‘I had for me all the blew bonnets to a man, and a Lady whose good heart I respect still more than her birth, tho it be the very highest, she made press me (_sic_) to ask a pension, assuring me it would cost but one word. I excused myself as having no pretention to merit it. She bid me not name her, in leaving you to guess I do not injure her. She said the same also to Baron Kniphausen.’ Years later, from Neufchâtel, he wrote to Andrew Mitchell, ‘The Provost of Kintore presents his compliments,’ adding some congratulations on Mitchell’s pension. Not even the Provostship of Kintore reconciled the Earl, a changed man, to a changed Scotland. Conceivably he was not welcomed by the Jacobite remnant around the cracked bell. Bigotry, hypocrisy, and intolerable sabbatarianism were what the Earl disliked in his own country. He was also resolute against marrying, declined _faire l’étalon_, as Frederick delicately put it. Early in 1761, he made up his mind to return to Neufchâtel, and to compose the quarrels of Protestants and heretics. At Neufchâtel the Earl made an acquaintance rather disagreeable to most English tastes, the moral and sensible Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The philosopher’s account of the Earl is in his ‘Confessions.’ According to him, Marischal, beginning life as a Jacobite, ‘se dégoûta bientôt,’ which is not historically accurate. ‘La grande âme de ce digne homme toute républicaine’ could not endure ‘l’esprit injuste et tyrannique’ of King James! The wicked people of Neufchâtel, whom the Earl ‘tried to make happy,’ ‘kicked against his benevolent cares.’ A preacher ‘was expelled for not wanting many persons to be eternally damned.’ Rousseau went to Neufchâtel to escape the persecution which never ceased to attack this virtuous man. Frederick allowed him to hide his virtues in this hermitage, and made some rather slender offers of provision (twelve _louis_, says Rousseau), which exasperated the sage. On seeing the Earl his first idea was to weep (Jean-Jacques perhaps followed Richardson in his tearfulness), so extremely emaciated was the worthy peer. Conquering his ‘great inclinations to cry,’ with an effort, Rousseau admired the Earl’s ‘open, animated, and noble physiognomy.’ Without ceremony, and acting as a Child of Nature, Jean-Jacques went and sat down beside the Earl on his sofa. In his noble eye Rousseau detected ‘something fine, piercing, yet in a way caressing.’ He became quite fond of the Earl. Wordsworth has justly remarked that you seldom see a grown-up male weeping freely on the public highway. But, had you been on the road between Rousseau’s house and the Earl’s you might have seen the author of the ‘Nouvelle Héloïse’ blubbering as he walked, shedding _larmes d’attendrissement_, as he contemplated the ‘paternal kindnesses, amiable virtues, and mild philosophy of the respectable old man.’