would not give her up for his father's dissent, and her own reiterated determination not to go counter to it; the advantageous offers which she had refused in his absence, and which she valued only as proofs of her disinterestedness; it was to his knowledge of two of them, from men of good standing and fortune, that she had ascribed his renunciation of her when their union seemed indefinitely postponed. As she heard that he was not seeking any other woman in marriage, what wonder that she had set down his conduct to delicacy and unselfishness, and preference of what he deemed her good to his own happiness? Strong in this belief, when her father died she had valiantly rejected the home and ease and assured future which were laid at her feet, and adopted a mode of life which she detested, to support her mother and herself. She could not resist the temptation of alluding to the conquests which still marked her path; but it was with a burst of bitterness that she recalls how, in the hour of her bereavement, when rejected lovers, mere acquaintances, even strangers, had hastened to offer her comfort, the only one who had given no sign of sympathy was he to whom her heart belonged. Yet she thanks Heaven for having saved her from a marriage which would have resulted in mutual misery: "Hard heart, which I once thought so tender! What did I ask of you? What did I want? Your father was still alive, and my resolve was unshaken; I asked for the only sentiment which remained to us. I consider you a man of honor incapable of breaking a promise, seducing, or betraying; but capable of tearing a heart to shreds for your amusement by the most ingenious tortures. longer invoke the wrath of Heaven upon you, as I did in my first anger; but I need be no prophet to assure you that the day will come when you will regret the irreparable loss which you incurred when you estranged for ever the too frank and tender heart of S. C."

I no

So ends the chapter of Suzanne Churchod's romance. With her wounds cauterized, but still burning, it now only remained for her to decide upon her future. Many homes were open to her upon her own terms. She was living temporarily with the excellent Pastor

Moultou, a former lover, who had become a faithful and devoted friend. Disappointed of his early love, he had married her friend, Mlle. Cayla. Suzanne, in order not to be a burden to these kind hosts, filled the post of governess to their children while going on with her other lessons. How irksome, how intolerable, these duties, associations, and scenes had become to her one may well guess. She longed to escape; the only alternative was a marriage of reason or braving the unknown trials of a lady's companion. In her dread of the latter, she lent an ear to the proposals of a lawyer from Yverdun, who had been sighing about her for some time, but she would not commit herself finally without further respite.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century it was the fashion in France for fine ladies in delicate health to go to Geneva and consult Dr. Tronchin. There was a floating society among the lacustrine villas, drawn together by the strange medley of tastes and ideas which rose to the surface in the ferment preceding the Revolution. People resorted to the shores of Lake Leman-some for Dr. Tronchin, or for change of climate; some for the scenery, for Voltaire, for Rousseau; some because they were sentimental, and cultivated sensibility; some because they were strong-minded, and practised inoculation; most of them for the reason which takes idle folks anywhere-because they found it amusing. The head of this society was the Duchesse d'Anville, a Rochefoucauld both by birth and marriage, who prided herself on her literary tastes and liberal ideas. She had made Madame Churchod's acquaintance about the time of her father's death, and had interested herself in various ways in the young lady's behalf. There was another fair patient of Dr. Tronchin's, a young widow from Paris, Madame de Vermenoux, rich, intelligent, attractive, and fond of amusement. She liked clever men and had them about her; she also liked clever women, and falling in love with Suzanne, proposed to take her back to Paris as her companion. Suzanne was between twenty-six and seven, the same age as Madame de Vermenoux, and her pride and love of independence had in

creased with poverty; she hesitated when it came to the point of even temporarily surrendering her liberty. The influence of her friend M. Moultou, steadied her wavering inclination; she accepted the proposal, and set out in this humble position to find a cure for her grief in new scenes, while Gibbon's steps were drawing toward Rome, and that memorable hour of meditation in the ruins of the Capitol which gave the world his immortal work.

The eighteenth century was at its apogee in France when Mlle. Churchod first went to that country. The great lights of the age were still shining, if some were on the wane; there was an extraordinary concourse of men and women of genius, talent, and learning in Paris. Suzanne's natural taste for literature and the intercourse of clever, cultivated people had been sharpened by her acquaintance with Rousseau, Voltaire, and the people of note whom she met at Ferney. She entered upon her new life with eager expectations, too high-pitched to be satisfied; she had probably indulged in visions of the Encyclopædists sitting in a circle, each talking like a book, and imagined Parisian society as only a larger and more brilliant debating club than her little Academy of the Springs, Her first letters to Switzerland express disappointment and betray provincial prejudices, although she met Marmontel, Bonstetten, and other celebrated men at Madame de Vermenoux's. Of the last-named Suzanne has nothing to say but praise for her kindness, consideration, generosity, and sympathy. The only drawback to her position as companion, besides a melancholy which she could not always hide, was the difficulty of dressing properly on an income of about sixteen pounds a year. She received no salary; Madame de Vermenoux loaded her with presents, and would have supplied all her wants if Mlle. Churchod's pride had permitted them to be suspected. The charm began to work, and the enjoyment and excitement of the new life to be felt, and to promote her moral cure, which was rapid in proportion to the anguish of her undeception and disillusion. She began to live again. At the same time she felt that she was merely passing through those new scenes; that the sit

