“The weapons of Rousseau, his rival, were more logical; his were sarcastic,--an arm less dignified, but the most powerful in France. Rousseau was admired, Voltaire produced enthusiasm: the one addressed the understanding, the other spoke to the passions. The one fenced dexterously with a sword, the other stabbed the social body with his dagger. The Genevese Heraclitus, although far more eloquent, was much less popular than the Democritus of Ferney. Vain, frivolous, vicious, and immoral; cynical in his countenance, essentially a mocker and a scoffer, faithless in controversy, violent in polemical discussion, vindictive and implacable, yet the flatterer of power, abject and crouching at the footstool of kings, their favourites, and their mistresses, and ever courting aristocratic distinction and drawing-room favours: Voltaire was, in short, the personification of his time. “Rousseau, more austere, was gathered up in the dignity of the man and the philosopher. His logic was inflexible, and he carried it to its utmost limits. Rigorous and absolute in principle, he not unfrequently wandered in the exaggeration of results, and boldly laid down theories without duly considering how far they might prove practicable. In politics be appeared rarely to have contemplated the present; but his eagle-eye sought to pierce into futurity, and gaze upon the splendour of a republican democracy. “Rousseau prepared a political reform. Voltaire operated a revolution in religion, attacking its influence with insult and mockery. Philosophy, handled by him, became sophistical and narrow; but nevertheless, as Chateaubriand observes, it disengaged Christianity from its trammels, to restore it ultimately to all its purity.” While thus endeavouring to accelerate a reform in the social order, Rousseau was most energetic in denouncing the practice of duelling; and the following are his memorable remarks on the subject: “Beware how you confound the sacred name of honour with that ferocious prejudice which places virtue on the sword’s point, and which is only calculated to make brave ruffians. “And what constitutes this prejudice?--the most extravagant and barbarous idea that ever entered the human mind; fancying that all social duties will find a substitute in valour; that a man ceases to be a rogue, a cheat, a slanderer, and becomes civilized, humane, and polite, when he knows how to fight! that falsehood becomes truth, theft legitimate, treachery and perfidiousness praiseworthy, so soon as he can maintain these qualities sword in hand! that an insult is wiped away by the wound of a sword, and that you can never be in the wrong when you have killed your adversary! There does exist, I admit, a sort of affair in which politeness is combined with cruelty, and where people only kill each other by chance; and this is when men fight for the _first blood_. The first blood! good God! And what dost thou want with this blood, ferocious beast? dost thou want to drink it?