as sentimental idealists, and to many inexcusable as disloyal demagogues. For his part, Mr. Gibbon, in 1774, had no misgivings in supporting Lord North's Boston Port Bill, removing the customs and courts to Salem, a step so detrimental to the former town, that it must soon reduce it to our own terms, and yet of so mild an appearance" that in the Lords it passed with "some lively conversation but no division." These facts are intermixed with some indecent gossip of the town in which Mr. Gibbon seems to have had the interest of a student of civilization; and his letters do not mention America again till the following year, when we find him tempted by the greatness of the subject to expose himself" in a speech on American affairs. He never did so, but he was soon one of "three hundred and four to one hundred and five" who voted an address to the throne “declaring Massachusetts Bay in a state of rebellion. More troops, but I fear not enough, go to America, to make an army of ten thousand men at Boston. I am more and more convinced that with firmness all may go well; yet," he prudently adds, "I sometimes doubt." In the autumn of this year he mentions the government negotiations with the Russians, failing which, we had the Hessians sent us. "We have great hopes of getting a body of these barbarians," the Russians: five and twenty thousand of them, who are to go out as mercenaries, not allies. "The worst of it is that the Baltic will soon be frozen up, and that it must be late next year before they can get to America. In the mean time we are not quite easy about Canada," though in the following January he can congratulate his friend Lord Sheffield (to whom nearly all these letters are written) that Quebec is not yet taken. "I hear that Carleton is determined never

to capitulate with rebels, a glorious resolution if it were supported with fifty thousand men." Unhappily, it needed not half so inany to disperse the intrepid little army led to starve and freeze at the foot of that impregnable rock by Arnold and Montgomery; and, twenty days before Gibbon wrote, one of these gallant chiefs had died to glory and the other survived to infamy in the narrow defile of the Sault au Matelot. The writer of the letters does not mention these tidings till June, though they could hardly have been so long in reaching England; and then he couples them with the rumor that Lee is captured, and in his next letter he is pleased to observe that "the old report of Washington's resignation and quarrel with Congress seems to revive,”

Lord George Germaine, "with whom I had a long conversation last night, was in high spirits," at another time during that summer, entertaining lively hopes "that the light troops and Indians under Sir William Johnson, who are sent from Oswego down the Mohawk River to Albany, will oblige the Provincials to give up the defence of the Lakes, for fear of being cut off.” Things, in fact, fell out much as Lord George Germaine sanguinely foreboded. On "the Lakes" there was a naval combat, "in which the Provincials were repulsed with considerable loss. They burnt and abandoned Crown Point. Carleton is besieging Ticonderoga," but Mr. Gibbon never has the satisfaction of announcing the fall of this post to his noble friend; and though he thinks later that "things go on very prosperously in America," Howe being "in the Jerseys," on his way to the Delaware, and Washington, "who wishes to cover Philadelphia," having "not more than six or seven thousand men with him," while, best of all, a province ("it is indeed only poor little Georgia ") has

"made its submission, and desired to be reinstated in the peace of the king," yet presently we read that "America affords nothing very satisfactory," and this being written at Almack's, "Charles Fox is now at my elbow, declaiming on the impossibility of keeping America." The Americans are by this time (the spring of 1777) not only behaving very unsatisfactorily at home, but on the night of the 5th of May a small privateer fitted out at Dunkirk attacked, took, and has carried into Dunkirk road the Harwich packet. The king's messenger had just time to throw his despatches overboard,” and Mr. Gibbon, hearing of this affair at Dover on his way to Paris, is in great doubt whether he had better go on. But he goes on, and at Paris he actually dined with Franklin, the terrible, "by accident," as he tells his friend in expressive italics, but dined with him nevertheless, and, let us hope, liked him. At that distance from London he sees clearly the mismanagement of the American business; a wretched piece of work. The greatest force which any European power ever ventured to transport into that continent is not strong enough even to attack the enemy . . . . and in the mean time you are obliged to call out the militia to defend your own coasts against their privateers." Being returned to England in December, he has to communicate, from his place in the House of Commons, "dreadful news indeed! . . . An English army of nearly ten thousand men laid down their arins, and surrendered prisoners of war on condition of being sent to England, and of never serving against America. . Burgoyne is said to have received three wounds. General Fraser, with two thousand men, killed. Colonel Ackland likewise killed. A general cry for peace."

It was at last beginning to be time, though peace was far off yet, and Mr. Gibbon's party had much to learn. A year before this he had written: "We talk chiefly of the Marquis de la Fayette, who was here a few weeks ago. He is about twenty, with a hundred and thirty thousand livres a year; the nephew of Noailles, who is ambassador here. He has bought the Duke of Kingston's yacht, and is gone to join the Americans," and now "it is positively asserted both in private and in Parliament, and not contradicted by ministers, that on the 5th of this month,” — February, 1778,- a treaty of commerce (which naturally leads to a war) was signed at Paris with the independent States of America." The administration is by no means premature, then, in proposing an act of Parliament to declare that we never had any intention of taxing America, — another act to empower the crown to name commissions" to stop the fighting, and to grant everything but independence," by this time. the only thing the rebels would accept. Mr. Gibbon amuses himself with this complete about-face of his leader, Lord North, and asks his friend next Friday to take notice of the injunction of the liturgy: "And all the people shall say after the minister, Turn us again, O Lord, and so shall we be turned," which may have been the current joke of the hour. In the autumn the temper of government is changed again, and "there are people, large ones, too, who talk of conquering America next summer, with the help of twenty thousand Russians." At this point Mr. Gibbon leaves pretty much all mention of our affairs, and we only find one allusion to America afterwards in his letters, a passage in which he begs his step-mother to learn for him the particulars concerning " an American

mother who in a short time had lost three sons; one killed by the savages, one run mad from that accident, and the third taken at sea, now in England, a prisoner at Forton Hospital. For him something might perhaps be done, but you will prudently suppress my request, lest I should raise hopes which it may not be in my power to gratify." In announcing the rumored submission of "poor little Georgia" Mr. Gibbon had been rather merry over the fright of the Georgians at the Indians who had "begun to amuse themselves with the exercise of scalping on their back settlements," but matters of that kind are always different when brought to one's personal notice, and cannot be so lightly treated as at a distance of four thousand miles. In fine, Mr. Gibbon was our enemy upon theory and principle, as a landed gentleman of Tory family should be, and there can be no doubt of his perfect sincerity and uprightness in his course. For my own part, my heart rather warms to his stout, wrong-headed patriotism, as a fine thing in its way, and immensely characteristic, which one ought not to have otherwise, if one could.

It is a pity not to know how he felt towards us when all was over, and whether he ever forgave us our success. But after his retirement to Lausanne, the political affairs which chiefly find place in his letters are those of France, which were beginning to make themselves the wonder and concern of the whole polite world. He first felt the discomfort of having the emigrant noblesse crowding into his quiet retreat, and he murmurs a little at this, though Lausanne is always "infested in summer" by the travelling English, and it "escapes the superlatively great" exiles, the Count d'Artois, the Polignacs, etc., who slip by to Turin.