fame
before publication by reason of his habit of reading them to
enthusiastic and influential friends who made them known.

"The Social Contract," however, dangerous as it was, did not when
published arouse so much opposition as "Emile." The latter book, as we
now see, contained much that was admirable; but its freedom and
looseness in religious discussion called down the wrath of the clergy,
excited the alarm of the government, and finally compelled the author to
fly for his life to Switzerland.

Rousseau is now regarded as an enemy to Christian doctrine, even as he
was a foe to the existing institutions of society. In Geneva his books
are publicly burned. Henceforth his life is embittered by constant
persecution. He flies from canton to canton in the freest country in
Europe, obnoxious not only for his opinions but for his habits of life.
He affectedly adopts the Armenian dress, with its big fur bonnet and
long girdled caftan, among the Swiss peasantry. He is as full of
personal eccentricities as he is of intellectual crotchets. He becomes a
sort of literary vagabond, with every man's hand against him. He now
writes a series of essays, called "Letters from the Mountain," full of
bitterness and anti-Christian sentiments. So incensed by these writings
are the country people among whom he dwells that he is again forced
to fly.

David Hume, regarding him as a mild, affectionate, and persecuted man,
gives Rousseau a shelter in England. The wretched man retires to
Derbyshire, and there writes his "Confessions,"--the most interesting
and most dangerous of his books, showing a diseased and irritable mind,
and most sophistical views on the immutable principles of both morality
and religion. A victim of mistrust and jealousy, he quarrels with Hume,
who learns to despise his character, while pitying the sensitive
sufferings of one whom he calls "a man born without a skin."

Rousseau returns to France at the age of fifty-five. After various
wanderings he is permitted to settle in Paris, where he lives with great
frugality in a single room, poorly furnished,--supporting himself by
again copying music, sought still in high society, yet shy, reserved,
forlorn, bitter; occasionally making new friends, who are attracted by
the infantine simplicity of his manners and apparent amiability, but
losing them almost as soon as made by his petty jealousies and
irritability, being "equally indignant at neglect and intolerant of
attention