I know it is the custom to look down upon the period when the Peels, the Aberdeens, the Russells, the Derbys and the Palmerstons held out their hands loyally and had them locked in the peaceful grasp of the Molé, the Thiers, the Guizot, the Drouyn de Lhuys and the Walewski themselves. However, we must not forget that it was the time when our fathers did great things without boasting, knew how to unite freedom and empire without attitudinizing imperially, and how to lead Europe in the path of progress. Doubtless, the thing is no more, and there must have been a cause for the change. But let us for the present only remember that a Franco-English friendship has been possible and that both countries have not exactly had to lament its fostering. If there is nothing to prevent a mutual understanding between Russia and England, what should hinder France from making a third in the arrangement? It is only necessary for those who in England dream such perfectly reasonable dreams not to forget that it is absolutely of no avail to try a flirtation with Russia without France. The coupling of France and Russia is one of the few steady, fixed points of the present state of things. Subject to this there is nothing at all against the attempt of an entente à trois. In fact, I dare to say the true inwardness of the Franco-Russian friendship makes such a completion necessary.

At first, perhaps, it was possible to mistake more or less unwillingly the real character of that understanding, and to see in it a kind of war-engine. One of the weaknesses of this contrivance was that, even amongst its best friends, it was erroneously taken for an instrument of revenge. Time and experience have made away with this mistake. It has been more and more obviously proved that the Franco-Russian alliance is an alliance, not of war, but of peace; not of revenge, but of equilibrium; that its end is to make Europe again a reality, to give a counterpoise to the too preponderating power of Germany and her confeder

It

ates; to put the security of the world on a broader and steadier basis than the good-will of a leading potentate. That such is the object of the FrancoRussian alliance has been sufficiently removed from doubt by its results. is a fact that, during the last three years, while the Eastern crisis unfolded its interminable coils, France and Russia have been by their mutual understanding, by their spirit of conciliation, the true honest brokers of the European Concert. France, after all, in so doing, is acting in strict conformity to her genius, to her interests, and to her history. In the East, she has always known how to be the friend of the Turk and the guardian of the Christians. She wants the maintenance of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, insomuch as it means the absolute exclusion of all egoistical and untimely attempts on the estate of the Sick Man, something like a self-denying ordinance. At the same time, she has no other wish than the gradual enfranchisement of the Christian nationalities, the constitution of native States subject only to the preservation of the peace. Everywhere she is animated by such feelings.

Truly, it cannot be very difficult to find a way to the good-will of a nation so chastened by the lessons of misfortune. Of course there are on the broad surface of the earth many points where the interests of England and France may clash. I make bold, however, to say that not even in Egypt are these divergencies above the reach of a wellmeaning diplomacy. The hour is come to look in the face all these small difficulties and to make a choice between two ways. I have tried to show the drift of events between Germany and England, the gradual estrangement, the nearly unavoidable conflict of the future. I must not pass in silence over the counterpart of this antagonism; I mean the so striking, so oft-renewed, so newly emphasized advances and offers of good-will the German emperor is making all the while to France.

Nobody ignores the immense, the nearly insuperable difficulty which pre

of having been jilted. She writes to Mme. de Brentes on November 7th:"I do not know if I told you, madame, that I have seen Gibbon. The pleasure I experienced was beyond all description, not that I have any sentiment left in me for a man who I see merits none; but my feminine vanity has never had a fairer or more virtuous triumph. He stayed two weeks in Paris; I had him with me every day; he became gentle, amenable, humble, proper even to prudery."

Gibbon was twenty-seven when these words were written of him by the woman whom he had once for a short time loved. Every one knows the outlines of the story; Suzanne Curchod's rapid conquest of the young Englishman at Lausanne, his return to England, and his easy resignation to his father's wishes. When he returned to Switzerland three years afterwards, Mlle. Curchod naturally ascribed his abandonment of her to rumors he might have heard about her flirtations, rather than to a prudence and coldness of disposition which even her charms had failed to subdue. She wrote to him, giving a long explanation of her conduct, and denying that she had ever harbored the thought of any one else in her heart. Gibbon comments on it thus in his unpublished diary, which, at that time, he wrote in French:

"I have received a most unexpected letter: it was from Mlle. C——, a dangerous and artificial girl," and goes on to congratulate himself not only on his escape, but on the knowledge of the perfidy and fickleness of women which this experience had given him. He seems to have taken considerable pains to make his sentiments quite clear, "She must have seen a hundred times," he says, "that everything was over forever."

