Émile is made an orphan; thus Rousseau gives himself full sway; thus does he free himself from the necessity of constant consultation with parents. He is determined to love the boy, to encourage him in his sports, to develop his amiable instincts, his natural self. Émile must not cry for the sweets of life; he must have a need for all things rather than a joyful desire for some. Instead of teaching virtue to him, Rousseau will try to shield him from a knowledge of all vice. Where Plato recommends certain pastimes, he will train Émile to delight in himself--thus making of him something of a youthful egoist. This amœba state, endowed with all physical liberty, deprived of all dignity of childish memory, is to be the boyhood of Émile. He “shall never learn anything by heart, not even fables and not even those of La Fontaine, artless and charming as they are.” Though he does not possess the judgment to discriminate, he must be told the bare facts, and he must discover for himself the relations which these facts bear to each other. At the age of twelve, he shall hardly know a book when he sees it. Rousseau calls books “cheerless furniture.” So much for the boy; the girl Sophie fares as ill. Being of the woman kind as well as of the child brand, she is to develop in even a more colourless fashion. Fortunately all theory is not human actuality, and Émile must have peopled his world in a way Rousseau could not prevent. We are given natural rights and hereditary endowments; even the savage has his standards and his dreams. Rousseau’s plan of existence ignored the social evolution of history. Yet Émile might by such training have been saved many wearisome explanations of the Mr. Barlow type, and it is ofttimes true, as Mr. G. K. Chesterton claims, that the mysteries of God are frequently more understandable than the solutions of man. There was much in Rousseau’s book to rouse opposition; there was equally as much to appeal to those whose instinctive love of childhood was simply awaiting the flood gates to be opened. Like the Grimm fairy tales of suspended animation, on the instant, the paternal instinct began to be active, the maternal instinct to be motherly. Rousseau--emended, modified, accentuated--overran England, France, and Germany. Children were now recognised as children; it remained to be seen whether they _were_ to be children. The didactic era is in no way more fitly introduced than with the names of Madame de Genlis and Arnaud Berquin in France, together with the Edgeworth and Aikin families and Thomas Day in England. To each, small space may be allotted, but they are worthy of full and separate consideration.