old age cheerful, sprightly and agreeable in company, yet at the same time his countenance presented those uncommon features which are only seen in men of great genius."
"It was difficult for him to talk quickly, for he then stuttered, especially when he was obliged to talk in a foreign tongue . . . He spoke slowly, and it was always a pleasure to be with him at table, for whenever Swedenborg spoke, all other talk was hushed, and the slowness with which he spoke had the effect of restraining the frivolous remarks of the curious in the assembly."
Those who could not read his writings (as they were in Latin) were likely to be among the frivolous, according to Robsahm, but those who could read them judged him quite differently. "And what is remarkable, most of those who do read his books become in a greater or less degree his adherents . . .," he said, though noting that they were shy about admitting it. Their judgment, as evidently that of Robsahm himself, cautious banker that he was, seems to have been that there was much that was good in Swedenborg's writings, except for the other-world visions and conversations.
Even those might have been accepted in a sense, if only Swedenborg had not insisted that they were really "from things heard and seen." Cultivated people in the eighteenth century were well used to having opinions presented in various disguises. Montesquieu had written Lettres Persanes, for one instance; still further back there was Sir Thomas More's Utopia; and of religious allegories there were Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Milton's Paradise Lost.
And now here was Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell. It had been published in London in 1758, being extracts from the eight volumes of the Arcana Celestia, which again were mainly from the spiritual diaries, as far as conditions in the Beyond were described. Heaven and Hell began to trickle into Sweden about 1760, and if it had only been presented by its author as symbolic of spiritual truths it would have charmed the readers by its imaginative insight, poetic fables, shrewd psychology, and lofty ethics, as indeed it did charm a man like Höpken, who thought that Swedenborg's works "sparkled with genius."
What delightful ideas, one can imagine his friends saying, in this book with the inclusive title, supposing of course that they are not put forward seriously. Innumerable "societies" of angels in heaven,
