Note 20 — CHARACTERS OF PASSION AND IMAGINATION.

I must allude, but with reluctance, to another character, which I have heard likened to Juliet, and often quoted as the heroine par excellence of amatory fiction—I mean the Julie of Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse; I protest against her altogether. As a creation of fancy the portrait is a compound of the most gross and glaring inconsistencies; as false and impossible to the reflecting and philosophical mind, as the fabled Syrens, Hamatryads and Centaurs to the eye of the anatomist. As a woman, Julie belongs neither to nature nor to artificial society; and if the pages of melting and dazzling eloquence in which Rousseau has garnished out his idol did not blind and intoxicate us, as the incense and the garlands did the votaries of Isis, we should be disgusted. Rousseau, having composed his Julie of the commonest clay of the earth, does not animate her with fire from heaven, but breathes his own spirit into her, and then calls the "impetticoated" paradox a woman. He makes her a peg on which to hang his own visions and sentiments—and what sentiments! but that I fear to soil my pages, I would pick out a few of them, and show the difference between this strange combination of youth and innocence, philosophy and pedantry, sophistical prudery, and detestable grossièreté, and our own Juliet. No! if we seek a French Juliet, we must go far—far back to the real Héloïse, to her eloquence, her sensibility, her fervor of passion, her devotedness of truth. She, at least, married the man she loved, and loved the man she married, and more than died for him; but enough of both.