Byron knew him better and styled him "self-torturing." Rousseau did not laugh at the world or at anything. There was this force in kim, that he was desperately in earnest. He had none of the happy gaiety, the irresistible spring, which distinguished Voltaire. Rousseau's suspicious nature might make him fear the world, but he reserved his smiles for the smiles of nature, and only laughed as the morning laughs at the lovely youth of another day. All that was happy in Rousseau stirred in him only at the bidding of love or at the sight of natural beauty. For the world of humanity he had no laugh, he had nothing but a side-long suspicion, or a grave earnest look.

The literary and personal reputation of Rousseau suffered in its day from his novel political and social teaching. His enemies would not see the beauty of his language, nor the other powers of his pen. His 'Eloisa' has grave defects, but yet it came upon the corrupt literature of his time like waft of pure air in an overheated and unwholesome atmosphere. In a day of universal corruption Rousseau upheld the sanctity of the marriage tie, and makes his heroine recognise that marriage has "its chaste and sublime duties." Surely this ought to be remembered to his honour. Eloisa' has passages of great beauty. It will be, however, weary reading unless the reader will transport himself to the scenes and live with the characters. Even then he will find it sensuous, and with passages not to be excused, but he will come across occasional descriptions of scenery which are the very transcripts of nature, and which take us delighted to the spots described. Who shall ever tell, who shall ever approach to a guess, at the ecstasy with which this most melancholy man drank in the beauty of those scenes? Everything goes to show that it was meat and drink to him, that all his troubles vanished before it, that the turbulence of his passions was subdued by it, that his morbidities were soothed. Here in his heart he built an altar to God. The grand sight of the everlasting hills moved him as it did David of old; and though he did not sing as David sang, yet in whatever frame of mind he came he was purified by the contemplation of nature, and this part of his song, this side of his character, will always command admiration. The waving of the dark pines, the soothing sound of rushing waters, the alternate cloud and sunshine chasing over the mountain side, the murmur of the breeze before it slept at sunset, and the reflected heaven in the waters beneath, awoke in him feelings to which he endeavoured to give eloquent expression. But with all his powers of expression he must have felt the keen pain of an inexpressible joy. Even this is felt by ordinary natures; but how much more by Rousseau, who had watched with loving eye and concentrated ardour the beauties of nature over a long solitary life!

As the tale of his days draws to a close his mind got more clouded,

6

he fled to England, got into a controversy with Hume, in which Rousseau was wrong and Hume not generous, thought his house was surrounded by spies and again fled. He took refuge at Gisors, where he finished those Confessions' in which, in an article on Diderot many years ago in the Quarterly Review,' he was held to have committed moral suicide. Whether this be so or not, it is certain that had he not written them we never could have seen Rousseau as his contemporaries saw him, and we should have lost a work of singular value in whatever light it may be viewed.

He then went to Paris for some years, and seems to have lived in a certain amount of happiness; but from this time his wife became a sore trouble to him, he suffered from an incurable and tormenting disease, he thought himself the object of universal suspicion, and he became a monomaniac. His darkened mind received more and more rarely gleams of light, and these chiefly from scenery, from music, from objects of beauty. But they were truly Rembrandt gleams, which with all their brightness revealed the gloom around. Poverty at last was added to his miseries, and we read with an inexpressible sense of relief that the unhappy man found rest at last, though only in the grave.

"It seems as if, being lifted above all human society, we had left every low, terrestrial sentiment behind, and that as we approach the ethereal regions the soul imbibes something of their eternal purity."

With this sentiment of one of Geneva's most gifted sons I close. Now that time has cooled the passions that contended around him and helped to destroy him, it might be written on his tomb.

G. B.

Drawn at a Venture.

"MY DEAR JACKSON:

horses to run on the 11th.

CHAPTER I.

"Come and look us up on your way to Towerston. I've two Come and see them. The mare's wonderfully fit, and full of running. Of course you know that Rigby's put in the Usurer. He's fast, and a good fencer, but he won't beat her over that ground. Can't stay. This is the most ramshackle, tumbledown old place in the principality. It's well worth coming out of your way to see. Kitty says I'm to tell you there are ghosts by the dozens, and a haunted room, which I am to hold out as an inducement. You know all the people who are coming. Naires, Dudley, and most of the old set. I don't know about De Wint. Bring him with you if you see him. Mrs. Scott Ridley's here, and Laura Browne-you know them both. We are all waiting to drink Rocketer's health. I hear they've nothing there that can beat him. We shall expect you, unless we hear to the contrary-which the gods forbid. "Yours,

"T. ANDERSON."

"Shall you go?" asks De Wint, as I communicate the contents of this epistle to him in the cab that takes us from the Rugby station to the racecourse.

"I don't know," I say. "I might run down for a couple of days, but I couldn't stay over the 11th, on account of Towerston. I'm due there on that day."

Towerston is my uncle, whose seventieth birthday I am on my way down to Scotland to keep. Kitty is the woman I love. She is also the woman I am disposed to suspect Naires, Dudley, and De Wint of loving; and the consideration that one or other of them may be making the running while I am kowtowing at that inhumanly tough old sinner's, at once presents itself to my imagination.

