alliance of a supreme friendship, must have depths and tenderness in it which it is difficult to connect with the formal sedateness and selfoccupation of the historian. This was the poetical side of his nature.

He did not get through youth, however, without one small inevitable chapter of romance. "I hesitate," he says in his sententious way, "from the apprehension of ridicule, when I approach the delicate subject of my early love;" and he explains with a little serious flourish what he means by love,not gallantry, which is " interwoven with the texture of French manners," but a passion "which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession. as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being." This neat eighteenth-century definition of the sentiment does not lead us to expect any profound absorption in it; and the air of gentle complacency with which Gibbon contemplates the incident across the long interval of placid years is extremely characteristic. He is pleased with himself that he was capable of "such a pure and exalted sentiment," and is happy to remember that he has no occasion to blush when he recalls the object of his choice. It was such a choice as a young man of his pretensions ought to have made. "The personal attractions of Mademoiselle Susan Curchod were embellished by the virtues and talents of her mind." Her father, another pastor, had bestowed "a liberal and even learned education on his only daughter." "In her short visits to some relations at Lausanne, the wit, the beauty, and erudition of Mademoiselle Curchod were the theme of universal applause." She was "learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners." Such a gentle and faultless being might

have furnished Rousseau with a model for her country woman Julie, or Mrs. Radcliffe with a heroine for one of those novels which contain so many types of feminine perfection, along with their wonders and mysteries. Perhaps the most satisfactory proof of Mademoiselle Susan's charms and endowments, and the one which most pleasantly excites the grateful complacency of her early suitor, is that she became afterwards the wife of Necker, and a very considerable personage. But no doubt, when they met in the little assemblies at Lausanne, the English lad, whose curiosity was awakened "by the report of such a prodigy," felt his youth stir in him underneath his laced coat, when he made his formal bow to the wise Swiss maiden in her hoop and patches, if such vanities were permitted in the pastor's household. They added, no doubt, some follies of their age to the strain of fine sentiment and eloquent discussion which flowed around; and by-andby the happy young man was permitted to visit her in her father's house, among the wild and pastoral heights of Burgundy, where he was accepted as a suitor not unworthy, -and the parents "honourably encouraged the connection." "In a calm retirement," says the hero of this chapter of ineffectual lovemaking, falling into fictitious inflation of words in the conscious insincerity of the story, "the gay vanity of youth no longer fluttered in her bosom; she listened to the voice of truth and passion, and I might presume to hope I had made some impression on a virtuous heart." But alas! when he returned to England he found the vanity of his hopes. His father "would not hear of this strange alliance;" and without his father Gibbon had nothing. He was not the man to beard fortune under any impulse, however strenuous; and he has left

no record of any great mental commotion on the subject. The words in which he narrates the end of the episode are very well known. "After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate. I sighed as a lover; I obeyed as a son."

In this fine antithesis the reader will not, we fear, see much impression of real feeling. A young lover who gives up his Susan so easily, gets little sympathy, even from those who would wish their sons in similar circumstances to prove equally philosophical. The little rhetorical effort perhaps consoled him, but there is an indefinable consciousness that he was but a sorry fellow after all, though he makes the best of it in the tale. "My wound," he adds, "was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life. My cure was accelerated by a faithful report of the tranquillity and cheerfulness of the lady herself, and my love subsided in friendship and esteem." But when he goes on to say that her father died, and that Susan had to come to Geneva and "earn a hard subsistence" for herself and her mother by teaching, while he at home lived an easy life, and grew fat and comfortable, without apparently the slightest impulse towards the woman that he had supposed himself to love, Gibbon's historical calm grows somewhat odious. "In her lowest distress," he adds, with an approval which, if the reader is of a warm temper, will make him long for a possibility of kicking the shade of the historian, even though there may not be de quoi, "she maintained a spotless reputation, and a dignified behaviour." One wonders what Susan thought of it, earning her hard subsistence in Geneva, and remembering perhaps by times how the young Englishman at parting had vowed and promised who now was piously glad to hear that she behaved her

to

self so well in her misfortunes. But luckily Susan said nothing, and after a while married that rich banker in Paris, who "had the good fortune and the good sense discover and possess this inestimable treasure," says Gibbon, doing his praise handsomely, let us hope to conceal a little inward sense that he himself cut a poor figure in the business, and became Madame Necker, and entertained her old love amicably and splendidly in after-days, with excellent friendliness, and perhaps a little secret contempt, as women will.

