es with which his
writings abound,--even in one of his letters appealing for pity because
he "had never known the sweetness of a father's embrace." With
extraordinary self-conceit, too, he looked upon himself, all the while,
in his numerous illicit loves, as a paragon of virtue, being apparently
without any moral sense or perception of moral distinctions.

It was not till Rousseau was thirty-nine years of age that he attracted
public attention by his writings, although earlier known in literary
circles,--especially in that infidel Parisian _coterie_, where Diderot,
Grimm, D'Holbach, D'Alembert, David Hume, the Marquis de Mirabeau,
Helvetius, and other wits shined, in which circle no genius was
acknowledged and no profundity of thought was deemed possible unless
allied with those pagan ideas which Saint Augustine had exploded and
Pascal had ridiculed. Even while living among these people, Rousseau had
all the while a kind of sentimental religiosity which revolted at their
ribald scoffing, although he never protested.

He had written some fugitive pieces of music, and had attempted and
failed in several slight operettas, composing both music and words; but
the work which made Rousseau famous was his essay on a subject
propounded in 1749 by the Academy of Dijon: "Has the Progress of Science
and the Arts Contributed to Corrupt or to Purify Morals?" This was a
strange subject for a literary institution to propound, but one which
exactly fitted the genius of Rousseau. The boldness of his paradox--for
he maintained the evil effects of science and art--and the brilliancy of
his style secured readers, although the essay was crude in argument and
false in logic. In his "Confessions" he himself condemns it as the
weakest of all his works, although "full of force and fire;" and he
adds: "With whatever talent a man may be born, the art of writing is not
easily learned." It has been said that Rousseau got the idea of taking
the "off side" of this question from his literary friend Diderot, and
that his unexpected success with it was the secret of his life-long
career of opposition to all established institutions. This is
interesting, but not very authentic.

The next year, his irregular activity having been again stimulated by
learning that his essay had gained the premium at Dijon, and by the fact
of its great vogue as a published pamphlet, another performance fairly
raised Rousseau to the pinnacle of fashion; and this was an opera