and had received at least equal services from him.[382] The good man at once sent a servant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau had again disappeared.  The parson of the parish had passed several hours of each day in his company, and had found him cheerful and good-humoured.  He had had a blue coat made for himself, and had written a long letter to the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint a guard, at Rousseau’s own expense, to escort him in safety out of the kingdom where enemies were plotting against his life.[383] He was next heard of at Dover (May 18), whence he wrote a letter to General Conway, setting forth his delusion in full form.[384] He is the victim of a plot; the conspirators will not allow him to leave the island, lest he should divulge in other countries the outrages to which he has been subjected here; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres that will arrest him if he attempts to put his foot on board ship.  But he warns them that his tragical disappearance cannot take place without creating inquiry.  Still if General Conway will only let him go, he gives his word of honour that he will not publish a line of the memoirs he has written, nor ever divulge the wrongs which he has suffered in England.  “I see my last hour approaching,” he concluded; “I am determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and to perish or be free; there is no longer any other alternative.”  On the same evening on which he wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorn creature took boat and landed at Calais, where he seems at once to have recovered his composure and a right mind.

FOOTNOTES: 

[350] Jan. 1766—­May 1767.

[351] Streckeisen, ii. 275, etc. Corr., iii.

[352] Burton, ii. 299.

[353] The materials for this chapter are taken from Rousseau’s Correspondence (vols. iv. and v.), and from Hume’s letters to various persons, given in the second volume of Mr. Burton’s Life of Hume.  Everybody who takes an interest in Rousseau is indebted to Mr. Burton for the ample documents which he has provided.  Yet one cannot but regret the satire on Rousseau with which he intersperses them, and which is not always felicitous.  For one instance, he implies (p. 295) that Rousseau invented the story given in the Confessions, of Hume’s correcting the proofs of Wallace’s book against himself.  The story may be true or not, but at any rate Rousseau had it very circumstantially from Lord Marischal; see letter from Lord M. to J.J.R., in Streckeisen, ii. 67.  Again, such an expression as Rousseau’s “occasional attention to small matters” (p. 321) only shows that the writer has not read Rousseau’s letters, which are indeed not worth reading, except by those who wish to have a right to speak about Rousseau’s character.  The numerous pamphlets on the quarrel between Hume and Rousseau, if I may judge from those of them which I have turned over, really shed no light on the matter, though they added much heat.  For the journey, see Corr., iv. 307; Burton, ii. 304.