what might have been said, only in better style, by M.
Voltaire, and it would not have been, as it seems to me, the worst advice
he could have given."

My lord Marshal had left Neuchatel; Rousseau no longer felt safe there;
he made up his mind to settle in the Island of St. Pierre, in the middle
of the Lake of Bienne. Before long an order from the Bernese senate
obliged, him to quit it "within four and twenty hours, and with a
prohibition against ever returning, under the heaviest penalties."
Rousseau went through Paris and took refuge in England, whither he was
invited by the friendliness of the historian Hume. There it was that he
began writing his _Confessions_.

Already the reason of the unhappy philosopher, clouded as it had
sometimes been by the violence of his emotions, was beginning to be
shaken at the foundations; he believed himself to be the victim of an
immense conspiracy, at the head of which was his friend Hume. The latter
flew into a rage; he wrote to Baron d'Holbach: "My dear Baron, Rousseau
is a scoundrel." Rousseau was by this time mad.

He returned to France. The Prince of Conti, faithful to his
philosophical affections, quartered him at the castle of Trye, near
Gisors. Thence he returned to Paris, still persecuted, he said, by
invisible enemies. Retiring, finally, to the pavilion of Ermenonville,
which had been offered to him by M. de Girardin, he died there at the age
of sixty-six, sinking even more beneath imaginary woes than under the
real sorrows and bitter deceptions of his life. The disproportion
between his intellect and his character, between the boundless pride and
the impassioned weakness of his spirit, had little by little estranged
his friends and worn out the admiration of his contemporaries. By his
writings Rousseau acted more powerfully upon posterity than upon his own
times: his personality had ceased to do his genius injustice.

He belonged moreover and by anticipation to a new era; from the restless
working of his mind, as well as from his moral and political tendencies,
he was no longer of the eighteenth century properly speaking, though the
majority of the philosophers outlived him; his work was not their work,
their world was never his. He had attempted a noble reaction, but one
which was fundamentally and in reality impossible. The impress of his
early education had never been thoroughly effaced: he believed in God, he
had been nurtured upon the Gospel in childhood