But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ever spawn forth a -- ---! And with these rickety and drivelling abortions--all having followers and adulators--your Public can still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the day when they gave laws and models to the literature of Europe; they can bear to hear -- --- proclaimed a sublime genius in the same circles which sneer down Voltaire!" Voltaire is out of fashion in France, but Rousseau still maintains his influence, and boasts his imitators.

Rousseau was the worse man of the two; perhaps he was also the more dangerous writer.

But his reputation is more durable, and sinks deeper into the heart of his nation; and the danger of his unstable and capricious doctrines has passed away.
In Voltaire we behold the fate of all writers purely destructive; their uses cease with the evils they denounce.

But Rousseau sought to construct as well as to destroy; and though nothing could well be more absurd than his constructions, still man loves to look back and see even delusive images--castles in the air--reared above the waste where cities have been.

Rather than leave even a burial-ground to solitude, we populate it with ghosts.
By degrees, however, as he mastered all the features of the French literature, Maltravers become more tolerant of the present defects, and more hopeful of the future results.