parties, and none of the French in Geneva will set their foot in his house." Again in 1793 he visited the Neckers, and the next year, when he died in London, was the last year of her life.

Something very high, very pure, very noble, characterized her always, and amidst the corrupt and brilliant society of which she became a leader, and to the good qualities of which she did justice, she was honored for the virtues which few others practised. "Her faults," says Sainte-Beuve, were not French faults" she wanted tact, and sometimes she wanted taste, but she never wanted principle, nor a generous mind by which to judge people and conditions so unexpectedly and wholly new to her as those of Paris. 'When I came to this country," she wrote back to a friend in Lausanne, "I thought that literature was the key to everything, that men cultivated their minds only by books, and were great only through knowledge," and this sentence, which so perfectly characterizes the young, unworldly, enthusiastic country-girl, also indicates how great was the work before her, to remodel all her standards and criterions, to make herself over. Sainte-Beuve believes that her health first began to sink under the anxieties and disappointments of this effort. She lamented that she did not even know the language of society, that she hurt people's self-love when she meant to flatter it. "What is called frankness in Switzerland is egotism in Paris," she says. She saw that there her old ideas were all wrong; and, as she says, she hid away her little capital and began working for a living. It must have been by very hard work indeed that she made herself acceptable to the circle of philosophers and literati whom her husband's distinction drew about her, but she did so, and most

acceptable to the best men among them. Better than this, she entered, with her Swiss zeal and practical goodness, upon a life of beneficence as well as social eminence. The Paris hospitals were savage lairs, in which the sick were herded together without comfort or decency, and she founded a hospital of her own which still bears her name; her husband, proud of its success, mentioned it in his official reports to the king, and this fondness made the Parisians laugh. Her most intimate friends, too, had their reserves to the last, which Marmontel at least has but too keenly expressed. To his thinking, she had not the air of the world; she had not taste in dress, nor an easy manner, nor an attractive politeness; her mind and her face were too formal for grace. But, on the other hand, she had propriety, candor, kindness, and culture. Her tastes were from her opinions, not from her feelings. She was a devoted hostess, and eagerly strove to please her guests, but "even her amusements had their reason, their method, . . . . all was premeditated, nothing flowed naturally." If much of the schoolmistress, in fine, lingered in this great-hearted and good woman, Gibbon apparently never saw it. In all that he says of her there is imaginable a sunset light from his early and only love, from the days when the ingenuous young Englishman saw the Swiss pastor's daughter in the blossom of "that beauty, pure, virginal, which,” as Sainte-Beuve says, "has need of the first youth," with her lovely face "animated by a brilliant freshness, and softened by her blue eyes, full of candor." Her married life was in the highest degree happy; she and her husband reciprocally admired and adored each other; and it must have been with a sense of the perplexing unreality of all past experience that she saw her old

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unworthy lover re-enter her world, and grow year by year more famous and more enormously fat in the narrowing circle of her life. What perpetual curiosity, what generous pity, must have piqued her; how strange and sad it must all have been! Upon the whole, I do not know a more provoking love-story in the annals of literature, and though, as Sainte-Benve says, Gibbon bore his disappointment with a tranquillity that makes one smile, it is not with a smile only that one dwells upon "the delicate subject of his early love."

When he had definitely sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son, he settled down to the dulness of English country life, the trivial pleasures of which, the visits, the talk with commonplace people, afflicted him even more than its monotony, though less perhaps than his misspent service as a captain of the militia which Pitt kept under arms after its supposed usefulness in defying invasion during the Old 'French War was quite past: this he felt was unfit and unworthy of him. At this time he was occupied with his Essay on the Study of Literature, which he wrote in French, and which in his maturer years humbled him by excellences he had so little improved upon; and he projected a number of histories before he fixed at last upon his great work: he thought of writing the history of the Crusade of Henry the First, of the Barons' Wars against John, the lives of Henry the Fifth and Titus, the Life of Sir Philip Sidney, the History of the Liberty of the Swiss, and that of the Republic of Florence under the Medici. But his studies for an Italian tour, and his subsequent visit to Italy, insensibly confirmed his tendency toward the work of his life, the first conception of which occurred to him at Rome, as

he "sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter."

It was not till after seven years' preparation, that, full of uncertainty and misgiving, this man of a genius unsurpassed and even unapproached in its kind, sat down to write the first chapter of a history which he had not yet named in his own mind; and then he toiled at the mere technique of his work with a patience which teaches the old lesson, eternally true, that genius absolves from no duty to art, and that it achieves its triumphs by endeavors proportioned to its own greatness. "The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise. Many experiments were made before I could hit the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation; three times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their effect. In the remainder of the way I advanced with more equal and easy pace; but the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters have been reduced by three successive revisals from a large volume to their present size." It is thus only that the exquisite is produced. There is no inspiration but that which comes after long travail; Jacob wrestled with the Angel of the Lord until the breaking of the day, before he stood face to face with the Infinite; in spite of all the unfruitful toil in the world, there is no fruit but from toil.

Gibbon had now fixed his home in London, where he became a man of fashion and of the great world, which not many years later he deliberately forsook for the little comfortable world of Lausanne, in whose simple quiet he finished the work begun and largely ad

vanced in the tumult of the English capital. There were, he tells us, few persons of any eminence in literature or politics to whom he was a stranger, and he stoops to specify, in a grandiose footnote, Dr. Johnson, Mr. Burke, Dr. Goldsmith, Mr. Topham Beauclerc, and others, as his fellow-members of the Literary Club. At this period also he entered into political life, and took his seat for the Borough of Liskeard.

He was therefore just seated in Parliament when our troubles with the mother country began, and he took a lively interest in American affairs. But it was not in our behalf; on the contrary, he disliked our cause with all the spirit of a gentleman whose sense of propriety and of property was hurt by our insubordination, and he steadily voted with the government against us, or, as he says with characteristic pomp, he "supported, with many a sincere and silent vote, the rights, though not perhaps the interest, of the mother country." His friend Lord Sheffield adds in a note that "though he was not perfectly satisfied with every measure" of the administration for our suppression, "yet he uniformly supported all the principal ones," and what these were we learn not from the Memoir, but from his letters. The Memoir, once clearly defining his attitude, has nothing more to say about us; but the letters mention us often enough, in hope or in despair, as the chance of war is against us or for us. It is always curious to note these fluctuations; it is like a glimpse, by instantaneous photograph, of the feeling of the past. In this case the feeling is that of the great mass of the English nation, and of some of the best Englishmen; for hard as it is for us to understand (the time being so distant, and ourselves being concerned), our friends in England then must have been excusable to most of their fellow-countrymen only