Rousseau's writings generally must be taken as expressions of feeling, quite as much as attempts to change the world. They are growls or sighs, rather than sermons.] While Rousseau's First Discourse is pernicious in its general teaching, it is rich in eloquent passages, and it contains some of those sensible remarks which we seldom fail to find in its author's works. At the time of writing it, as later, he was interested in education,--the subject on which his influence has been, on the whole, most useful. "I see on every side," he says, "enormous establishments where youth is brought up at great expense to learn everything but its duties. Your children will be ignorant of their own language, but will speak others which are not in use anywhere; they will know how to make verses which they will hardly be able to understand themselves; without knowing how to distinguish truth from falsehood, they will possess the art of disguising both from others by specious arguments; but those words, magnanimity, equity, temperance, humanity, courage, will be unknown to them; that sweet name of country[Footnote: Patrie,--a word seemingly necessary, but which the English language manages to do without.] will never strike their ears; and if they hear of God, it will be less to fear Him than to be afraid of Him. `I would as lief,' said a sage, `that my schoolboy had spent his time in a tennis-court; at least his body would be more active.' I know that children must be kept busy, and that idleness is the danger most to be feared for them. What, then, should they learn? A fine question surely! Let them learn what they must do when they are men, and not what they must forget."[Footnote: Compare Montaigne, i. 135 (liv. i. chap. xxv.).]