Rousseau’s last Love forms one of the most romantic episodes in his life, concerning which nothing was known until a few years ago when the French historian, R. Chantslauze, discovered in a bookstall the MS. of a letter by Rousseau to Lady Cecile Hobart, dated 1770, when Rousseau was almost sixty years of age. He appears to have met this lady in England at the time when he was writing his _Confessions_. She had first won his affection by her admiration of his works; and in course of his long and hyper-sentimental letter he remarks, “Why is it that I have never felt any other true love but that for the products of my own fancy? Wherein lies the reason, Cecile? In these fancied beings themselves; they made me dissatisfied with everything else. For forty years I have carried in my mind the image of her I adore. I love her with a constancy, an ecstasy inexpressible.... I had no hope of ever meeting her, had given up the eager search for her, when you appeared before me. It was folly, infatuation, if you like, that made me surrender myself for a moment to the magic of your sight; but I could not but say to myself: There she is! No other woman ever inspired that thought in me. And stranger still is it that I could hear you speak without changing my opinion. What the ideal of my heart thought, you spoke it to my ears.” II.—ARDOUR If Bacon did not write the plays of Shakspere, it was the biggest mistake of his life. Second among his mistakes must rank the opinion expressed in the following sentence: “You may observe that amongst all the great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or modern), there is not one that hath been transported to the mad degree of love.” If the advocates of the Baconian theory had as much sense of humour as they stimulate in other people, they would see that such a sentence—and there are others like it in Bacon—could not by any possibility have been penned by the author of _As You Like It_, _Venus and Adonis_, or _Romeo and Juliet_. Dante was by no means the only “great and worthy person” before Bacon’s day who had been “transported to the mad degree of love”; and since Bacon’s day the word Genius has become almost synonymous with the capacity for lovers’ madness. Yet there is a grain of truth in Bacon’s sentence as it stands. He evidently had in mind chiefly the _ancient_ “great and worthy persons”; and of these, as we have seen, but one or two had even a vague presentiment of what was to be some day the moral lever of the universe. Bacon probably had a dim perception of the fact that the ancients knew nothing of passionate Love, of the imaginative type; but he did not quite succeed in grasping the idea.