The next relation which they regenerate by their statues to Rousseau is that which is next in sanctity to that of a father.  They differ from those old-fashioned thinkers who considered pedagogues as sober and venerable characters, and allied to the parental.  The moralists of the dark times praeceptorem sancti voluere parentis esse loco.  In this age of light they teach the people that preceptors ought to be in the place of gallants.  They systematically corrupt a very corruptible race, (for some time a growing nuisance amongst you,)—­a set of pert, petulant literators, to whom, instead of their proper, but severe, unostentatious duties, they assign the brilliant part of men of wit and pleasure, of gay, young, military sparks, and danglers at toilets.  They call on the rising generation in France to take a sympathy in the adventures and fortunes, and they endeavor to engage their sensibility on the side, of pedagogues who betray the most awful family trusts and vitiate their female pupils.  They teach the people that the debauchers of virgins, almost in the arms of their parents, may be safe inmates in their house, and even fit guardians of the honor of those husbands who succeed legally to the office which the young literators had preoccupied without asking leave of law or conscience.

Thus they dispose of all the family relations of parents and children, husbands and wives.  Through this same instructor, by whom they corrupt the morals, they corrupt the taste.  Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulation of life.  A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.  Rousseau, a writer of great force and vivacity, is totally destitute of taste in any sense of the word.  Your masters, who are his scholars, conceive that all refinement has an aristocratic character.  The last age had exhausted all its powers in giving a grace and nobleness to our natural appetites, and in raising them into a higher class and order than seemed justly to belong to them.  Through Rousseau, your masters are resolved to destroy these aristocratic prejudices.  The passion called love has so general and powerful an influence, it makes so much of the entertainment, and indeed so much the occupation, of that part of life which decides the character forever, that the mode and the principles on which it engages the sympathy and strikes the imagination become of the utmost importance to the morals and manners of every society.  Your rulers were well aware of this; and in their system of changing your manners to accommodate them to their politics, they found nothing so convenient as Rousseau.  Through him they teach men to love after the fashion of philosophers:  that is, they teach to men, to Frenchmen, a love without gallantry,—­a love without anything of that fine flower of youthfulness