whom he had never gone without profit."[6] "I think I see my father now,"
he wrote when he had begun to make his mark in Paris, "living by the
work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. I
see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along with the
tools of his craft. I see at his side a cherished son receiving
instruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too little
fruit."[7] This did little to implant the needed impressions of the
actual world. Rousseau's first training continued to be in an excessive
degree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs the
imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the
strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the
age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the
personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him
with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to
heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of
Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a
hot chafing-dish.[8]

Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in
ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean
Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away
into Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen
for ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,[9] and he
commemorates the homely tenderness and care with which his early years
were surrounded. Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the
side of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying
curiosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busy
about affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contented
interest, as she sang the simple airs of the common people. The
impression of this kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to