The more brilliant the talents which led the way in this new impious and Revolutionary career of the European mind, the more generally pernicious was the result. Such was the case with that scoffer, whose genius could adapt itself to all the forms, moods, and styles of the old French literature, and who wielding, as he did, with so masterly a hand the weapon of a lawless wit, directed it without intermission during his whole life against everything holy and venerable, of what nature and kind soever. As those errors are the most dangerous, which as containing a portion of truth, carry with them a greater power of conviction; so Rousseau has perhaps exercised a more fatal influence than that other spirit, who with his mockery polluted all things. We cannot precisely term him un-christian--at least such an epithet cannot be applied to him in the same unqualified and universal extent--and when compared with the Atomical philosophy and the Atheistical idolatry of nature, his fanatic worship of nature will be found of a more spiritual cast. The great eloquence of this man entitles him perhaps as clearly to the first rank among the orators of his nation during the eighteenth century, as Bossuet with very different religious principles holds in his own age. Eloquence less powerful than Rousseau's could not well have sufficed to draw his age into an admiration for that savage equality which he preached up--to have excited its enthusiasm for the state of the Caribees and the Iroquois, which, looking back with regret to man's original happiness in the pure freedom of nature, he represented as his proper destiny, utterly marred as he was, by European civilization. This was not a mere idle freak of imagination, such as any false enchantment of romance might display--but Rousseau endeavoured to demonstrate with all the rigid deductions of mathematical proof, the happy equality of the savage state; and with the most earnest conviction and blind fanaticism, his system was applied to the actual relations of life. The result was that period of godless freedom--freedom separated from God and from every divine principle whether of conduct or belief, and which, as usual, was soon succeeded by the false unity of a crushing despotism, equally hostile to every heavenly and exalted motive of human action. But such has been the frightfully accelerated march of events in these latter times, that the former stages of the Revolutionary course in ancient Rome--the attempt of the elder Brutus--the establishment of a Republic--the wars with the rival Carthage--the rapid career of military conquests--and the transition to despotism, down to Tiberius or Dioclesian--have been here traversed in the short period of scarcely one generation. It would be unjust always to term this the French Revolution, or to consider it exclusively as such--it was a general political malady--an universal epidemic of the age. In Holland and Belgium a Revolution had