He indulged, he says, his dream of felicity, but on his return to England he soon discovered that his father would not hear of this "strange alliance," and then follows the sentence which has lost him in the eyes of some persons.

"After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate: I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." What else he was to do under the circumstances does not appear.

He was wholly dependent on his father, and on the Continent at least parental authority is not regarded as a trifling impediment in such cases.

Gibbon could only have married Mdlle.

Curchod as an exile and a pauper, if he had openly withstood his father's wishes.