ave dwarfed individual life, until one's own
personal affairs, if they would press upon the attention, seemed
impertinence, to be disposed of as quickly as possible, that one might
give every thought and every emotion to one's country. She saw the
commencement and the close of that great social earthquake which
overthrew the oldest dynasty in Europe; she saw the rise, the
culmination, and the setting of Napoleon's meteor-star; she witnessed
the return of the Bourbons after their long absence, and the final death
in defeat and exile of her dreaded enemy--the great soldier-Emperor--on
the rocky ocean isle. This series of events is not to be paralleled for
magnitude and meaning in any period of modern time, and Madame de Stael
was something more than a spectator during much of the great
miracle-play.

Her father, Necker, was the Controller-General of Finances under Louis
XVI., and a man worthy of honor and long remembrance, although he was
called during those perilous times to a work he was unable to do, and
which perhaps no man could have done. The corrupt and meretricious court
had brought France, financially as well as morally, to a point where no
one man, had he been ever so great and so noble, could save her--could
even retard the period of her ruin. Necker made a noble struggle, but
was overborne by fate; and had his genius been even more commanding than
it was, he would doubtless have been thus overborne. History tells us of
many greater statesmen than he, but of few better men. Disinterested
almost to a fault, stainless in his private character as well as
unquestioned in his public integrity, truly religious in a time given
over to atheism and impiety, conscientious even to the smallest matters
in public as well as private life, and moderate when everything about
him was in extremes,--well might Madame de Stael be proud of her father,
and fond to effusion of his memory.

Her mother was a woman to be held in reverent remembrance. She was both
beautiful and accomplished, possessed of fine talents, as well as
spotless character. She had been engaged to Gibbon in her youth, and the
attachment between them was a strong one. But the marriage was prevented
by his father; and, after a long period of mournful constancy, she
married M. Necker, and took her place among the great ones of the earth.
The friendship between herself and Gibbon was afterwards very tender and
sacred, although she was a faithful and devoted wife to