THE LAKE OF GENEVA.
Six FREDERICK TREVES is by now expert in the art of writing' pleasantly about pleasant places. His new volume on The Lake of Geneva (Cassell, 25s. net), illustrated with a hundred of his own admirable photographs, is an interesting and agreeable book. He has gone round the whole lake, describing the towns and villages as he saw them last year and adding notes both from familiar sources and from local histories which are not so well known. His chapters on the smaller places, like Ripaille or Gruybres—which he describes without mentioning the cheese —Morges or Rolle, are especially to be commended. His account of Geneva includes a lengthy narrative of the " Esca- lade," the Duke of Savoy's treacherous attack on the town in December, 1602. Sir Frederick Treves might have referred to Mr. Stanley Weyman's The Long Night, which in the guise of fiction gives a vivid description of the affair. His remarks on the fine new monument to Calvin and his fellow-Reformers remind us that Dryden, in the bitterness of his dislike for Calvinism, referred to Geneva as
" Set between a puddle and a wall."
The author says not a word about the League of Nations, which has made Geneva once again a meeting-place for the peoples of the -world. Lausanne, of course, brings up the tragi-comic future of Gibbon. The author omits the caustic remark of the Marquis de Bievre on the historian in his closing years.: " When I want to take exercise, X walk three times round Mr. Gibbon." We should like also to find in these pages -Gibbon's famous sentences on the completion .of his history :-
" I have presumed to mark the moment of -conception ; I shall now commemorate the hour of my final deliverance. It was on the day, or rather the night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in .a summer=house in my garden. After laying down my pen I took several turns in a barman, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotion .of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame."
"La Grate," the house which Gibbon shared with his friend Deyverdun, was demolished long since. Sir Frederick Treves tells us that the Hotel 'Gibbon, standing on part of the site, was pulled down last year and that what remained of Gibbon's garden was then destroyed. In a chapter on Millen the author exposes once again the true character of the adventurer Bonnivet, on whom Byron has made generations of guileless persons waste their sympathy. After retiring from the career of a bandit, Bonnlvet, it seems, had four wives, successively, and no great luck with any of them. But the poet, more potent than the historian, will continue to make his readers believe in the -vir- tuous and ill-used " Prisoner of Chillon," of whom, as he con- fessed, he knew little or nothing. Sir Frederick Treves notes
that the eminent physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, who was Court physician to James I. and Charles L, who discovered the merits al calomel and who lies buried in St, Martin-in-the-
Fields, was a native of Mayeme, near Geneva, and seigneur of Aabonne on the lake. He was only one of many -Genevese and Vaudois who have rendered good service in various ways to England.
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