He re

This is the only incident in Gibbon's calm and comfortable existence which could have made his pulse beat quicker than its habitual pace. He returned to England at twenty-one, so that he had the excuse of youth for faults supposed to be the opposite of those to which youth is prone; but it would seem to have been some time after, probably years, before Susan's fate was settled, and time, absence, and new habits had healed the young man's not very severe wound. turned with everything done that his father had desired: his Romanism gone like a dream, and probably a good deal more with it, the departure of which was not divined at the time: his education advanced, his morals improved-a highly respectable Swiss young gentleman, with only the little drawback that he had "ceased to be an Englishman." This is not a result which would be at all likely to be wrought now, by the absence of a youth from sixteen to twentyone; but Switzerland was as far off England then as America is now, and much more unlike. His views, even his prejudices, had been altered by his absence. He passed the middle portion of his life in England, and did what was required of him, even to the length of serving in a militia regiment, of which he

was captain and his father major, with all dutiful regard to the legitimate expectations of his friends. But when circumstances gave him an excuse to retire from the insular world in which he had never been quite happy, he took advantage of the chance to return to his beloved Switzerland, to the very spot where he had been sent in disgrace and banishment in his early youth.

We cannot attempt to enter into the record of his reading and studies, which were infinite. The man himself, more interesting, is but vaguely revealed to us in his formality and old-fashioned methodical precision. He was eagerly delighted to see his aunt once more; very dutiful to his father, and friendly to the step-mother who had in the meantime been added to the household; ready to respond to all the calls of the two latter upon him, and doing his best to conceal his impatience of their demands upon his time, and the tedium of their rustic existence, far from town and its delights. Days broken in upon by interminable meals; by the fact that "after breakfast Mrs. Gibbon expected my company;. after tea my father claimed my conversation and the perusal of the newspapers;" studies of ancient historic relics, "abruptly terminated by the militia drum"-make up the record, and prove that though he was incapable of sacrificing his worldly welfare to love, he had the heart to make a great many daily sacrifices to the comfort of his home, and possessed in reality many amiable qualities. When he (with some trouble, for his family had settled out of town, and he had got out of the knowledge of his friends) made his way into society, he was not without popularity, though he was somewhat inclined to lay down the law. His appearance in the club, in the society of Johnson, to whom he made an excellent pen

dant and contrast, has been described with considerable effect. "In a suit of flowered velvet, with a bag and sword," fine in clothes and elegant in manners, he “ "tapped his snuff-box, smirked and smiled, and rounded and rounded his periods" with a "mouth mellifluous as Plato's," but in appearance like "a round hole nearly in the centre of his visage." Sometimes when spending solitary evenings over his books in his London lodging, and hearing the carriages roll outside, his studies would be "interrupted with a sigh which I breathe towards Lausanne." And twice he broke away from his duties and occupations, and visited the Continent, where he spent a month or two on both occasions with much enjoyment in Paris. Before his first visit, he had published his first literary work, which was written in French, the Essai sur l'étude de la Littérature;' and this compliment, paid to the politest of nations, gained him favour, as well as the recommendations he carried. The description we have of him in the capital of good manners is agreeable enough. He was not a modest man, but his vanity was never offensive. He secured the attention which he considered his due in the most legitimate way by "a conversation animated, sprightly, and full of matter." If the tone of his discourse was authoritative, it seemed rather the result of confidence in himself than of a wish to domineer over others. His talk was formal, and arranged in careful periods, never carrying any one away; but it was the talk of a considerable person, fully aware of his claim to be listened to; and that claim was fully acknowledged in many of the best circles.

From Paris he went back, ever hankering after that favourite abode, to Lausanne, where Susan, it would appear from a letter of

Rousseau's, looked for his appearance still with a little trepidation, and her friends with indignant alarm. But Susan is not so much as mentioned in the record, though the visitor pauses with much complacency to describe "the innocent freedom of Swiss manners," and his "favourite society" there, "which had assumed, from the age of its members, the proud denomination of the spring (la société du printemps). It consisted of fifteen or twenty young unmarried ladies of genteel though not of the very first families, the eldest perhaps about twenty, all agreeable, several handsome, and two or three of exquisite beauty. At each other's house they assembled almost every day, without the control or even the presence of a mother or an aunt. They were trusted to their own prudence among a crowd of young men of every nation in Europe." He hastens to assure us that this liberty was never marred by licence, nor sullied by a breath of scandal; but the pretty company and their lighthearted amusements for "they laughed, they sang, they danced, they played cards, they acted comedies" were delightful to the young man of letters, feeling himself, after his long banishment in his native country, to be once more at home. Rousseau's letter already referred to gives a less delightful glimpse of the visitor. "The coldness of Mr. Gibbon makes me think ill of him," he says. "I cannot think him well adapted to Mademoiselle Curchod. He that does not know her value is unworthy of her; he that knows it, and can doubt her, is a man to be despised." Susan was toiling, making her "hard subsistence," in Geneva, within easy reach, while her former lover was amusing himself with the gay société du printemps. He had long ceased "to sigh as a lover," but he evidently had not yet made it plain

