his hunger he had been born a Protestant, and took his religion to market to a Roman Catholic Bishop in Savoy, who sent him to a convent for instruction, where, having abandoned his faith, aud being compensated with-what we dare say was a liberal equivalent for such a faith as he had-the sum of 17s. 6d., he again became a wanderer. He entered successively two families as a footman; from the first he was dismissed for his old propensities of thieving and lying, which grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength' to an almost incredible degree of depravity. In the second place he was promoted, as he says, from being footman to be secretary; but he does not account, except by the plea of restlessness, for his having forfeited this extraordinary good fortune. Wandering again, he renewed a casual acquaintance with a sensual widow, who hired him as footboy, but eventually exalted him-the poor wretch thought it Olympic exaltation to be her paramour.

Expelled from this filthy elysium by the jealousy of his rival-the gardener he again took to a vagabond life, till he found himself, at a mature age, upon the pavé of Paris. During all his vicissitudes, however, he had read whatever came in his way, particularly romances, and acquired what was thought, for a person in his circumstances, a surprising degree of literature; he had also a natural-though it is said a false--taste for music, and proposed to exist by his discoveries and compositions in that art: he failed, indeed, in these musical projects, but contrived, while prosecuting them, to make some respectable acquaintance, and obtained what he impudently calls the secretaryship of the French mission at Venice a gross exaggeration of the dignity of his employment; for it turns out that he had no diplomatic character whatsoever, but was only a kind of upper servant, who, knowing how to read and write, and copy and even compose music, was treated on a footing superior to the other domestics. Be that as it may, he contrived to be dismissed from this situation also; and had now, at near forty years of age, no resource but to return to Paris; where he existed at first on a clerkship in the office of one of the farmers-general of the revenue, and subsequently by some literary and musical efforts, which at length brought him into notice-particularly a little dramatic scene of Le Devin du Village,' which had a great success in Paris, and which Dr. Burney introduced, without any success, on the English stage by the title of The Cunning Man.'

During this time Rousseau formed a connexion with the vulgar, stupid, and ugly maid-servant of the obscure house in which he lodged; by her he had five children, whom, with a diabolical egotism and inhumanity of which we know no parallel, he abandoned as soon as they were born to the foundling-hospital, taking

irrevocable

irrevocable precautions to prevent the possibility of their being ever recognized. This atrocity he defended in his writings by an excuse still more atrocious- All the world persecutes me, and if I had brought up these children, there is no crime which they might not have been suborned to commit against me.' These mean amours he diversified, as he boasts, by some adulterous intrigues of a higher order, for which the extreme profligacy of the philosophical society of Paris afforded too much opportunity. The reputation of one of his exalted flames, who was not sufficiently complying, he endeavoured to bring down to his own level by calumniating her in anonymous letters, which he had the additional baseness of attributing to the lady's sister-in-law-his own best friend.

These disorders probably suggested to him his celebrated novel of La Nouvelle Héloïse, which appeared in 1759, when its author was near fifty, and may be characterized in three words as an apology for incontinence and adultery. Two years after appeared his Contrat Social-to which, more than all his other works, we attribute his influence over revolutionary France. In this he first promulgated his equally absurd and fatal doctrine of the practical sovereignty of the people. This was, after a short interval, followed by Emile, a wild paradox on education, in which he episodically introduced an attack on Christianity, so offensive that the Parlia ment of Paris, already startled by the disorganizing doctrines of the Contrat Social, felt itself obliged to order proceedings against the author, who fled into Switzerland to escape the storm. There he published other works of the same tendency, so grossly insulting to all sense and feeling, that even the mob of the little village in which he resided rose against him, and expelled their crazy and mischievous guest.

David Hume-whose constitutional goodnature was perhaps somewhat stimulated by sympathy for a persecuted deist-now obtained for him an asylum in England; but by this time Rousseau seems to have become entirely mad, and he exhibited that most common and infallible symptom, of believing that all mankind was conspiring against him-his English friends being, in his disordered imagination, the chief conspirators. He broke away from them in a frenzy of indignation; and at length was permitted to return to France, where he was received with kindness by his philosophical admirers, one of whom, M. Girardin, established him in a cottage at his seat of Ermenonville. Here he put the last hand to the extraordinary work published after his death, called his Confessions,' in which he avows with maniacal effrontery most of the turpitudes to which we have alluded; and here, in 1788before he had time to quarrel with M. Girardin, which he assuredly would soon have done, as he did with every other bene

factor

factor he ever had-he died suddenly, but whether by his own hand or not, is a still litigated question?*

"What,' it has been asked, 'must be the priest, when a monkey is the god?' What must be the sect of which a devil is the idol? Rousseau's most devoted disciple was Robespierre! The Contrat Social was the text book of Jacobin policy: the Héloïse and Emile, the guides of Jacobin morals; and the benign influence of the Man of Nature,' as he was called, was piously evoked during all the atrocities of the Reign of Terror! His bones were removed from Ermenonville, and enshrined-the National Assembly attending in a body the impious procession-with those of Marat in the PANTHEON-(as by a characteristic blunder it was called)—of a people who acknowledged no GOD, and canonized only the most worthless of mankind. The same spirit which carried Rousseau to the Pantheon, during the horrors of the first Revolution, has revived his reputation in the impudent profligacy of the last; and we shall see, by-and-by, that even the least offensive of the recent publications of the Parisian press are exaggerations of the worst faults of Rousseau-for odious as was his private life, and mischievous as were his writings, there is, even in the Héloïse, a certain decency of language-a semi-opaque veil which diminishes the deformities of the subject-a kind of involuntary tribute paid to good manners, if not to virtue-which forbids us to rank that work in the more disgraceful class of which we shall have occasion to speak.

