[369] Walpole’s Letters, v. 7 (Cunningham’s edition).  For other letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp. 23-28.  A corroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the letter until he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to Madame de Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and n. 2.

[370] Bernardin de St. Pierre, Oeuv., xii. 79.

[371] To Adam Smith.  Burton, 380.

[372] Burton, 381.

[373] A very common but random opinion traces Rousseau’s insanity to certain disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions.  They may have contributed in some small degree to depression of vital energies, though for that matter Rousseau’s strength and power of endurance were remarkable to the end.  But they certainly did not produce a mental state in the least corresponding to that particular variety of insanity, which possesses definitely marked features.

[374] Burton, ii. 314.

[375] For an instructive and, as it appears to me, a thoroughly trustworthy account of the temper in which the Confessions were written, see the 4th of the Reveries.

[376] Letter to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. Corr., v. 98:  also 118.

[377] Ib. v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p. 137, etc.

[378] Corr., v. 37.

[379] Corr., v. 88.

[380] See the letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April 1767. Corr., v. 140-147.

[381] Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371.

[382] J.J.R. to Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767. Corr., v. 66, 152.

[383] Burton, 369, 375.

[384] Corr., v. 153.

CHAPTER VII.

THE END.

Before leaving England, Rousseau had received more than one long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest of mankind as he was unlike them himself.  This was the Marquis of Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire of a more famous son.  Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau’s originality was in some respects the more salient of the two.  There is less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in him than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many other headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions of philanthropy and human brotherhood.  He really was by very force of temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be, with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without native strength.  Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken up the trade of friendship for man and adopted the phrases of perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a Fenelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils.