They had glimpses of the rougher side of life in the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood.

These ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainly for the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from school was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors.

All this is an old story in every biography written or unwritten.

It seldom fails to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic creatures.
And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlier schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in Genevese youth in after years.

"In my time," he says admiringly, "children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to keep....