I am afraid, as Whitbread's sire said to the king, when he wanted
to knight him, that I am "too old;" [3] but nevertheless, no one wishes
you more friends, fame, and felicity, than
Yours, etc.
[Footnote 1:
"'And ah! what verse can grace thy stately mien,
Guide of the world, preferment's golden queen,
Neckar's fair daughter, Stael the 'Epicene'!
Bright o'er whose flaming cheek and pumple nose
The bloom of young desire unceasing glows!
Fain would the Muse--but ah! she dares no more,
A mournful voice from lone 'Guyana's' shore,
Sad Quatremer, the bold presumption checks,
Forbid to question thy ambiguous sex.'
"These lines contain the Secret History of Quatremer's deportation. He
presumed, in the Council of Five Hundred, to arraign Madame de Stael's
conduct, and even to hint a doubt of her sex. He was sent to 'Guyana'.
The transaction naturally brings to one's mind the dialogue between
Falstaff and Hostess Quickly in Shakespeare's 'Henry IV'."
'Canning's New Morality', lines 293-301 (Edmonds' edition of the 'Poetry
of the Anti-Jacobin', pp. 282, 283).
Anne Louise Germaine Necker (1766-1817), only child of the Minister
Necker and his wife Suzanne Curchod, Gibbon's early love, married, in
1786, the Swedish Ambassador Baron de Stael Holstein, who died in 1802.
She married, as her second husband, in 1811, M. de Rocca, a young French
officer, who had been severely wounded in Spain, but survived her by a
year (Madame de Recamier, 'Souvenirs', vol.
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