of David Hume, and the two engravings then and there made after him, by David Martin and by Richard Purcell (alias "C. Corbutt") - the latter reversed — are superb folio mezzotints. Comparable in scale, if somewhat coarse in execution, is J. B. Nochez's line engraving after Martin, published in Paris in 1769. In the case of La Tour, the first engraving appears to be L. J. Cathelin's (1763), bearing no name, but only Rousseau's device, Vitam impendere vero, in accordance with his authorization of July 21, 1762, to the Maréchale de Luxembourg, then the owner of the pastel of 1753. (The fine engraving by Augustin de Saint-Aubin from the same portrait is reversed.) So far so good; and now we choose between the La Tour in French fashionable costume and Ramsay in Armenian bonnet and fur-bordered cloak. Which is the real Rousseau? Either, one might respond; in spite of a difference so great that they never would be suspected to stand for the same man for they were taken thirteen years apart, or between the time when the Citizen of Geneva was delighting the Court with his opera, "Le Devin du Village," and the time when, having renounced that citizenship upon the public burning of his "Émile" in his native place as well as in Paris, he began his long wanderings, haunted by the monomania of a universal conspiracy against him.

may

A man's opinion of his own portrait is proverbially

discredited. In this case we cannot tolerate "Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques," as in his famous Dialogues. He has a pronounced predilection for La Tour's portrait of him. It has, in fact, a smiling expression not" touching," as Bernardin de SaintPierre found it, yet with the “je ne sais quoi d'aimable, de fin." Diderot, who viewed it in the Salon of 1753, thought La Tour (a wonderful technician, in his opinion) to have made rather a pretty thing than a masterpiece; and criticised the dress of the courtier, that masked the author of the Discourse on Inequality, and even the comfortable rush-bottomed chair he was seated in clearly not the man implied in Marmontel's lines affixed to the pastel, "Sages, arrêtez-vous; gens du monde, passez." Ramsay's canvas, to our eyes, conveys far more strikingly the personal charm and the lively intellect of Jean Jacques. It shows also those "regards perçants et inquiets,” that “œil oblique," of the self-tormentor, which Dusaulx noticed in their first interview three years later. Rousseau sitting for it (or standing in a constrained attitude, if we may believe his subsequent account) found no fault with it. He speaks, in his letter to Du Peyrou of March 29, 1766, of the "good painter," whose work the King had asked to see, and which was so much approved that it was to be engraved. Later, upon his breach with Hume, the portrait seemed a part of the foul conspiracy by

which he had been brought to England, and he denounced it (but apparently upon the engravings) as an attempt to make a sullen and frightful Cyclops of him.

Was Hume disappointed? The first night out from Paris, it will be remembered, the poor Frenchman, sleeping in the same room with his patron, heard him cry out with the ominous words, “Je tiens J.-J. Rousseau!" Had he really "got" him, with Ramsay's aid? We shall never know how good the likeness is. The National Gallery of Scotland has "got" it, and our collector must put up with an engraving. Martin's he cannot fail to envy for its art, but if he compares it minutely with a photograph direct from Ramsay, he will discover fatal aberrations, the parent of countless others in the long line of repetitions. Not without reason did Rousseau censure it for the eyes, which if not Cyclopic, are larger and more open, are lighter, and have none of the rather beady expression of the painting. This change carries the eyebrows and forehead higher, affects the width of the head, alters the angular curve of the Armenian bonnet, thickens the upper lip of the wonderfully sensitive mouth, and in other ways departs from the model. Yet no expense was spared to command the best talent for this copy.

Photography, which enables us to make this damaging comparison, also paves the way for a nearer

approach to a trustworthy engraving. The defects we have noticed may have been those of the draughtsman combined with the engraver's. It is now possible to photograph upon the wood-block, and to have the base as true as the camera can make it. This has actually been done within the past few weeks by the indefatigable Gustav Kruell, and we are prepared to say that here and now for the first time in any country has Ramsay's portrait been engraved in a manner to inspire confidence, as well as in the highest style of art. It comes in good time, for in 1912 the world will be celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Rousseau.

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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU 1

1

THE "new criticism" displayed in these needlessly bulky volumes turns out to be an enlargement and confirmation of the same author's contention in her Studies in the France of Voltaire and Rousseau," published in 1895, from which one whole chapter is excerpted, with modifications, on the subject of Rousseau's children and his putting away of them (I, 140). While, in the course of her minute argument, she touches almost every phase of Jean Jacques's career, but unevenly, the work is not for those who would seek in it a first acquaintance with the man whose two hundredth birth anniversary will be celebrated six years hence. Such as are, on the contrary, already more or less familiar with his biography in its broader outlines, will find their profit in Mrs. Macdonald's challenge of the defaming of Rousseau's personality - both among his contemporaries and by too subservient latter-day accepters of the legend invented by them, notably Sainte-Beuve, Saint-Marc Girardin, E. Scherer, John Morley, and Perey and Maugras. It is upon the decades 1746-66 that her searchlight is principally directed. In this period were painted

1 Jean Jacques Rousseau: A New Criticism. By Frederika Macdonald. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. From the Nation, December 27, 1906, vol. 83, p. 556.