moment should always belong to your first and your
last friend (_amie_), and I do not know which of those titles is the
sweetest and dearest to my heart."--"Near you, the recollections you
recalled were pleasant to me, and you connected them easily with
present impressions; the chain of years seemed to link all times
together with electrical rapidity; you were at once twenty and fifty
years old for me. Away from you the different places, which I have
inhabited are only the milestones of my life telling me of the
distance I have come." With much more in the same strain. Of Madame de
Stael Gibbon does not speak in very warm praise. Her mother, who was
far from being contented with her, may perhaps have prejudiced him
against her. In one letter to him she complains of her daughter's
conduct in no measured terms. Yet Gibbon owns that Madame de Stael was
a "pleasant little woman;" and in another place says that she was
"wild, vain, but good-natured, with a much larger provision of wit
than of beauty." One wonders if he ever knew of her childish scheme of
marrying him in order that her parents might always have the pleasure
of his company and conversation.

These closing years of Gibbon's life were not happy, through no fault
of his. No man was less inclined by disposition to look at the dark
side of things. But heavy blows fell on him in quick succession. His
health was seriously impaired, and he was often laid up for months
with the gout. His neglect of exercise had produced its effect, and he
had become a prodigy of unwieldy corpulency. Unfortunately his
digestion seems to have continued only too good, and neither his own
observation nor the medical science of that day sufficed to warn him
against certain errors of regimen which were really fatal. All this
time, while the gout was constantly torturing him, he drank Madeira
freely. There is frequent question of a pipe of that sweet wine in his
correspondence with Lord Sheffield. He cannot bear the thought of
being without a sufficient supply, as "good Madeira is now become
essential to his health and reputation." The last three years of his
residence at Lausanne were agitated by perpetual anxiety and dread of
an invasion of French democratic principles, or even of French troops.
Reluctance to quit "his paradise" keeps him still, but he is always
wondering how soon he will have to fly, and often regrets that he has
not done so already. "For my part," he writes, "till Geneva