Crebillon had for a long time none but very obscure imitators— Diderot is hardly an exception, for his Novels, like Voltaire's, were politics; but on the approach of the Revolution appeared the work of La Clos, one of the creatures and confidants of Egalité-Orleans, of which we will only say, that it is characteristic and worthy of the society which produced it; and that of Louvet, published soon after, and which was the sole recommendation of that adventurer to the rank of a legislator in regenerated France.

Thus we see, that during the eighteenth century, which gave birth to the NOVEL, properly so called, and which produced thousands of the class, we can cite-previous to the Revolutionbut three authors of any note,-Crebillon-La Clos-and Louvet, -who can be stigmatised as having written what can be strictly

His admirers often speak with rapture of a colloquy supposed to have occurred between him and his wife immediately previous to his death, in which the unhappy man is made to exclaim in a frenzy of triumphant blasphemy, 'Eternal Being! the soul I am now going to give thee back is as pure at this moment as it was when it proceeded from thee.' This is certainly very characteristic; but there seems reason to doubt how far the stupid Thérèse, with whom the whole dialogue purports to have passed, can be received as credible evidence of feelings and expressions, which she assuredly was not capable of comprehending.

called

called licentious novels; for Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot though they did worse-if worse can be-can hardly, for the reasons before stated, be included in this particular category: while, on the other hand, there is an illustrious list of men, and more particularly of women, who really have deserved Warburton's praise of having improved the charms of fictitious narratives, with the higher graces of morality and occasionally of piety.

The first burst of the Revolution drowned all literature-bad as well as good-in a deluge of blood. The powers of imagination fell prostrate before the despotic realities. No romance could be so terrific-no drama so bloody-no tale so profligate as the passing events and the prevailing manners. But, when on the fall of Robespierre, something like security and order revived, the novelists re-appeared, though with altered features: the nation had supped so full of horrors,' that it had no taste for the sensibilities of fictitious distresses; and the upper ranks of society, which had hitherto afforded the personages of the novel of manners, were utterly exterminated, so that those two great sources of description were dried up. Authors were, therefore, driven-the graver and the more moral (a select few) into the historic romance—and the less scrupulous majority into the broad humour and loose gaieties of low or middle life.

These productions-of which Pigault Le Brun's may be cited as the most remarkable-are for the most part tainted with vulgarity and indecency, and though they have none of the deep corruption of Crebillon or La Clos, they give but a bad impression of the manners and morals of the society in which they acquired so much popularity. Under the Empire and the Restoration, all violent outrages against either morals or religion were restrained; but there still continued a coarseness and laxity, which was, however, we think, gradually disappearing, when the July Revolution gave a new and formidable appearance to a species of writing which had hitherto (notwithstanding a few culpable exceptions) exhibited nothing which indicated either the existence of an extensive or profound immorality in the nation at large, or the danger that such a state of immorality might be created.

Unfortunately, the present state of things indicates boththat there must be already a wide immorality, and that, under such powerful excitements, the contagion is likely to spread beyond all control. If one or two authors, in one, or two, or three works, had been seduced by a depraved taste or betrayed by a too lively fancy into culpable excesses, we should have seen cause of regret rather than alarm; but the enormity of the evil, both in mass and matter, gives the whole affair its distinctive character. Three novels of Crebillon were enough to give

the

the romance literature of France a bad name for half a century; within five years we have had twice fifty publications, each of which equals Crebillon in personal profligacy, and superadds, what he never dealt with, details of swindling, robbery, and murder-as scenes of private life in France-of which the most depraved imagination of former times had never formed any conception.

We are far from believing, because an individual author calls his work an image of real life, that it really is so; but when all who affect to paint from the life agree in one general character of society, it is impossible not to fear that there must be some existing prototype of such unconcerted resemblances. M. Scribe, the comic dramatist, and one whose muse borrows little or none of her reputation from profligacy or terror, was lately elected into the French Academy. In his speech of reception, the facetious author amused his auditory by a paradox from his mouth peculiarly piquant-of denying that the stage exhibited a picture of real life-for, added he, if that were to be taken as a criterion, life in France must be reckoned as little else than one black tragedy of adultery, incest, and murder.' M. Scribe was evidently faisant ses farces-and M. Villemain, the president of the night, reproved him with equal keenness and good sense for the absurd levity of his discourse; but M. Villemain is a hot partisan of the July Revolution, and one of the happy few who have got anything by it-for he has been made a peer of France. He could not, therefore, do full justice on M. Scribe without confessing more than he was willing to do of the effects of the late Revolution ;-else he might have reminded M. Scribe that it was not the theatre alone which indicated so diseased a state of society-he might have told him that, between the day of his election and that of his reception, there had been exhibited before the various tribunals of France a series of trials, proving a greater proportion of all species of crime than we believe he could have paralleled in any equal period of the judicial annals of his country-quite enough to have furnished a tragic drama of the most revolting details to every one of the rival theatres of Paris. Nay, at the moment M. Scribe was indulging in what he and his auditory thought, no doubt, an agreeable "persiflage,' the three chief actors of one of the most wholesale murders ever perpetrated were lying-in dungeons within a street's length of the room in which he was speaking-under the intermittent agonies of a trial at which M. Villemain himself had an hour before been sitting as a judge.

M. Scribe might indeed, and, if he had been serious, would no doubt have alleged, and M. Villemain might have admitted as we are ready to do—that there is, and always was, one class

of