It is clear, that whatever had been Hume's conduct in the affair, Rousseau's rage was a storm predestined to burst upon him. Its elements were in the mind of "the self-torturing sophist," not in the conduct of any other person; and whoever was the object nearest to his thoughts at the moment, as being most associated with the circumstances in which he was placed, had to stand the shock. In this view, Hume's conduct is no more to be tested by that of Rousseau, than the keeper's by that of his patient. We are thus rid of the unpleasant employment of comparing things which cannot bear comparison; and of the sickening task of enumerating instances of kindness, attachment, persevering good offices, and charitable interpretations of conduct on the one side, met by black ingratitude, contempt, and deadly injury on the other.
If we look for that over-excited propensity which may have caused this mental disease, it appears, beyond doubt, that it was vanity.[333:1] All Rousseau's avowed misfortunes are the calamities of celebrity. At one time he is the victim of princes and prime ministers; at another, of an assembled clergy; at another, of half the learned men of Europe. That he is neglected and forgotten is never among his ostensible complaints; though there is good reason to believe that it was at the bottom of his most conspicuous fits of fury. The English people, though they were at first somewhat curious about the remarkable stranger, did not incommode themselves about him, and obstinately abstained from following him into the wilderness. In his long letter of charges, he cannot help bitterly remarking the apathy of the public; but he states it as an accusation against Hume,[333:2] whom he supposes to have said, like Flavius,
I'll about And drive away the vulgar from the streets: So do you too, where you perceive them thick. These growing feathers, pluck'd from Cæsar's wing, Will make him fly an ordinary pitch, Who else would soar above the view of men, And keep us all in servile fearfulness.
Had the solitudes of Wooton been peopled by multitudes anxious to catch a passing glance of the "apostle of affliction," he would doubtless have let loose his half-appeased discontent in some querulous letters about the impossibility of his finding repose and solitude; but he would not have courted such a conflict as he rushed into in the bitterness of his solitude. Although his character stands without parallel in its own vast proportions, it is not without abundance of exemplifications on a smaller scale. There are few who have not, in their journey through life, encountered one or more small Rousseaus, in men of ravenous and insatiable vanity, who, unlike the ordinary good-natured vain men, are perpetually rejecting the incense offered to their appetite, and demanding some new form of worship. In these, as in the chimney-piece models of celebrated statues, may we view the proportions of the great self-tormenter's mind; and when it is found that the peculiarity is generally accompanied with some observable amount of intellectual acquirements, which place the individual a degree above those who surround him, the resemblance is the more complete. Vanity being its source, the shape assumed by his monomania was a dread of conspiracies in all shapes; and he was as sincere a believer in their existence, as any unfortunate inhabitant of bedlam has ever been in the creations of his diseased mind.[334:1]