as a man of letters. The one fly in the amber of his pleasure was that he could not satisfy his ambition to be regarded as a man of fashion. The salon at which he was most welcomed was that of Madame Geoffrin, the widow of a wealthy ice-merchant, and nicknamed by Madame du Deffand "la mère des philosophes." His reception at Paris in 1777 was very different, and marks the advance that he had made in the social position, which he valued more highly than literary fame.

At Lausanne he lingered several months, engaged, as he tells his stepmother, "in a considerable work, which will be a most usefull preparation to my tour of Italy." It is the first hint of the design which took shape at Rome in the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." "It is," he continues,

a description of the ancient Geography of Italy, taken from the Original writers. If I go into Italy with a work of that kind tolerably executed, I shall carry everywhere about with me an accurate and lively idea of the country, and shall have nothing to do but to insert in their proper places my own observations as they tend to confirm, to confute, or to illustrate what I have met with in books. I should not even despair, but that this mixture of study and observation, properly digested upon my return to England, might produce something not entirely unworthy the eye of the publick on a subject upon which we have no regular or compleat

treatise.

With this object in view he worked hard at Lausanne and subsequently travelled through Italy. Scarcely a detail of his plan appears in his letters, which are rather written to distract his own mind from such serious sub jects than to instruct his father and stepmother. Here, for example, is a picture of Voltaire in his retirement at Ferney, which will serve as a sample of his letters from abroad. It should be mentioned that in 1757-58, when Voltaire was settled at Monrepos. Gibbon had seen him act in his tragedies of "Zaïre Alzire." "Zulime," and his sentimental comedy, "L'Enfant Prodigue."

After a life passed in courts and Capitals, the Great Voltaire is now become a meer country Gentleman, and even (for the honor of the profession) something of a farmer. He says he never enjoyed so much true happiness. He has got rid of most of his infirmities, and tho' very old and lean, enjoys a much better state of health than he did twenty years ago. His playhouse is very neat and well contrived, situated just by his Chappel, which is far inferior to it, tho', he says himself, "que son Christ est du meilleur faiseur de tout le pays de Gex." The play they acted was my favorite "Orphan of China." Voltaire himself acted Gengis, and Madame Denys Idamé; but I do not know how it happened; either my taste is improved or Voltaire's talents are impaired since I last saw him. He appeared to me now a very rantig unnatural performer. Perhaps, indeed, as I was come from Paris, I rather judged him by an unfair comparaison than by his own independent value. Perhaps too I was too much struck with the ridiculous figure of Voltaire at seventy acting a Tartar Conqueror with a hollow broken voice, and making love to a very ugly niece of fifty. The play began at eight in the evening, and ended (entertainment and all) about

half an hour after eleven. The whole

Company was asked to stay and set Down about twelve to a very elegant supper of a hundred Covers. The supper ended

about two, the company danced till four, when we broke up, got into our Coaches, and came back to Geneva just as the Gates were opened. Show me in history or fable, a famous poet of Seventy who has acted in his own plays, and has closed the scene with a supper and ball for a hundred people. I think the last is the more extraordinary of the two.

After Gibbon's return to England in June, 1765, he resumed his old manner of life, spending his summer months at Beriton and the winter in London, occupied either in literary work or in the less congenial task of endeavoring to extricate his father from his pecuniary embarrassments. In 1770 the elder Mr. Gibbon died, and the son succeeded to the wreck of what had once been an ample fortune. "Economy," he tells his aunt, Miss Hester Gibbon,

was not amongst my father's Virtues. The expences of the more early part of his life, the miscarriage of several promising schemes, and a general want of order and exactness involved him in such difficulties as constrained him to dispose of Putney, and to contract a mortgage so very considerable that it cannot be paid unless by the sale of our Buckinghamshire Estate. The only share that I have ever taken in these transactions has been by my sensibility to my father's wants and my compliance with his inclinations, a conduct which has cost me very dear, but which I cannot repent. It is a satisfaction to reflect that I have fulfilled, perhaps exceeded, my filial duties; and it is still in my power with the remains of our fortunes to lead an agreable and rational life.

