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distinguished visitors and admirers from all parts. The veteran Bonstetten, who had been the friend of Gray and the associate of Voltaire, was still talking and enjoying life in his appartement overlooking the woods of La Bâtie. Rossi and Sismondi were busy lecturing to the Genevese youth, or taking part in Genevese legislation; an active scientific group, headed by the Pictets, De la Rive, and the botanist Auguste-Pyrame de Candolle, kept the country abreast of European thought and speculation, while the mixed nationality of the place the blending in it of French keenness with Protestant enthusiasms and

Protestant solidity - - was beginning to find inimitable and characteristic expression in the stories of Töpffer. The country was governed by an aristocracy, which was not so much an aristocracy of birth as one of merit and intellect, and the moderate constitutional ideas which represented the Liberalism of the post-Waterloo period were nowhere more warmly embraced or more intelligently carried out than in Geneva.

During the years, however, which immediately followed Amiel's birth, some signs of decadence began to be visible in

this brilliant Genevese society. The generation which had waited for, prepared, and controlled, the Restoration of 1814, was falling into the background, and the younger generation, with all its respectability, wanted energy, above all, wanted leaders. The

revolutionary forces in the State, which had made themselves violently felt during the civil turmoils of the period preceding the assembly of the French States General, and had afterwards produced the miniature Terror which forced Sismondi into exile, had been for a while laid to sleep by the events of 1814. But the slumber was а short one at Geneva as elsewhere, and when Rossi quitted the Republic for France in 1833, he did so with a mind full of misgivings as to the political future of the little State which had given him -an exile and a Catholic. so generous a welcome in 1819. The ideas of 1830 were shaking the fabric and disturbing the equilibrium of the Swiss Confederation as a whole, and of many of the cantons composing it. Geneva was still apparently tranquil while her neighbours were disturbed, but no one looking back on the history of the Republic, and able to measure the strength of the Radical force in Europe after the fall of Charles X., could

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have felt much doubt but that a few more years would bring Geneva also into the whirlpool of political change.

In the same year-1833-that M. Rossi had left Geneva, Henri Frédéric Amiel, at twelve years old, was left orphaned of both his parents. They had died comparatively young, his mother was only just over thirty, and his father cannot have been much older. On the death of the mother the little family was broken up, the boy passing into the care of one relative, his two sisters into that of another. Certain notes in M. Scherer's possession throw a little light here and there upon a childhood and youth which must necessarily have been a little bare and forlorn. They show us a sensitive impressionable boy, of health rather delicate than robust, already disposed to a more or less melancholy and dreamy view of life, and showing a deep interest in those religious problems and ideas in which the air of Geneva has been steeped since the days of Calvin. The religious teaching which a Genevese lad undergoes prior to his admission to full Church membership, made a deep impression on him, and certain mystical elements of character, which remained strong in him to the end, showed

themselves very early. At the Collège or Public School of Geneva, and at the Académie, he would seem to have done only moderately as far as prizes and honours were concerned. We are told, however, that he read enormously, and that he was, generally speaking, inclined rather to make friends with men older than himself than with his contemporaries. He fell specially under the influence of Adolphe Pictet, a brilliant philologist and man of letters belonging to a well-known Genevese family, and in later life he was able, while reviewing one of M. Pictet's books, to give grateful expression to his sense of obligation.

Writing in 1856 he describes the effect produced in Geneva by M. Pictet's Lectures on Esthetics in 1840. the first ever delivered in a town in which the Beautiful had been for centuries regarded as the rival and enemy of the True. 'He who is now writing,' says Amiel, 'was then among M. Pictet's youngest hearers. Since then twenty experiences of the same kind have followed each other in his intellectual experience, yet none has effaced the deep impression made upon him by these lectures. Coming as they did at a favourable moment, and answering many a positive question and

many a vague aspiration of youth, they exercised a decisive influence over his thought; they were to him an important step in that continuous initiation which we call life, they filled him with fresh intuitions, they brought near to him the horizons of his dreams. And, as always happens with a first-rate man, what struck him even more than the teaching was the teacher. So that this

memory of 1840 is still dear and precious to him, and for this double service, which is not of the kind one forgets, the student of those days delights in expressing to the professor of 1840 his sincere and filial gratitude.'

Amiel's first literary production, or practically his first, seems to have been the result partly of these lectures, and partly of a visit to Italy which began in November 1841. In 1842, a year which was spent entirely in Italy and Sicily, he contributed three articles on M. Rio's book, L'Art Chrétien, to the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève. We see in them the young student conscientiously writing his first review-writing it at inordinate length, as young reviewers are apt to do, and treating the subject ab ovo in a grave, pontifical way, which is a little naïve and inexperi

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