that he meant to obey as a son. The reader who has accepted Gibbon's explanation, and concluded his love-affair to be long over, will probably feel a sensation of disgust for the man who had not feeling enough at least to keep out of the way and avoid a contrast so odious. It would be difficult to imagine anything more heartless; but probably the self-complacent Englishman, delighted with his gay young companions, was really unaware of this, and incapable of perceiving any harm in it. Next time he visited the Continent he was received by Madame Necker in her Parisian Parisian drawing-room, and expressed with still greater complacency and self-satisfaction the admiration he had always entertained for her.

"It

It was on this first tour that the idea of writing his great History occurred to him. An intention of producing some historical work had long been in his mind, and he had thought of various subjects, among which the history of the Swiss nation was the one that pleased. him best; but his first essay on this subject was a failure: and when he went to Italy the question was quickly decided. was at Rome," he says, "on the 15th of October 1764, that I sat musing amongst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, when the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the city first started to my mind." We can contemplate the historian in this scene with greater respect and sympathy than among the village junketings of Lausanne. That magical city, all fallen and low, in deep eighteenth-century decadence, lay at his feet, a slave of all nations, she who had been the Queen of the world at one time, and the arbitrator of Christendom at another. Small sympathy had he for Rome

in that later development, yet the chant of the Franciscans struck his ear as adding to the picturesque effect, the pathos and solemnity of the scene. No doubt the sun was sinking and the skies all aglow-a background of flame to those melancholy memorials of greatnessas the vesper song stole on the enchanting air. For the moment the smug Englishman had a vision and inspiration. He returned to England next year, and for some time longer to his old bondage of domestic life, the country, the militia, and all his other hindrances. But in 1770 his father died, and Gibbon was released. He settled in London as soon as circumstances permitted, collected his books around him, and set to work. His French Essay-a curious beginning for an Englishman-had got him a little reputation; and the world of critics was already prepared to accept something of greater pretension from him. His beginning was laborious and anxious in the extreme. He could not please himself either in the arrangement of his subject or the style of his diction. "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 thrice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their effect." He was by this time a man of thirty-five, in the full prime of his life, and fully alive to the gravity of the work he was undertaking. Though he was eager to take advantage of every aid, "I was soon disgusted," he says, "with the modest practice of reading my manuscript to my friends. Of such friends, some will praise from politeness, and some will criticise from vanity. The author himself is the best judge of his own performance: no one has so deeply meditated on the subject;

no one is so sincerely interested in the event." The first volume was published in 1776. "So moderate were our hopes, that the original impression had been stinted to five hundred, till the number was doubled by the prophetic taste of Mr.Strahan." But the author was not kept long in the suspense, which he declares "was neither elated by the ambition of fame, nor depressed by the apprehension of contempt." "I am at a loss," he says, "how to describe the success of the work, without betraying the vanity of the writer. The first impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand, and the bookseller's property was twice invaded by the pirates of Dublin. [N.B.-It was the Irish-and also Scotch-publishers who pirated literature in those days. America has scarcely as yet developed to this stage.] My book was on every table, and almost on every toilette; the historian was crowned by the fashion or taste of the day; nor was the general voice disturbed by the barking of any profane critic." To be sure, those Oxford dignitaries for whom Gibbon had so great and bitter a contempt, and the leaders of orthodoxy everywhere, rose up immediately against him; and with the ingenuous wonder of so many candid souls, when they have attacked what other men hold most dear, he was astonished that the Church and the serious classes should mind his assault upon Christianity. "Let me frankly own that I was startled at the first discharge of the ecclesiastical ordnance," he says; "but as soon as I found that this empty noise was mischievous only in the intention, my fear was converted into indignation: and any feeling of indignation and curiosity has long since subsided in pure and placid indifference."