Even this satisfaction he was at first denied. His stepmother had heard a rumor that his own imprudence was the cause of the financial difficulties. He repudiates the suggestion with some warmth and considerable dignity. "As a raw lad of one-and-twenty, unacquainted with law or business, and desirous of obliging" his father, he had consented to join in cutting off the entail and raising a mortgage of 10,000l. But he had none of the money for himself, neither was it raised to pay his debts. His allowance was never more than 3001. a year, and on that he lived. He had never had any other debts than common tradesmen's bills, trifling in amount and annually paid. "I have never lost at play a hundred pounds at any one time; perhaps not in the course of my life. Play I neither love nor understand." He had probably, for the moment, forgotten his losses as a boy at Lausanne. "I should deserve the imputation," he continues, "could I submit to it with patience. As long as you credit it, you must view me in the light of a specious hypocrite, who meanly cloaked his own extravagancies under his father's imprudence, and who ascribed to filial piety what had been the consequence of folly and necessity." Gibbon was now a landed proprietor, and no man could be more unfitted for the part. For a few weeks the novelty

of the position amused him, and he asks with some show of interest after the breaking in of the colt, the progress of the rot among the sheep, or the prospect of improved prices in wheat. He even hugs himself with self-satisfaction at the shrewd bargains which "Farmer Gibbon" has driven in letting his farms, or at the judgment with which he has sold his hops. But to a man of his tastes and temper the details of estate management and the strenuous idleness of country life grew intolerably irksome. Dilatory in his habits, his letters are a treasury of excuses for unpunctuality in correspondence. He had no country pursuits. His sporting friends are savages who hunt foxes. "Neither a pack of hounds, nor a stable of running horses, nor a large farm" had any interest for him. Magisterial work did not appeal to him. "I detest," he says, "your races, I abhor your assizes." The rustic mind was unintelligible to him, and he to it. If his tenants wished to see him, he would make any concession to avoid a deputation of the "savages." While he is negotiating the sale of one of his estates, he has an interview with the agent and the proposed purchaser: "though we did not speak the same lauguage," he says, "yet by the help of signs, such as that of putting about the the natives seemed bottle, well satisfied." In all matters of business he was careless, forgetful, impatient of legal forms, helpless as a child. If his signature is required to a deed, he is sure to sign his name in the wrong place. If he is asked to make interest on behalf of a friend, the letter is probably placed in the wrong enclosure, and "Lord Milton's heir was ordered to send me without delay a brown Ratteen Frock, and the Taylor was desired to use his interest with his cousin the Duke of Dorset." It is not therefore surprising that he soon grew "tired of sticking to the earth by so many Roots," or that before many months Beriton was let, and Gibbon settled in London.

In 1773 he took from Lady Rous the lease of No. 7 Bentinck Street. It was

His correspondence ripens under the pleasant sun of prosperity. For the amusement of his stepmother he becomes the court newsman, the theatrical critic, the literary adviser, and even the retailer of gossip. It is for her benefit, for instance, that he tells the story of the duel to which Lord Bellamont challenged Lord Townshend, and its amusing sequel.

I am so unfashionable as not to have fought a duel yet. I suppose all the Nation will admire Lord B.'s behavior. I will give you one instance of his-call it what you please. Lord T.'s pistol was raised when he called out, "One moment, my Lord; Mr. Dillon, I have undertaken a commission from the French Embassador-to get some Irish poplins. Should I fall, be so good as to execute it. Your Lordship may now fire."

Six weeks later, he writes again:

This morning, the fact is certain, an Address was delivered to Lord B. from the Grand Jury of the County of Dublin, thanking him for his proper and spirited behavior. Incomparable Hibernians! A Judicial Body, appointed to maintain and execute the Laws, publicly applaud a man for having broke them.

For his friend Holroyd, afterwards Lord Sheffield, he collects the latest political intelligence, and flavors his reports with the most recent scandal of the clubs or the green room. Gibbon sat in Parliament throughout the American War; he was an intimate friend of Lord North, Charles James Fox, and Lord George Germain; he witnessed the overthrow of the favorite minister of George the Third, and the commencement of Pitt's parliamentary career. The times were full of excitement, and Gibbon, though a silent member, was a shrewd observer. Onlookers often see the most of the game. Some of the interest of the political letters lies in the restoration of passages which Lord Sheffield had suppressed. One example must suffice. In 1788 Fox paid Gibbon a visit at Lausanne, and he describes with

man's conversation. But Lord Sheffield omits the account of Mrs. Armstead, who was travelling with Fox, and of the effect which her presence produced. "The wit and beauty of his Companion," writes Gibbon, "are not sufficient to excuse the scandalous impropriety of shewing her to all Europe, and you will not easily conceive how he was lost himself in the public opinion, which was already more favorable to his Rival. Will Fox never know the importance of character?"

