liv.  X. ode XXXV. et Pindare en l’esquissant a grands traits, au commencement de sa douzieme Olympique, n’avoient laisse a leurs successeurs que son cote moral a envisager, et c’est le parti que prit Rousseau.  The general sentiment of the ode is handled with great dignity in Paradise Regained.  Bk.  III. l. 43—­157—­a passage which, as Thyer says, contains the quintessence of the subject.  Dante has some noble lines on Fortune in the viith canto of the Inferno,—­lines worthy of a great mystic poet.  After referring to the vain complaints and maledictions of men against this Power, he beautifully concludes: 

     Ma ella s’e beata e cio non ode: 
     Con l’altre prime creature lieta
     Volve sua spera, e beata si gode.

J.B.  Rousseau was born in 1669, began his career at the close of the age of Louis Quatorze, died at Brussels, March 17, 1741.  He had been banished from France, by an intrigue, on a false charge, as now seems clear, of having composed and distributed defamatory verses, in 1712; and it was engraved upon his tomb that he was ’thirty years an object of envy and thirty of compassion.’  Belonging to the classical school of the 17th century, of which he was the last survivor, he came somewhat into conflict with the spirit of the 18th, which was preparing a new vintage, and would have none but new wine in new bottles.  Rousseau, however, was a very finished writer in his way, and has been compared to Pindar, Horace, Anacreon and Malherbe.  His ode to M. le Comte du Luc is as fine an example as I know of the modern classical style.  This is quite different from that which is exemplified in Wordsworth’s Laodamia and Serjeant Talfourd’s Ion; for in them the subjects only are ancient, while both the form and spirit are modern; whereas in the odes of Rousseau a modern subject is treated, as far as difference of times and language will allow, in the manner and tone of the Ancients.  Samson Agonistes and Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris are conformed to ancient modes of thought, but in them the subject also is taken from antiquity.  Rousseau’s works consist of Odes, Epistles in verse, Cantatas, Epigrams, &c. &c.  He wrote for the stage at the beginning of his literary life, but with no great success.  S.C.)

He recommended me to read his HERMANN before I read either THE MESSIAH or the odes.  He flattered himself that some time or other his dramatic poems would be known in England.  He had not heard of Cowper.  He thought that Voss in his translation of THE ILIAD had done violence to the idiom of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the Greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its particular spirit and genius.[231] He said Lessing was the first of their dramatic writers.  I complained of NATHAN as tedious.  He said there was not enough of action in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of their writers.  He spoke favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS OF WERTER was his best work, better