Therese le Vasseur was not an ill-conducted girl on certain points; she was always faithful, as far as is known, to her tie to Rousseau; but she was not only ignorant and illiterate, but wanting in common understanding. Rousseau boasts that she could give excellent advice on emergencies; but this common sense did not lead her to resist the influence of her mother, a low cunning woman; while Rousseau, not liking to have the burden of her destiny, future as well as present, thrown wholly on himself, felt no inclination, at the commencement of their intercourse, when alone it was possible, to separate her from association with her family, which tended to keep her vulgar-minded and artful. Even in his Confessions, where Rousseau discloses his secret errors, he by no means appreciates the real extent of his misconduct on this occasion. He allied himself to a girl whom he despised too much to allow her at first even to share his home; he took her as a sort of convenience, and when inconveniences arose from the connection, he was disposed to get rid of them on the easiest possible terms. Theresa was about to become a mother. According to the profligate code of French morals, this fact would dishonour her; though the illicit intercourse, if not openly acknowledged, did not. Rousseau did not like to multiply ties between himself and his mistress and her family: he was needy: he had heard young men of rank and fortune allude vauntingly to the recourse they had had on such occasions to the Foundling Hospital. He followed their criminal example. He at first acted, he says, without serious examination of the morality of his conduct; but when he commenced author, he gave attentive consideration to the point, and satisfied himself that he did right, and continued his course of conduct. Five of his children were thus sent to a receptacle where few survive; and those who do go through life are brutified by their situation, or depressed by the burden, ever weighing at the heart, that they have not inherited the commonest right of humanity, a parent's care. It is insulting the reader to dwell on the flagrancy of this act. But it is a lesson that ought to teach us humility. That a man as full of genius and aspiration after virtue as Rousseau, should have failed in the plainest dictates of nature and conscience, through the force of example and circumstances, shows us how little we can rely on our own judgment. It shows too, that a father is not to be trusted for natural instincts towards his offspring; for the mother wept, and it needed the control of her own mother, and strong necessity, to induce the weak-minded and misguided girl to consent to part with her offspring.