ROUSSEAU, Jean Baptiste, a French lyric poet, of very great merit, was born at Paris in April 1670. His father, who was a shoemaker in good circumstances, made him study in the best colleges of Paris, where he distinguished himself by his abilities. He at length applied entirely to poetry, and soon made himself known by several short pieces that were filled with lively and agreeable images, which made him sought for by persons of the first rank and men of the brightest genius. He was admitted as a pupil to the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres in 1701, and almost all the rest of his life he attached himself to some great men. He attended Marshal Tallard into England in the capacity of secretary, and there contracted a friendship with St Evremond. On his return to Paris, he was admitted into the polite company, lived amongst the courtiers, and seemed perfectly satisfied with his situation; when, in 1708, he was prosecuted for being the author of some couplets in which the characters of several persons of wit and merit were blackened by the most atrocious calumnies. This prosecution made much noise; and Rousseau was in 1712, by a decree of the Parliament of Paris, banished out of the kingdom, to which he was never more to return. However, he always steadily denied, even on his death-bed, his being the author of these couplets. From the date of this sentence he lived in foreign countries, where he found illustrious protectors. The Count de Luc, ambassador of France in Switzerland, took him into his family, and studied to render his life agreeable. At the treaty of Baden in 1714, he was one of the plenipotentiaries, and was presented to Prince Eugene, who, entertaining a particular esteem for him, took him to Vienna, and introduced him to the emperor's court. Rousseau lived about three years with Prince Eugene; but having lost his favour by satirizing one of his mistresses, he retired to Brussels, where he afterwards usually resided. It was there that he commenced his disputes with Voltaire, with whom he had become acquainted at the college of Louis the Great, and who then much admired his turn for poetry. Rousseau, from the period of their dispute, always represented Voltaire as a buffoon, and as a writer possessing neither taste nor judgment, who owed all his success to a
Rousseau. particular mode which he pursued. As a poet Rousseau considered him as inferior to Lucan, and little superior to Prædon. Voltaire treated him still worse. Rousseau, according to him, was nothing better than a plagiarist, who had nothing but the talent of arranging words. He came over in 1721 to London, where he printed his Œuvres Diverses, in two volumes 12mo. This edition, published in 1723, brought him near ten thousand crowns, the whole of which he placed in the hands of the Ostend Company. The affairs of this company, however, soon getting into confusion, those who had any money in their hands lost the whole of it; by which unfortunate event Rousseau, when arrived at that age when he stood most in need of the comforts of fortune, had nothing to depend upon but the generosity of his friends. He died at Brussels in February 1740. A very beautiful edition of his works was published in 1743 at Paris, in three volumes 4to, and in four volumes 12mo, containing nothing but what was acknowledged by the author as his own. His works, which contained odes, epistles, cantatas, allegories, epigrams, and comedies have been published at Paris by Amar, preceded by an essay on his life and writings, entitled Œuvres Complètes, 5 vols., 1820. His poetical works have likewise been published in the Collection des Classiques Français.