FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW VOLUME XXXII. OCTOBER, 1843, AND JANUARY, 1844. AMERICAN EDITION. NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY LEONARD SCOTT & CO. 112 FULTON STREET. 1844. a THE FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW, No. LXIII. FOR OCTOBER, 1843. ART. I.-Les Confessions de J. J. Rousseau,, exaggerations; that the virtues of selfRouvelle Edition, précédée d'une Notice par denial and patriotism, which were so proGeorge Sand. (New Edition of Rous-minent among the Greeks and Romans, seau's Confessions, preceded by a notice were in themselves impossible; and the by G. Sand.) Paris: Charpentier. 1841. demonstration founded on a knowledge of the world was by no means difficult. Yet IN France, in the middle of the last cen- was the strange man not convinced, but tury, when the artificial in society was at answered, True, I see that from the men its height when bienséance was the pro- of this day, you cannot construct a patriot fessed substitute for virtue-when there or a legislator of the antique school; but was no belief in a higher morality than that how am I sure that the ancient man was which could be deduced from mere selfish- not the true man, and that these are not the ness-when the admission of a cold matemere creatures of degeneracy.' And he set rialism was considered the perfection of ci- to work, and he tore down, and he abvilisation-there arose a man who declared |stracted, and he sifted, and he declaimed: that he was dissatisfied with all this. He and the result of his doctrines was that arcould not repose on a materialism which tificial convention was not all, but that seemed to rob man of his dignity; he could man was a real something beneath it. He not bear to find all high emotions reduced would not admit that when the periwig, and to the love of self; he fancied that there the snuff-box, and the smart saying, and the was an inner worth of man more valuable flippant gallantry, and taste, and philosothan obedience to the external forms of po-phy,' were taken away, nothing was left; liteness; he even considered that there but declared that there was still man-a might be a higher sphere of action than the natural man, capable of joy and sorrow— petits soupers over which some witty lady pre-aye, capable of great achievements-greatsided, and that excellent as was the glance er, mayhap, than were often dreamed of in of approval from feminine eyes, there was the select parties. The little word 'MAN,' no such great nobility in flippant explana- in the mouth of this innovating thinker, betions of physical science to femmes savantes.gan to acquire a new significance, and the The man was not a learned man, but he frequenters of the petits soupers were startled had read his Plutarch, and when he contemplated the pictures of antique greatness, he discovered the possibility of a different sort of people from the courtiers, and the wits, and the poetasters, and the musicians, and the philosophes of Louis XV. He had read his Tacitus; and he had found therein reflections on a corrupt age, which, with out any great exertion, he could apply to It was explained to him that these ancient pictures were but so many his own. at the phenomenon. The strange personage who had thought so oddly, and who uttered such startling doctrines, and so terribly scared poor convention, was JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, citizen of Geneva. But this same Rousseau did not stop at the declaration, that man was something beyond a mere empty substratum, existing to sustain the decorations of civilisation, but he went further, and declared that these so-called decorations were only disfigure |