"I think I shall go," says De Wint, "and you had better come too. Why are you bound to turn up at Towerston on the 11th? Your uncle's birthday, is it? I had an uncle once, and I suppose he must have had birthdays, but he managed somehow to keep them himself. I'm afraid he'd have had to go without, if he'd depended upon me to help him."

"I've half a mind to go," I say.

"I'll tell you," says De Wint, smitten with an idea; "let us make

Rocketer settle it. If he wins, you go; if he doesn't, you do the other thing. What do you say to that?"

"That will do," I say. "I'm willing enough to let Rocketer have all the bother of deciding."

And so we leave it to Rocketer, who, winning by a length, settles it in the only rational way, as De Wint says, when we find ourselves rushing eastwards in the Shrewsbury express.

"You have been there before, haven't you?" I asked. "It seemed a queer fancy of Anderson's to take such a place as Detroit."

"It's out of the way," says De Wint sleepily, "and the stables are A 1. Anderson likes to have his horses under his own eye. That mare of his is certain to do something big. Then he's got the place furnished, and with a whole lot of servants in it besides. I don't suppose he'll stay there much longer, though the Detroits never cared to be much there, since that poor fellow Armstrong put an end to himself."

"I never understood about that," I say. "It always seemed so utterly incomprehensible to outsiders like myself. Was there no reason at all assigned for it?"

"None whatever. Detroit told me that they had never been able to hit upon the slightest clue to any possible motive. When they came to look into his affairs, they found everything all square and in perfect order. In fact he was several thousands to the good. He'd been lucky in some speculation on the turf, I think it was. Detroit (he was his first cousin, you know,) said they hadn't noticed anything at all unusual in his manner the day before. As the papers say, 'he went to bed in his usual health and spirits,' and in the morning, by Jove, they found that he'd hanged himself to a beam at the bottom of his bed."

"Of course he must have been mad," I say, as we transfer our goods and our half-frozen persons to the T-cart which we find waiting for us at Cherrington.

"Of course he was mad," responds De Wint, "and what proves it is, that he brought a rope with him on purpose-a bran-new ropehad kept it in his portmanteau-which showed of course that he'd been thinking of it for some time. The man who unpacked his clothes swore afterwards to having seen it there."

"Most extraordinary thing!" I say, after we have smoked for some time in silence, broken only by De Wint's anathemas against the English climate in general and east winds in particular. "I can't understand why he should have come to Detroit to do it. But of course they brought it in temporary insanity?"

"Not they," answers De Wint, as we emerge from a dismal swamp that looks like the remains of some primeval forest, in sight of a monstrous red-brick building, with a tower on the top of it; "being

a Welsh jury, they were only too happy to bring it in felo de se, the rascals, though it was as plain as a pikestaff that the poor fellow was out of his mind. That's the house. What do you think of it ?"

"By Jove! what an absurdly ugly place!" I exclaim. "Anderson was right enough when he said it was worth coming out of one's way to see. I suppose that's one of Detroit's fellows waiting for us at the door, with that lugubrious visage. He looks as if the place had had an effect upon his spirits, at any rate."

Entering the house at Detroit, you find yourself lost in a labyrinth of passages, inner and outer halls, and staircases, and expect to see the other guests wandering down with clues of red silk in their hands, and the other end attached to the leg of the dinner-table.

From a treacherous beeswaxed passage to the left issues a babel of of voices, apprising us that the ceremony of afternoon tea is being observed; down which passage De Wint and I, after peeling off a layer of the outer man, skate with our benumbed toes after the decorous and sure-footed Detroit retainer, and are only saved from utter discomfiture by a humanely spread tiger-skin at the other end of it.

Bringing ourselves up adroitly, we enter the drawing-room. A square, low room-a heavily-curtained, deep-windowed room. As many windows in it as in a lighthouse, and yet marvellously little light. Lozenge paned windows, emblazoned with the arms of the Detroit family, through one of which the feeble sun is painting green and purple patches on the cheek and white throat of my beloved. Very hideous do those of the party look, I am fain to observe, upon whom the monstrous barbarism of the Detroits is being thus visited. The fair hands of Laura Browne are dyed a deep full red; Gresley, who is fortifying her with buttered toast, rejoices in a verdant chevelure that contrasts surprisingly with the complementary hue of his beard; Lady Elizabeth Luxmore, who in her character of aunt is here to chaperon the party, has her fat, good-humoured face picked out in spots that are more becoming to the pard in the Detroit armorial bearings; De Wint and I, on emerging from the perils of the passage, become drenched from head to foot in the flood of crimson that streams from the robes of some Detroit departed, and make our appearance as if we had come, red-handed, from some deed of darkness.

"What a multitude of people!" mutters De Wint, as we make our way up the room. "Hullo, Dudley! what has brought you here already?"

"I really can hardly tell," says Dudley pathetically, "what did bring me. You won't press the point, will you? I expect it must have been that Browne woman. She has a sort of horrible fascination

for me. I I suppose I shall marry her some day, if nobody has the