But the charm was not to be broken without a violent effort being made to restore to Rousseau his earlier supremacy. It came from the group of brilliant Radical writers, who had not accepted the Toryism of the ruling classes, to whom the discredited principles of the Revolution were more dear than they had ever been, and who pinned their attractive and enthusiastic æsthetic reforms to the voluptuous ecstasy of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ and the chimerical sentiment of _Emile_. Already, in _The Round_ _Table_ (1814), Hazlitt had recommended the _Confessions_ as the "most valuable" of all Rousseau's writings; he was presently in his _Liber Amoris_ (1823) to produce the work which of all important books of the English nineteenth century was to reproduce most closely the manner of the Genevese master. Two years later, having made a very careful examination of the works, Hazlitt published his essay _On the Character of Rousseau_, which was not surpassed, or approached, as a study of the great writer until the appearance of Lord Morley's monograph, nearly sixty years afterwards. Hazlitt exposes the baneful effect of Burke's attacks, while acknowledging that from his own, the Tory point of view, Burke was justified in taking the line that he did. It is perfectly true that "the genius of Rousseau levelled the towers of the Bastille with the dust," but Hazlitt, an intellectual revolutionary, exults in the admission. Hazlitt allows, nevertheless, that the exaggerated hopes founded upon such books as the _Contrat Social_ have been followed by inevitable disappointment. It was, however, not the fault of Rousseau, but of his sanguine and absurd disciples, that Europe, or particularly England, has "lost confidence in social man." Ecstatic admirers of his inspired visions had expected the advent of Rousseau to bring in a millennium, and in the disappointment founded on the excesses of the French Revolution they had turned, with ingratitude, upon the pure and Utopian dreamer who had drawn things as they should be, not as it was humanly possible that they ever could be. The writings of Rousseau, he declares, are looked up to with admiration by friends and foes alike as possessing "the true revolutionary leaven," but it needs political foresight and a rare capacity of imagination to perceive that this operates, through temporary upheaval and distraction, to produce an ultimate harmony and a beneficent beauty. In the course of his writings, Hazlitt frequently quotes Rousseau, and always with admiration. He is the most illuminating and the most thoughtful of all his early English critics.