purposes of the present introduction.]

Henri Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva in September, 1821. He belonged
to one of the emigrant families, of which a more or less steady supply
had enriched the little republic during the three centuries following
the Reformation. Amiel's ancestors, like those of Sismondi, left
Languedoc for Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His
father must have been a youth at the time when Geneva passed into the
power of the French republic, and would seem to have married and settled
in the halcyon days following the restoration of Genevese independence
in 1814. Amiel was born when the prosperity of Geneva was at its height,
when the little state was administered by men of European reputation,
and Genevese society had power to attract 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 Batie. 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 Toepffer. 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,