But when events had rapidly developed, and Burke came to write the flaming sentences of his great _Letter to a Member of the National Assembly_ (1791), the importance of Rousseau's influence in bringing about the events which Burke so passionately deplored had greatly widened and deepened. He saw that the very blood of Rousseau had been transfused into the veins of the National Assembly of France. "Him they study," he wrote, "him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day, or the debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his life he is their canon of _Polyclitus_; he is their standard figure of perfection." Burke felt obliged to denounce, with his unparalleled wealth of picturesque eloquence, the fatal character of the fascination exercised by the author of the _Lettres de la Montague_ and the _Confessions_. To Burke, thus brought face to face with what he believed to be the very Ragnarok of the gods, the ruin of all which made life in Europe worth living, it now became a religious duty to expose the malefic character of the charming, exquisite pleadings of the revolutionary of Geneva. He declared that the virtue propounded by Rousseau was not virtue at all, but "a selfish, flattering, seductive, ostentatious vice." This was a theory new to Englishmen, a theory which had, of course, in faltering accents, been here and there suggested by opponents, but never before deliberately and logically asserted by a great master of English oratory. Burke spoke, not merely with the immense prestige of his position, but as one who had been subjected to the personal charm of Rousseau, and who had studied him in his lifetime, not merely without prejudice, but with sympathy and admiration. His grave censure of the philosopher came with unction from the lips of one who was known to have been in communication with him, during his first visit to London, almost from day to day.[5] Burke spoke with authority to a large section of the public when he stated that he had gradually become persuaded that Rousseau "entertained no principle either to guide his heart, or to guide his understanding, but _vanity_." He did not deny the charm of Rousseau's writing, or pretend to depreciate his incomparable talents, but he pronounced him to be deranged and eccentric, and to have gloried in the illumination of the obscure and vulgar vices. He described the _Confessions_, over which the English world had bowed in transports of emotional adulation, as the record of "a life that, with wild defiance, he flings in the face of his Creator." Violence carried Burke so far as to describe Rousseau as a man, by his own account, without a single virtue. There can be no question that this diatribe, prominently brought forward by the first of English orators, in a work which was read by every educated man in Great Britain, sapped the reputation of Rousseau