"Amongst the circle of my acquaintance at Lausanne I have gradually acquired the solid and tender friendship of a respectable family: the four persons of whom it is composed are all endowed with the virtues best adapted to their age and situation ; and I am encouraged to love the parents as a brother, and the children as a father. Every day we seek and find the opportunities of meeting; yet even this valuable connexion cannot supply the loss of domestic society." It was indeed this feeling of solitude and loneliness which " tinged with a browner shade the evening of his life." After enumerating, with the pride and partiality which its comforts and its beauties justified, the many advantages of his literary retreat, he touchingly adds-" but I feel, and with the decline of years I shall more painfully feel, that I am alone in Paradise."

After laying down my pen,

The summer-house in which the great historian completed his lengthened labours may still be seen. "It was on the day," says he, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. I took several turns in a berçeau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame; but my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken

an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious."

The sentiment of regret thus breathed by Gibbon has been no less beautifully expressed in the verse of Lord Byron, who has made Tasso lament in the same spirit over the dismissal of the Jerusalem :

But this is o'er-my pleasant task is done,
My long-sustaining friend of many years!
If I do blot thy final page with tears,

Know that my sorrows have wrung from me none.
But thou, my young creation! my soul's child!
Which ever playing round me came and smiled,
And wooed me from myself with thy sweet sight,—
Thou too art gone, and so is my delight;

And therefore do I weep and inly bleed

With this last bruise upon a broken reed.

The terrace which the historian used to perambulate still remains. Here, not unfrequently, he was accustomed to walk and converse with the distinguished strangers who sought him in his retreat. In one of his letters to Lady Sheffield he has recorded, with excusable pride, a memorable assemblage of rank and of talent upon his terrace. "A few weeks ago, I was walking on our terrace with M. Tissot, the celebrated physician; M. Mercier, the author of the Tableau de Paris;' the Abbé Raynal; Monsieur, Madame, and Mademoiselle Necker; the Abbé de Bourbon, a natural son of Louis XV.; the hereditary Prince of Brunswick, Prince Henry of Prussia, and a dozen counts, barons, and extraordinary persons,

amongst whom was a natural son of the Empress of Russia. Are you satisfied with the list, which I could enlarge and embellish without departing from the truth?"

When visited by M. Simond a few years since, the house of Gibbon exhibited symptoms of dilapidation and decay. "The principal rooms are now used as a counting-house; the few trees on the terrace have been cut down, and the grounds below are very littery" (we copy the English version, and M. Simond was his own translator)," and planted with shabby fruit-trees, but were no doubt better in Gibbon's time, yet it could never have been any great things; you go down to this terrace by a long flight of narrow stone stairs inside the house as if to a cellar; the terrace itself is a mere slip, seventy or eighty yards long, by ten in width, with a low parapet wall towards the prospect. An old-fashioned arbour of cut charmille (dwarf-beech) at the end of the terrace, encloses the petit cabinet, where Gibbon says he wrote the last lines of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' It is itself declining and falling into ruin. In short, every thing has been done to disenchant the place."

Lausanne and Ferney, as the abodes of Voltaire and of Gibbon, have been finely apostrophised by Lord Byron :

Lausanne! and Ferney! ye have been the abodes
Of names which unto you bequeath'd a name;
Mortals, who sought and found, by dangerous roads,
A path to perpetuity of fame :-

They were gigantic minds, and their steep aim

Was, Titan-like, on daring doubts to pile

Thoughts which should call down thunder, and the flame
Of Heaven, again assail'd, if Heaven the while

On man and man's research could deign do more than smile.

The one was fire and fickleness, a child,
Most mutable in wishes, but in mind,
A wit as various,-gay, grave, sage, or wild,—
Historian, bard, philosopher, combined;
He multiplied himself among mankind,
The Proteus of their talents: but his own
Breathed most in ridicule,-which, as the wind,
Blew where it listed, laying all things prone,-
Now to o'erthrow a fool, and now to shake a throne.

The other, deep and slow, exhausting thought,
And hiving wisdom with each studious year,
In meditation dwelt, with learning wrought,
And shaped his weapon with an edge severe,
Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer;
The lord of irony,-that master-spell,

Which stung his foes to wrath, which grew from fear,
And doom'd him to the zealot's ready Hell,
Which answers to all doubts so eloquently well.

Yet, peace be with their ashes,-for by them,
If merited, the penalty is paid;

It is not ours to judge,-far less condemn;

The hour must come when such things shall be made
Known unto all,-or hope and dread allay'd

By slumber, on one pillow,-in the dust,
Which, thus much we are sure, must lie decay'd;
And when it shall revive, as is our trust,

'Twill be to be forgiven, or suffer what is just.

Lausanne and its neighbourhood are also rendered illustrious by their having afforded a residence to Necker and his most celebrated daughter. In a country house, near Lausanne, before he removed to Coppet, Necker composed his "Treatise on the Administration of the Finances," and it was here that Gibbon became acquainted with the ex-minister. At that period Mademoiselle Necker

was only a gay and giddy girl. Mademoiselle Necker," says the historian in a letter to Lord Sheffield, " one of the greatest heiresses in Europe, is now about eighteen, wild, vain, but good-natured, with a much greater provision of wit than of beauty." It does not appear that Gibbon at this time appreciated the talents and the genius which afterwards shone forth so brilliantly in the writings and conversation of Madame de Stael. Not unfrequently the Neckers visited the historian in his humble mansion, where the great financier conversed freely with him on the subject of his administration and his fall. Occasionally, also, Gibbon spent a few days with his friends at Coppet, and the correspondence, which has been published, between himself and Madame Necker, proves the very amicable terms on which they stood to one another, and from which, perhaps, the recollection of their youthful attachment did not detract. In visiting the scenes formerly illustrated by the lofty genius and graceful society of Madame de Stael, the traveller will regret that there is no adequate memoir of a person so truly distinguished. "Some one," it is well observed by Lord Byron, some one of all those whom the charms of involuntary wit and of easy hospitality attracted within the friendly circles of Coppet, should rescue from oblivion those virtues which, although they are said to love the shade, are in fact more frequently chilled than excited by the domestic cares of private life. Some one should be found to portray the unaffected graces with which she adorned those dearer relationships, the performance of whose duties is rather discovered amongst the interior secrets than seen in the outward management of family

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