Of the overt cult of Rousseau, even of careful and detailed examination of his works, there was none until Mr. (now Viscount) Morley published his brilliant monograph in 1873. This famous book, so remarkable for its gravity and justice, its tempered enthusiasm, its absence of prejudice, the harmony and illumination of its parts, is the one exception to the public neglect of Jean Jacques by nineteenth-century Englishmen. It removed the reproach of our insular ignorance; it rose at once to the highest level of Continental literature on the subject. The monograph of Morley has become a classic. Incessantly reprinted, it has remained the text-book of English students of Rousseau. It is needless in this place to draw attention to its eminent qualities, or to the fact that it contained, and continues to contain, _lacunæ_ which the eminent writer has not attempted to fill up by the light of later research. In particular, it is impossible not to regret that Lord Morley was unacquainted with the documents, so learnedly edited and lucidly arranged by Mr. L. J. Courtois, on the events of Rousseau's sojourn in England. But Lord Morley, immersed in the duties of a statesman, seems long ago to have lost all interest in the subject which he illuminated so brilliantly nearly fifty years ago. The wide publicity given to Morley's book did not, strangely enough, lead to any great revival of the study of Rousseau in Great Britain. English readers were content to accept the statements and the views of Morley without any special attempt to examine or continue them. There was no outburst of Rousseau study in England in consequence of the volumes of 1873. English translations of his works continued to be few and poor, and over the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ and the _Confessions_ there still hung a cloud of reproach. They were held to be immoral, and dull in their immorality. During the last decade of the century, however, a certain quickening of interest began to show itself in a variety of ways. A Rousseauiste, who excelled all other disciples in the vehemence of her admiration, was revealed in 1895 by the _Studies in the France of Voltaire and Rousseau_ of Mrs. Frederika Macdonald. These, however, were at first but little noticed, and the labours of this lady, culminating in her violent and excessive, but learned and original _New Criticism of J. J. Rousseau_ (1906) and _The Humane Philosophy_ (1908) belong to the twentieth century. It is to be hoped that the essays of Mrs. Macdonald may stimulate a new body of workers to remove the stigma which has lain on England for a hundred years of being dry with cynical neglect of Rousseau while all the rest of the threshing-floor of Europe was wet with the dews of vivifying criticism. THE CENTENARY OF LECONTE DE LISLE