But Suzanne Curchod had found it difficult to understand that a man whom she once undoubtedly loved could grow absolutely cold and indifferent to her, and she took leave of him in an indignant letter during the early part of the year 1764.

She married Mons. Necker soon after, and when they met once more in Paris, she was perhaps a little sanguine in her belief that she had at length conquered Gibbon. No doubt he came to her VOL. XV. 798

LIVING AGE.

salon, sat at her feet, let her listen to him, sometimes even listened to her, but I doubt if his heart-strings ever quivered with regret or even memory. A man can be very happy and easy with a woman he has once loved, especially if he has forgotten he ever did love her. The habit of intimacy and confidence remains, and no gusts of feeling or promptings of jealousy come to disturb the even tenor of their intercourse. I question if a woman ever forgets either that she has loved a man, or that he has loved her; sometimes she may wish to forget, but more often she would like to be reminded.

Gibbon would perhaps have been mildly pleased if he had known that Mme. Necker flattered herself, for now that she was happily married there could be no danger-she was no longer as he dubbed her in his diary "Fille dangereuse et artificielle"-and be liked to indulge in the illusion that he could be an ardent lover if he wished. He pretends to resent Mme. Necker's confidence in him, and writes to his friend, "The Curchod (Mme. Necker) I saw at Paris. She was very fond of me, and the husband very civil. Could they insult me more cruelly? Ask me every evening to supper, go to bed, and leave me alone with his wife-what an impertinent security! It is making an old lover of mighty little consequence. She is as handsome as ever, and much genteeler."

But in reality nothing would have been more distasteful to Gibbon than to re-assume the rôle of lover. He likedit gave him a sense of pleasant self-approbation-to look back upon the time when he had loved and really loved Suzanne Curchod.

"I understand by this passion," he says in one of his autobiographies, "the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness 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. I need not blush at recollecting the object of my choice-and though my love was disappointed of success, I am rather proud that I was once capable of feeling such a pure and exalted friendship."

This is the tone of a man who has

been safely inoculated against a disease. Gibbon feels he need not despise himself, and yet realizes that he has gained his experience of the passion with the least possible inconvenience to himself. He has made an aërial journey in a captive balloon, or seen foreign countries in a magic-lantern, or taken a header into deep water with a lifebelt round his waist. "The romantic hopes of youth and passion were checked on my return, by the prejudice or prudence of an English parent. I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life; and my cure was accelerated by a faith. ful report of the tranquillity and cheerfulness of the lady herself."

It might be inferred from this passage that Gibbon, when he found Mlle. Curchod had been happy, and had even flirted with others while he was away in England, was so wounded that the love which up to that moment had remained a pure and ardent flame was instantly extinguished. But in 1763, when Gibbon returned to Lausanne, the state of Suzanne's affections was well known that her friend, the Pastor Moulton, tried to bring the influence of J. J. Rousseau to bear upon Gibbon. Jean Jacques however refused to interfere.

"You give me a commission for Mlle. Curchod which I should execute badly, precisely because of my esteem for her. The cooling off of Mr. Gibbon makes me think badly of him. I have looked at his book again1-he struggles after wit, he is affected. Mr. G- is not my sort; I cannot believe that he would be Mlle. C.'s either. The man who does not feel her value is not worthy of her, but the man who has been able to feel it and gives her up is to be despised. She does not know what she wants, this man serves her better than her own heart. I would a hundred times rather that he left her poor and free with all of you, than carry her off to be unhappy and rich in England. In truth I hope that Mr. G will not come. I should want to disguise my feelings, but I should not be able to; I should want tɔ

do well, and I feel I should spoil every. thing."

Gibbon strangely enough calls attention himself to this letter in a note to one of his memoirs. "As an author,” he says, "I shall not appeal from the judgment, or taste, or caprice of Jean Jacques; but that extraordinary man, whom I admire and pity, should have been less precipitate in condemning the moral character and conduct of a stranger."

The fact is that Gibbon could not help himself; nature had so framed him that he could only sigh as a lover and obey as a son, and, except for this one springtide of his passion, he was never swept past the barriers which his reason and his comfort interposed.