uation was becoming daily more untenable from her want of means; that the way before her was narrowing to the issue of a return to her pupils or the marriage of reason at Yverdun.

The deus ex machina who descended to deliver her from this hard alternative was her countryman James Necker, of the Swiss banking-house of Necker & Thélusson, which had lately been established in Paris. He had been captivated by Madame de Vermenoux's airy graces before she went to Geneva; she had been unable either to take him or let him go, and on her return to Paris he was still a suitor on probation. It was in this light that Mlle. Churchod first made his acquaintance in July, 1764. She liked him, and seconded his suit with her friend. Madame de Vermenoux's first experience of matrimony had been unfortunate; she was rich enough to care little for M. Necker's fortune, nor did she wish to lose her aristocratic position by a plebeian marriage; yet Necker was not a man to discard unadvisedly. In short, she shillyshallied, and while she did so the wind veered to another quarter. M. Moultou's suspicions pointed in the right direction first; early in October Mlle. Churchod was forced to admit that he was right; she wrote to him that M. Necker preferred her, but that probably nothing would come of it, as he had started on a journey to Switzerland without offering himself. that she was far from indifferent to the result; and in a later letter she declared that if this brilliant castle in the air should dissolve, she would accept the lawyer of Yverdun, on condition of his allowing her to spend two months every year with her friends. But the crisis was at hand. On M. Necker's return from Geneva, he lost no time in addressing Mlle. Churchod, who replied by a little note, written," says her descendant, "in a trembling hand: If your happiness, sir, depends upon my feelings for you, I fear that you were happy before you desired it.'

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She confessed

It was true. Suzanne loved again, and with the whole force of her nature; this time it was no longer a girl's ardent fancy for a youth who appeared to her as a lover on their first meeting, and whom she endowed with all the attrib

utes which a pure and highly-wrought imagination could supply; she had studied Necker with a keen, impartial scrutiny, but when she gave him her heart it was his to the day of her death, and she loved him with a tender and passionate admiration such as seldom endures the friction of domestic life in any relation. It is impossible not to think that she over-rated him, but he was one of those unusual men whose qualities maintain their ascendancy over the persons with whom they are in the closest and most constant intercourse. On the eve of their marriage Suzanne wrote her future husband a letter in which she told him all her love for him; she wished that he should know once for all the intensity and extent of her affection, and with noble candor she confessed it all, and the boundless happiness with which it filled her soul. Many women might say as much, at such a moment, but there was not a day in her married life when she would not have signed it, and the last expression of her affection, written as she felt her end draw near, is in the same deep and fervent strain.

The news of Mlle. Churchod's good fortune soon reached Switzerland and caused a general jubilation in the Pays de Vaud. Congratulations rained upon her, upon M. Necker, upon the Moultous. Even the poor lawyer of Yverdun, writhing under the blight of hopes which had been kept alive for several years, and the smart of knowing that he had been tolerated only as Jack-at-a-pinch, heartily joined his good wishes and prayers for her welfare to the chorus of happier voices, and absolved her "mademoiselle et ma plus chère amie,'' for the pain she had inflicted. What Mme. de Vermenoux had to say we are not told. It is significant that the pair were married rather on the sly, and that Suzanne informed her benefactress of the event afterward, with many excuses and explanations. However, if there were any displeasure or vexation, they were soon dispelled; Mme. de Vermenoux was the godmother of their first and only child, and their fast friend to the end of her short life.

The marriage took place toward the close of the year 1764. M. and Mme. Necker established themselves in a vast old-fashioned house in the interesting

quarter of Paris called the Marais, even then no longer fashionable, but highly respectable, where the firm of Necker & Thélusson had its banking-house. She entered at once upon a large and luxurious style of living, the scale of which she found somewhat bewildering and oppressive until her energy and system gave her the control of its details. It was here that Gibbon found her on his return from Italy, a few months after her marriage. All readers of his memoirs will remember the letter, with its undertone of pique and fatuity, in which he relates his first visit to her; he asks comically if anything could be more mortifying than Necker's going off to bed and leaving him alone with his former flame, but he did not feel to the full the almost contemptuous security of the proceeding. It did not strike him that Mme. Necker might be taking a gentle revenge for his declining her friendship on the plea of its dangers for her as well as himself.