Gibbon carefully studied for himself the questions at issue in the American War. From Israel Mauduit, the agent of Massachusetts Bay, and from Governor Hutchinson, he gathered material for forming an independent judgment. "I think," he says, "I have sucked them very dry; and if my confidence was equal to my eloquence, and my eloquence to my knowledge, perhaps I might make no very intolerable Speaker." It is curious to note in his letters the apathy of Parliament on the subject. "In this season and on America," he writes in May, 1775, "the Archangel Gabriel would not be heard." His own opinion was, on several points, adverse to the policy of the government, which, except on one occasion, he steadily supported. He was one of those indolent men who attach themselves to political leaders rather than to political principles. For Lord North he felt a warm affection, and throughout voted with him, sometimes against his better judgment.

His speech would probably have been silver; his silence was certainly golden. In 1778 he was appointed a commissioner of trade and plantations, with a salary of 7501. a year. Fox believed that he had been bribed by office, and expressed the belief in the lines:

King George in a fright
Lest Gibbon should write
The story of England's disgrace,
Thought no way so sure

His pen to secure
As to give the historian place.
Gibbon held the appointment till the

of it decided him to leave England, though his friends were influential and active, and he might have secured another post. He was rapidly getting into debt, and he was anxious to finish his history. In 1784 he settled at Lausanne, and there passed the remainder of his life. It was on his second visit to England, in 1793-94, that he died on the 16th of January, 1794, at 76 St. James's Street, the house of Peter Elmsley, the bookseller.

It may be asked, in what way do these letters raise the popular view of Gibbon's character? Indolent and easy-going as he was, he was capable of making moral resolutions and of adhering to them with determination. At one time Gibbon fell into the habit of excessive drinking, which was a vice of social life. But in 1764 at Lausanne, after a drunken orgy, he was made aware that he had forfeited the respect of his better friends, and he cured himself of the vice, without adopting the desperate remedy of total abstinence. It was an age when men staked their fortunes on the fall of cards. Gibbon never gambled. It was an age when the tone of society was grossly immoral. Gibbon could say in 1774: "You once mentioned Miss F[uller]. I give you my honor, that I have not either with her, or any other woman, any connection that could alarm a wife." He went into Parliament with the intention of obtaining a lucrative office. But he valued his own independence so highly that, to secure it, he not only toiled laboriously with his pen, but voluntarily exiled himself from England when, to a man of his age and tastes, such a wrench must have been severe. For friendship he had a true genius. No trouble was too great to be taken for a friend, and this by a man who loved his ease to excess. To be by the side of Lord Sheffield, who had recently lost his wife, he hurried home to England from Lausanne at a time when the beginning of the Revolutionary War made his journey difficult, if not hazardous. He was a friend of children and a lover of dogs. His letters

his friend who died in childhood, shows his tender nature. The dogs to which he attached himself were not the breeds that appeal to sportsmen; but the fol| lowing passage from a letter, written to thank his stepmother for the gift of a Pomeranian, shows that he loved canine society:

After drinking coffee in the Library, we went down-stairs again, and as we entered the Parlor, our ears were saluted with a very harmonious barking, and our eyes gratified by the sight of one of the prettiest animals I ever saw. Her figure and coat are perfect, her manners genteel and lively, and her teeth (as a pair of ruffles have already experienced) most remarkably sharp. She is not the least fatigued with her voyage, and compleatly at home in Bentinck Street. I call her Bath. Gibbon would be ambiguous, and Dorothea1 disrespectful.

In a note accepting an invitation to Twickenham, he calls the Thames an "amiable creature." It is pleasing to relate that on his way he was upset into the water, and received a ducking for the affectation. But an affected manner could not conceal his kindness of heart. For his housekeeper, Mrs. Ford, he was careful to provide a support in her old age; his butler, Caplen, though he could not speak a word of French, refused a proffered pension and insisted on following him to Lausanne. To young men and boys he took the pains, even when he was famous, to make himself agreeable. The recollections of the younger Colman may be quoted as a proof. "The great historian," says Colman, writing of a time when he was himself a boy, "was bright and playful, suiting his matter to the capacity of the boy; but it was more sua (sic); still his mannerisms prevailed; still he tapped his snuff-box; still he smirked, and smiled, and rounded his periods with the same air of goodbreeding, as if he was conversing with men."

Above all, Gibbon was a straightforward, strictly honorable man. His relations and Lady Sheffield were al1 The Christian name of his stepmother.