With such weapons one might accidentally kill oneself, but one is strongly armed.  Rousseau was well equipped, at least as powerful as Voltaire; it may be said that the last half of the eighteenth century belongs to him.  A foreigner, a Protestant, original in temperament, in education, in heart, in mind and in habits, at once misanthropic and philanthropic, living in an ideal world constructed by himself, entirely opposed to the world as it is, he finds himself standing in a new position.  No one is so sensitive to the evils and vices of actual society.  No one is so affected by the virtues and happiness of the society of the future.  This accounts for his having two holds on the public mind, one through satire and the other through the idyll. — These two holds are undoubtedly slighter at the present day; the substance of their grasp has disappeared; we are not the auditors to which it appealed.  The famous discourse on the influence of literature and on the origin of inequality seems to us a collegiate exaggeration; an effort of the will is required to read the " Nouvelle Héloïse.”  The author is repulsive in the persistency of his spitefulness or in the exaggeration of his enthusiasm.  He is always in extremes, now moody and with knit brows, and now streaming with tears and with arms outstretched to Heaven.  Hyperbole, prosopopaeia, and other literary machinery are too often and too deliberately used by him.  We are tempted to regard him now as a sophist making the best use of his arts, now as a rhetorician cudgeling his brains for a purpose, now as a preacher becoming excited, that is to say, an actor ever maintaining a thesis, striking an attitude and aiming at effects.  Finally, with the exception of the “Confessions” his style soon wearies us; it is too studied, and too constantly overstrained.  The author is always the author, and he communicates the defect to his personages.  His Julie argues and descants for twenty successive pages on dueling, on love, on duty, with a logical completeness, a talent and phrases that would do honor to an academical moralist.  Commonplace exists everywhere, general themes, a raking fire of abstractions and arguments, that is to say, truths more or less empty and paradoxes more or less hollow.  The smallest detail of fact, an anecdote, a trait of habit, would suit us much better, and hence we of to day prefer the precise eloquence of objects to the lax eloquence of words.  In the eighteenth century it was otherwise; to every writer this oratorical style was the prescribed ceremonial costume, the dress-coat he had to put on for admission into the company of select people.  That which seems to us affectation was then only proper; in a classic epoch the perfect period and the sustained development constitute decorum, and are therefore to be observed. — It must be noted, moreover, that this literary drapery which, with us of the present day, conceals truth did not conceal it to his contemporaries; they saw under it