he course of his
training; but we find him, so early as the age of eighteen, leaving that
study and preparing himself with great zeal for the pulpit. His deeply
religious nature might well indicate this career; but he early failed in
it and gave it up. His first attempt to preach ended in mortification,
and it is not difficult to perceive why. His education must have been
defective, for, to the end of his long life, he spoke a jargon of German
or French, sometimes mixing the two; a kind of language which none but
his intimates could comprehend. His articulation was defective; his
countenance was so ugly as to be forbidding; and, during the latter part
of his life at least, his personal habits were worse than slovenly. The
failure in the pulpit is not wonderful; nor yet that in the law, which
he tried next. He turned again to his first pursuit, and published some
philological writings. While eager about a new method of teaching Latin,
he one day took up Rousseau's "Emile," and the book determined the whole
course of his life.

Insisting that the pursuit of learning was the most unnatural of human
occupations, he not only gave it up, but burned all his papers; not only
his notes, but manuscripts on Swiss law and Swiss history. He would live
henceforth as a son of the soil. He sold his small patrimony to buy a
bit of land to farm; married the daughter of a merchant of Zurich, and
began domestic life at two and twenty. His wife's connection gave him an
interest in a cotton manufactory; and he became well acquainted with two
classes of laborers at once. The discovery of their intellectual
degradation shocked him. Both the farm-laborers and the spinners were so
inferior to the poor of his imagination, that he was at once stimulated
and dismayed. He was thirty when he set about the sort of work which
made him the world's benefactor. He collected about fifty poor and
desolate children on his little estate, lived with them in a state of
hardship, taught them to work, and to think, and to read, and made
friends of them. In the absence of other assistants, he adopted the plan
of setting them to teach one another; a feature of his method which
recommended it where the Lancasterian system existed. Having no skill,
and no prudence in the management of affairs, he was soon ruined, and
the establishment was broken up.

This was the occasion of his giving us the book which made his name
famous all over Europe. To explain his views, and