CASTLE COPPET AND MADAME DE STAEL. *]\ 



Corpus, and Trial by Jury, she gained our shores in safety. At first 

 Dominie Sampson's exclamation would have well described it ; but 

 she was too profuse of exhibition, and, ere long, " the venerable 

 father of the English bar," as my Lord Vaux described him, for 

 whose white locks and unearthly phraseology she had taken an 

 affection, absolutely locked himself in, to avoid her everlasting 

 palarver. She, however, awakened the curiosity of his late Majesty 

 (then Prince Regent) to see and hear her ; and she was somewhat 

 recompensed for the neglect of the wholesale manufacturer of con- 

 stitutions, by being invited to meet his Royal Highness at Fife 

 House, then the residence of the late Earl of Liverpool. Cognizant 

 that law, physic, and divinity " Shakspeare, taste, and the musical 

 glasses" could furnish for discussion, she entered upon an elaborate 

 dissertation on the constitution and then existing merits of the House 

 of Lords ; when, abruptly interrupting her analysis, she demanded 

 " By the way, my Lord, what has become of Lord Hawkesbury, 

 whose speeches were my aversion, as the most stupid ever, perhaps, 

 uttered in the Chamber of Peers ?" The simple and dignified con- 

 fession made by the Earl, of " I am the man !" interrupted the 

 lady's lecture for nearly one third of a second. " The first gentle- 

 man in Great Britain," if politely, intelligibly expressed his disap- 

 pointment; and the mention of it, by a good-natured friend, little 

 tended to an increase of serenity in the Lioness. 



A younger son of Madame de Stae'l entered the Swedish service, 

 and a treatise, in reprehension of the practice of duelling, which she 

 wrote, was understood to have been intended for his use ; but he had 

 unfortunately previously decided on the subject, as the news of his 

 death, in a private rencontre, reached his mother, at the moment of 



E'ving her work to the world. A third son was drowned in the 

 eman ; and the young De Rocca survives, the inheritor, as it is said, 

 of much of his mother's wit and talent. 



The story goes, that the portly and voluminous Gibbon was an 

 admirer of Madame de StaeTs mother. He so ardently and impru- , 

 dently pressed his suit to Mademoiselle Curchod (after wards Madame 

 Necker), that he rashly operated a genuflexion, which would have 

 left him an eternity in which to declare his passion, had not his 

 considerate mistress summoned the servants to elevate her learned 

 and unwieldy lover from his unhappy " Decline and Fall." I met, 

 the other day, at Lausanne, a Madame Du Bri, who informed me 

 (and I think I can rely on her representation), that she well remem- 

 bers Gibbon, and had often beheld him, on the occasion of his visits 

 to his friend, M. de Sevry, of Lausanne. An accident he had met 

 with, in slipping on the pavement, had produced much personal 

 deformity, of which he was so sensible, that, when the sedan-chair, 

 which bore the bulk of instruction, arrived at M. de Sevry's door, 

 the historian declined to quit it, until due notice was given to the 

 females of the mansion to avoid his presence, on his way to the 

 library of his friend. Madame du Bri asserts positively, that the 

 strictest attention to the duties of religion were enforced in his house 

 by the order of Gibbon ; which is strange, as the epoch she refers to 

 is apparently that of the completion of that work which is so much 



