said to have done for Switzerland what the author of the Waverly Novels
did for Scotland, turning its mountains, lakes and islands, formerly
regarded with aversion, into a fairyland peopled with creatures whose
joys and sorrows appealed irresistibly to every breast. Shortly after
its publication began to flow that stream of tourists and travellers
which tends to make Switzerland not only more celebrated but more opulent
every year. It, is one of the few romances written in the epistolary
form that do not oppress the reader with a sense of languor and
unreality; for its creator poured into its pages a tide of passion
unknown to his frigid and stilted predecessors, and dared to depict
Nature as she really is, not as she was misrepresented by the modish
authors and artists of the age. Some persons seem shy of owning an
acquaintance with this work; indeed, it has been made the butt of
ridicule by the disciples of a decadent school. Its faults and its
beauties are on the surface; Rousseau's own estimate is freely expressed
at the beginning of the eleventh book of the Confessions and elsewhere.
It might be wished that the preface had been differently conceived and
worded; for the assertion made therein that the book may prove dangerous
has caused it to be inscribed on a sort of Index, and good folk who never
read a line of it blush at its name. Its "sensibility," too, is a little
overdone, and has supplied the wits with opportunities for satire; for
example, Canning, in his 'New Morality':

"Sweet Sensibility, who dwells enshrined
In the fine foldins of the feeling mind....
Sweet child of sickly Fancy!-her of yore
From her loved France Rousseau to exile bore;
And while 'midst lakes and mountains wild he ran,
Full of himself, and shunned the haunts of man,
Taught her o'er each lone vale and Alpine, steep