ghtness and veracity. As in his
greater themes, so in his paradoxes upon private relations, he hid
wholesome ingredients of rebuke to the unquestioning acceptance of
common form. "I am well pleased," he said to a friend, "both with thee
and thy letters, except the end, where thou say'st thou art more mine
than thine own. For there thou liest, and it is not worth while to
take the trouble to _thee_ and _thou_ a man as thine intimate, only to
tell him untruths."[29] Chesterfield was for people with much
self-love of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meet
than Doctor Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion for
a man.

Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen take
the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and
ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one
fresh from Voltaire. "So you have chosen for yourself a tender and
virtuous mistress! I am not surprised; all mistresses are that. You
have chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous mistress in
Paris is to have not such bad luck. You have made her a promise of
marriage? My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you continue to
love, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it is no
avail. You have signed it with your blood? That is all but tragic; but
I don't know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, gives
anything to the fidelity of the man who signs."[30]

We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possibly
excuse the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was now
as always the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made him
distraught. "My sufferings are not very excruciating just now," he
wrote on a later occasion, "but they are incessant, and I am not out
of pain a single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad. I
feel bitterly my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; but
if anything can excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness,"
and so on.[31] This prolonged physical anguish, which was made more
intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of a
surgical instrument,[32] sometimes so nearly wore his fortitude away
as to make him think of suicide.[33] In Lord Edward's famous letter on
suicide in the New Heloisa, while denying in forcible terms the right
of ending one's days merely to escape from intolerable mental
distress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders