with a strong enthusiasm for the simplification of life; for the poetry
of nature and of rustic employments; for the sweetness of domestic
affection. In Germany public sentiment had already been prepared for a
certain idealization of the bourgeoisie. Enlightened rulers and
publicists, here and there, were coming to feel that a virtuous yeomanry
was the sure foundation of a state's welfare. Countless idyls and
pastorals and moralizing romances had thrown a nimbus of poetry about
the simple virtues and humble employments of the poor, and taught people
to contrast these things with the corruption and artificiality of courts
and cities. It was, however, the passionate eloquence of Rousseau which
first gave to this contrast a revolutionary significance, and it was
Rousseau who first stirred the reading world with a woeful tale of
lovers separated by the prejudices of caste.

In 'The New Heloise' it is the lady who is the aristocrat. Julie
d'Etange, the daughter of a baron, wishes to marry the untitled St.
Preux, to whom in a transport of passion she has yielded up her honor.
But the Baron d'Etange is an implacable stickler for rank and she is a
dutiful daughter; whence her marriage to the elderly infidel, Wolmar,
and the well-known moral ending of the novel. The thought that concerns
us here is best expressed by the enlightened English peer, Lord B., who
thus expostulates with Baron d'Etange:

Let us judge of the past by the present; for two or three citizens
who win distinction by honest means, a thousand knaves every day get
their families ennobled. But to what end serves that nobility of
which their descendants are so proud, unless it be to prove the
robberies and infamy of their ancestor? There are, I confess, a
great number of bad men among the common people; but the odds are
always twenty to one against a gentleman that he is descended from a