In very early days he proposes to his father to settle an annuity upon him, "a scheme," he says, "which would make me easy and happy for life:" "Marriage," he continues, "and the consideration of posterity would be the only motives which could ever make me re pent of such a step, and among these my circumstances, my constitution, and a way of thinking grounded upon reasoning and strengthened by experience and habit, will, I hope, effectually secure me."

Many men have said or thought this kind of thing, and have come to grief after all, but Gibbon was of far too prudent and regulated a nature to disturb such neatly laid plans. When he was nearing the dangerous rapids of forty he was suspected by Mrs. Holroyd of designs, honorable of course, upon a young lady, Miss Fuller by name-and, indeed, he seems to have much taken with "Sappho." But the breath of romance is chilled at once when we read in a letter to his stepmother, who had heard of the flirtation:

been very

"The intelligence you received of fair eyes, bleeding hearts, and an approaching daughter-in-law, is all very agreeable romance. A pair of very tolerable eyes, I must confess, made their appearance at Sheffield, and, what is more extraordinary, were accompanied by good sense and good humor, without one grain of affectation. Yet still I am

are of Gibbon's own making) remove

About a year after this Gibbon seems to have actually made some kind of proposal to a lady through Mrs. Holroyd. She probably had an ample income, for he certainly makes no pretence of an ardent passion. After urging upon Mrs. Holroyd not to magnify his fortune, and not too ably to evade the question of his religious principles, and after assuring her also that neither with Miss F. nor any other woman has he "any connection that could alarm a wife," he says: "You see how serious 1 am in this business. If the general idea should not startle Miss the next consultation should be how and where the lover (!) may throw himself at her feet, contemplate her charms, and study her character." He takes the failure of these negotiations in a resigned mood, and says it has not much "disconcerted his philosophy."

In 1787 again he alludes, in a letter to Lord Sheffield, to Madame de Montolieu as a charming woman. "I was in some danger," he declares, and Madame de Silva, Maria Holroyd says, "possessed Mr. Gibbon's tender heart for some weeks before we came away from Lausanne."

Madame Necker, too, at one moment must have been seriously alarmed, for she writes: "Beware, monsieur, of forming one of these late ties; the marriage which brings happiness to mature life is the one which was contracted during youth."

There is no doubt that from time to time all through his life Gibbon toyed with the idea of marriage; but these attempts were only feints-the true color of his heart is much more correctly shown when, after the death of his friend Deyvurdun, he writes to Lord Sueffield: "Sometimes, in a solitary mood, I have fancied myself married to one or other of those whose society and conversation are most pleasing to me; but when I have painted in my fancy all the probable consequences of such an union, I have started from my dream, rejoiced in my escape, and ejac

1 Miss Holroyd, of Bath, who had gossiped with Mrs. Gibbon.

in possession of my natural freedom." No wonder he felt lonely sometimes, for if Nature had formed a man incapable of the passion of love, she had on the other hand endowed him with a most unusual power of friendship. No one can read through the delightful collection of letters edited by Mr. Murray without recognizing that Gibbon placed the duties and obligations and pleasures of friendship far above any other mortal considerations, above even his history. We are often reminded of his vanity, his absurd sensitiveness, his small-mindedness; I have even heard the conceit of these letters held up from the pulpit as a warning against literary ambition. But far the most striking trait exhibited in his correspondence, is his ideal and his practice of the art of friendship. If you were Gibbon's. friend you might feel sure that everything which concerned you would be deeply interesting to him, and no, trouble too great if in any way he could serve you. And he had many friends.

It would be easy to accumulate a pile of evidence-the minute and detailed interest in every concern of Lord Sheffield's; the faithful trust in Deyvurdun, which enabled him to write with perfect frankness after years of absence, and suggest that they should live together; the constant correspondence with his aunt; the visits to his stepmother at Bath where he had to endure terrible tête-à-têtes which lasted on an average eight hours.

"I am carried over the way in a chair," he writes from Bath, "about one o'clock, maintain a conversation till ten o'clock in the evening, and am then re-conveyed to my lodgings."

And there are still more striking instances (though, indeed, I think eight hours' tête-à-tête for a fortnight at a time is no inconsiderable test), such as his journey down to Bath when Mrs. Gibbon had the smallpox, and his immediate start for England when he heard of Lady Sheffield's death, in spite of the disturbed state of Europe, and the unwieldy size of his own body.

In his tentative love affairs he was apt to feel more uncertain of his own feelings than of the lady's. Maria Hol