of the proselyte, and never wearies of extolling the peace of the wedded state.  Love is no essential to its perfection.  “Worth, virtue, a certain accord not so much in condition and age as in character and temper, are enough between husband and wife; and this does not prevent the growth from such a union of a very tender attachment, which is none the less sweet for not being exactly love, and is all the more lasting."[69] Years after, when Saint Preux has returned and is settled in the household, she even tries to persuade him to imitate her example, and find contentment in marriage with her cousin.  The earnestness with which she presses the point, the very sensible but not very delicate references to the hygienic drawbacks of celibacy, and the fact that the cousin whom she would fain have him marry, had complaisantly assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew the fire of Rousseau’s critical enemies.

Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm.  When people are weary of a certain way of surveying life, and have their faces eagerly set in some new direction, they read in a book what it pleases them to read; they assimilate as much as falls in with their dominant mood, and the rest passes away unseen.  The French public were bewitched by Julie, and were no more capable of criticising her than Julie was capable of criticising Saint Preux in the height of her passion for him.  When we say that Rousseau was the author of this movement, all we mean is that his book and its chief personage awoke emotion to self-consciousness, gave it a dialect, communicated an impulse in favour of social order, and then very calamitously at the same moment divorced it from the fundamental conditions of progress, by divorcing it from disciplined intelligence and scientific reason.

Apart from the general tendency of the New Heloisa in numberless indirect ways to bring the manners of the great into contempt, by the presentation of the happiness of a simple and worthy life, thrifty, self-sufficing, and homely, there is one direct protest of singular eloquence and gravity.  Julie’s father is deeply revolted at the bare notion of marrying his daughter to a teacher.  Rousseau puts his vigorous remonstrance against pride of birth into the mouth of an English nobleman.  This is perhaps an infelicitous piece of prosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative of the idea of England in the eighteenth century as the home of stout-hearted freedom.  We may quote one piece from the numerous bits of very straightforward speaking in which our representative expressed his mind as to the significance of birth.  “My friend has nobility,” cried Lord Edward, “not written in ink on mouldering parchments, but graven in his heart in characters that can never be effaced.  For my own part, by God, I should be sorry to have no other proof of my merit but that of a man who has been in his grave these five hundred years.  If you know the English nobility, you know that it is