Officious, innocent, sincere, Of every friendless name the friend.[27] His own temperament was morbidly melancholy, but his writings contain the best antidotes against that pitiable affection. He ridicules it when indulged on occasion of each chance and trivial annoyance; he scorns it as "hypocrisy of misery," when assumed by those little-minded beings who complain for the luxury of pity: and he proposes the most salutary remedies for it, when a real and deeply-seated malady, in active and in honorable enterprise.[28] Above all he ever presses upon his readers, from a view of the transitory nature of mortal enjoyment, the wisdom of resting their hopes on the fixed prospects of futurity. Rousseau has been termed "the apostle of affliction." But his conviction of the emptiness of honours and of fame, and his contempt of the accidental distinctions of riches and of rank, led him to place all man's possible enjoyment, and to look for the only solace of his inevitable wretchedness, in the instant indulgence of appetite; while his genius unhappily enabled him to throw a seductive halo around the merest gratifications of sense. Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, The apostle of affliction, he who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first drew The breath that made him wretched; yet he knew How to make madness beautiful, and cast O'er erring deeds and words a heavenly hue Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they past The eyes which o'er them shed tears feelingly and fast. _Childe Harold, Canto 3, Stanza 77._