After the death of Rousseau, there was found among his manuscripts a work entitled his " Confessions," which contains a particular account of all his vices and virtues. or all indeed which here! him till the 30th year of his age. This work was left to his friend Mr. M— with instructions to publish it " after his death;" instructions which were unfortunately complied _With. It is impossible to suppose that this work was the production of a repentant spirit. Vanity alone must have inspired it; and it is mortifying to think, that our species contained one individual who, in the hour of health, could record such incidents; and, in the hour of death, bequeath to the public a record to dis grace his name, and operate as a moral poison among his fellow creatures.
The following interesting account of Rousseau's Confessions, and of his MSS. has been recently given by M. Siniond•, In the work already quoted.
"Mr. son of the friend of Rousseau, to whom he left his MSS. and especially his Confessions, to be published after his death, had the gcodness to show them to me. I observed a fair copy, written by him self in a small hand like print, very neat and correct, not a blot, even au erasure, to be seen. The most cu rious of these papers were several sketch-books, or memoranda, hall Idled, where the same hand is no longer discernible; but the same genius, and the same wayward temper and perverse intellect, in every fugi tive thought recorded. Rousseau's composition, like Montesquieu's was laborious and slow: his ideas flow ed rapidly, but were not readily brought into proper order; they do not appear to have conic in conse quence of a previous plan, but the plan itself formed afterwards came in aid of the ideas, and served as a sort of frame for them, instead of being a system to which they were subservient. Very possibly sonic of the fundamental opinions he defended so earnestly, and for which his disciples would willingly have suf fered martyrdom, were originally adopted because a bright thought, caught as it flew, was entered in his common-place book. Those loose notes of Rousseau's afford a curious insight into his mode of composition. You find him perpetually retrenching epithets—reduc ing his thoughts to their complete expression, giving words a peculiar energy by the new application of their original meaning—going back to the naivete of old language, and, in the artificial process of simpli city, carefully effacing the trace of each laborious footstep as he advanced; each idea, each image, com ing out at last as if cast entirely at a single throw, original, energetic, and clear. Although Mr. M— had promised that he would publish Rousseau's Con fessions as they were, yet lie Cook upon himself to suppress a passage explaining certain circumstances of his abjurations of Amieci, affording a curious but frightfully disgusting picture of monkish manners at that time. It is a pity that Mr. M— did no.l. break
his word, in regard to some few more passages of this most admirable, most vile, of all the productions of genius.
" A copy of the first edition of Emile, with original notes by Voltaire, is preserved in the library of Mr. De C. at St. Jean; his family had much inter course with Voltaire, being near neighbours. and were on an intimate footing with him. I shall only men tion one of the notes, by which the tone of the rest may be estimated. Le miserable (Voltaire speaking of Rousseau,) n' a de l'esprit que park contra la religion! "A few Genevans remember having seen Rousseau when he came in 1754, to change back again from the Catholic to the Protestant communion. I was taken to a confectioner's shop. the fourth house on the right going up the Rue de Coutance, where Rousseau fre quently clined at that time t•te-a-tete with his friend the confectioner, (a predecessor of the present occu pier) in the small back room serving as a kitchen. His nurse, then an old woman, carried on some petty dealings of her own in one of those booths in use at Ge neva,outside of the loot pavement in the lower streets. Rousseau used to go belOre dinner and sit by her on a low stool, while the people collected round to look at him, proud to think he was one of them. Madame C.—, then twelve years olc!, remembers being raised on a chair, that she might see the philosopher over people's heads, and his figure and general appearance are still present to her memory. A bob wig with a. hat, pepper and salt coat, waistcoat and breeches; his right hand on the knee of the old nurse: a round face, with piercing black eyes and pleasant smile. Notwithstanding his long alisence from Geneva, and his eloquence, he spoke broad St. Gervais, and was not less dear to the people on that account. Forty years after this, in the fervour of the revolution, the street in which it was supposed Rousseau was born received his name, and preserves it still; but though his lather had at a later period lived there, it appears that at the time of his birth the family resided in what is called La Grande Rue: opposite the hotel of the French resident, who became an ardent but Platonic admirer of Rousseau's mother; a very handsome, very sensible, and very virtuous woman. The birth of Rousseau cost her her life." Simond's Switzer land, p. 498.