dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted
Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the
wheel, and cut off La Barre's head.
French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Heloïsa in France
except deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly few
in this generation read it in our own country.[40] The action is very
slight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with the
ingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychological
analysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident or
excited humour to another, which mark the modern writer of sentimental
fiction. As the title warns us, it is a story of a youthful tutor and
a too fair disciple, straying away from the lessons of calm philosophy
into the heated places of passion. The high pride of Julie's father
forbade all hope of their union, and in very desperation the unhappy
pair lost the self-control of virtue, and threw themselves into the
pit that lies so ready to our feet. Remorse followed with quick step,
for Julie had with her purity lost none of the other lovelinesses of a
dutiful character. Her lover was hurried away from the country by the
generous solicitude of an English nobleman, one of the bravest,
tenderest, and best of men. Julie, left undisturbed by her lover's
presence, stricken with affliction at the death of a sweet and
affectionate mother, and pressed by the importunities of a father whom
she dearly loved, in spite of all the disasters which his will had
brought upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron from
some northern court. Wolmar was much older than she was; a devotee of
calm reason, without a system and without prejudices, benevolent,
orderly, above all things judicious. The lover meditated suicide, from
which he was only diverted by the arguments of Lord Edward, who did
more than argue; he hurried the forlorn man on board the ship of
Admiral Anson, then just starting for his famous voyage round the
world. And this marks the end of the first episode.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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