When the little chagrins and embarrassments attendant on the renewal of their intimacy wore off, Gibbon found a great and lasting resource in the friendship of the magnanimous woman whose love he had slighted, and of her husband. His name occurs, and his letters appear throughout the record of Mme. Necker's life; and when she and her family were forced to seek refuge at Coppet from the fury of popular fickleness, which pursued Necker alternately with huzzas and hooting until it drove him from France, they found Gibbon at Lausanne writing his "Decline and Fall." No guest was more frequent or welcome at Coppet than he. M. Morison alludes to Mme Necker's letters to Gibbon at this period as testifying “a warmth of sentiment on her part which, coming from a lady of less spotless propriety, would almost imply a revival of early affection for an early lover." M. Morison was not aware of the tendency to exaggeration which was a life-long characteristic of Mme. Necker's, contrasting singularly with her rigid circumspection of conduct; she was fully conscious of the defect herself, and tried to correct it in her daughter. One need only compare with these letters her expressions in writing to her husband to get the measure of her feeling for the

unknown to history-all lost in the light of an effulgent dawn. In speculating, therefore, on the origin of these things, we must make one or other of two assumptions either that man always had the same mental faculties and the same fundamental intellectual constitution that he has now, or that there was a time when these faculties had not yet risen to the level of humanity, and when his mental constitution was essentially inferior.

On the first of these assumptions we proceed on the safe ground of inquiry from the known to the unknown. We handle a familiar thing; we dissect a known structure; we think of a known agency. We speculate only on the matter of its first behavior. Even in this process we must take a good deal for granted-we must imagine a good deal that is not easily conceivable. If we try to present to our own minds any distinct image of the first man, whether we suppose him to have been specially created or gradually developed, we shall soon find that we are talking about a being and about a condition of things of which science tells us nothing, and of which the imagination even cannot form any definite conception. The temptation to thing of that being as a mere savage is very great, and this theory underlies ninetenths of all speculations on the subject. But, to say the very least, this may not -be true, and valid reasons have been adduced to show that it is in the highest degree improbable. That the first man. should have been born with all the developments of savagery, is as impossible as that he should have been born with all the developments of civilization. The next most natural resource we have is to think of the first man as something like a child. But no man has ever seen a child which never had a parent, or some one to represent a parent. We can form no picture in our mind's eye of the mental condition of the first man, if we suppose him to have had no communication with, and no instruction from, some intelligence other than his own. A child that has never known anything, and has never seen example, is a creature of which we have no knowledge, and of which therefore we can form no definite conception. Our power of conceiving things is, of course, no measure of their NEW SERIES.-Vol. XXXIV., No. 4

possibility. But it may be well to observe where the impossibilities of conception are, or may be, of our own making. It is at least possible that the first man may not have been born or created in the condition which we find to be so inconceivable. He may have been a child, but having, what all other children have, some intimations of authority and some acquaintance with its source. At all events, let it be clearly seen that the denial of this possibility is an assumption; and an assumption too which establishes an absolute and radical distinction between childhood as we know it, and the inconceivable conditions of a childhood which was either without parents, or with parents who were comparatively beasts. Professor Max Müller has fancied our earliest forefathers as creatures who at first had to be "roused and awakened from mere staring and stolid wonderment," by certain objects which set them for the first time musing, pondering, and thinking on the visions floating before their eyes." This is a picture evidently framed on the assumption of a fatherless childhood—of a being born into the world with all the innate powers of man, but absolutely deprived of all direct communication with any mind or will analogous to his own. No such assumption is admissible as representing any reasonable probability. But at least such imaginings as these about our first parents have reference to their external conditions only and do not raise the additional difficulties involved in the supposition that the first man was half a beast.

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Very different is the case upon the other of the two assumptions which have been indicated above. On the assumption that there was a time when man was different in his own proper nature from that nature as we know it nowwhen he was merely an animal not yet developed into a man-on this assumption another element of the unknown is introduced, which is an element of absolute confusion. It is impossible to found any reasoning upon data which are not only unknown, but are in themselves unintelligible and inconceivable. seems as if many of those who speculate on the origin of religion have not clearly made up their minds whether they are proceeding on the first of these assump

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Now it