and winter of 1766.  The idea of giving his memoirs to the public was an old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers.  To write memoirs of one’s own life was one of the fancies of the time, but like all else, it became in Rousseau’s hand something more far-reaching and sincere than a passing fashion.  Other people wrote polite histories of their outer lives, amply coloured with romantic decorations.  Rousseau with unquailing veracity plunged into the inmost depths, hiding nothing that would be likely to make him either ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and inventing nothing that could attract much sympathy or much admiration.  Though, as has been pointed out already, the Confessions abound in small inaccuracies of date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the facts of his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two of the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimental reminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yet when all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulness of what remains is made more evident with every addition to our materials for testing them.  When all the circumstances of Rousseau’s life are weighed, and when full account has been taken of his proved delinquencies, we yet perceive that he was at bottom a character as essentially sincere, truthful, careful of fact and reality, as is consistent with the general empire of sensation over untrained intelligence.[375] As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hard to see how a man is to tell the story of his own life without egotism.  And it may be worth adding that the self-feeling which comes to the surface and asserts itself, is in a great many cases far less vicious and debilitating than the same feeling nursed internally with a troglodytish shyness.  But Rousseau’s egotism manifested itself perversely.  This is true to a certain small extent, and one or two of the disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous matter, and are made moreover in a very nauseous manner.