It was about the year 1750, soon after writing his dissertation for the Dijon prize, that he made a total change in his habits and mode of living. He gave up all refinement about his dress, laid aside his sword, bag, and silk stockings, sold his watch, but kept his linen apparel, which, however, was stolen from him shortly after. He spent one half of the day in copying music as a means of subsistence, and he found constant employment. Several persons who knew his circumstances offered him three or four times the value of his labour, but he would never accept more than the usual remuneration. In 1753 he wrote his ‘Lettre sur la Musique Française,’ in which he asserted that the French had no music deserving the name, that they could not possibly have any, and then added, that “were they ever to have any it would be all the worse for them;” a sentence unintelligible to his readers, and probably to himself also. When years after this he heard Gluck, with whose music he was delighted, he observed to some one, “this man is setting French words to very good music, as if on purpose to contradict me;” and upon this reflection he broke off acquaintance with Gluck. However, his letter on French music sorely wounded the national vanity, and he was exposed to a sort of petty persecution in consequence of it. Rousseau wrote next his letter to D’Alembert, ‘sur les Spectacles,’ which led to a controversy between them. He wrote also the ‘Discours sur l’Origine de l’Inégalité parmi les Hommes,’ for another prize of the Academy of Dijon, with a dedication to the magistrates of his native town Geneva, which was much admired as a specimen of dignified eloquence. The discourse itself is composed in his accustomed paradoxical vein. He maintains that men are not intended to be sociable beings; that they have a natural bias for a solitary existence; that the condition of the savage, untutored and free in his native wilds, is the natural and proper state of man; and that every system of society is an infraction of man’s rights, and a subversion of the order of nature. He assumes that men are all born equal by nature, disregarding the daily evidence of the contrary, in respect both of their physical and moral powers. His idea of the equal rights of men, which he afterwards developed in the ‘Contrat Social,’ instead of being founded upon enlightened reason, religion, and morality, rests upon the base of his favourite theory, of man’s equality in a state of nature; while we know from experience, that those savage tribes who approach nearest to this imaginary natural state, acknowledge no other right than that of the strongest. Most of Rousseau’s paradoxes proceed from the false position assumed in his first dissertation, that a savage, unsocial state, is the very perfection of man’s existence.