redeeming the time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money.
He travelled alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris back
again to Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him in
the stead of books. Scarcely any great writer since the revival of
letters has been so little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to
literature for the most characteristic part of his work. He was formed
by life; not by life in the sense of contact with a great number of
active and important persons, or with a great number of persons of any
kind, but in the rarer sense of free surrender to the plenitude of his
own impressions. A world composed of such people, all dispensing with
the inherited portion of human experience, and living independently on
their own stock, would rapidly fall backwards into dissolution. But
there is no more rash idea of the right composition of a society than
one which leads us to denounce a type of character for no better reason
than that, if it were universal, society would go to pieces. There is
very little danger of Rousseau's type becoming common, unless lunar or
other great physical influences arise to work a vast change in the
cerebral constitution of the species. We may safely trust the prodigious
_vis inertioe_ of human nature to ward off the peril of an eccentricity
beyond bounds spreading too far. At present, however, it is enough,
without going into the general question, to notice the particular fact
that while the other great exponents of the eighteenth century movement,
Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, were nourishing their natural strength of
understanding by the study and practice of literature, Rousseau, the
leader of the reaction against that movement, was wandering a beggar and
an outcast, craving the rude fare of the peasant's hut, knocking at
roadside inns, and passing nights in caves and holes in the fields, or
in the great desolate streets of towns.

If such a life had been disagreeable to him, it would have lost all the