There is much independent and debonair criticism of contemporary English literature in the Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne, written for the information of continental Europeans by the Swiss Georges Deyverdun and his very close friend Edward Gibbon. Unfortunately volumes for 1767 and 1768 only were published, although, as Gibbon remarks in his personal Memoirs, “the materials of the third volume were almost completed, when I recommended Deyverdun as governor to Sir Richard Worsley. … They set forwards on their travels; nor did they return to England till some time after my father's death.” The number printed was so small that copies of the first volume are very infrequently to be met with, and of the second very rarely indeed. For Gibbon, the Mémoires littéraires were to some extent the fruit of his studies during a sojourn at Lausanne between 1753 and 1758; for Deyverdun they were a means of livelihood, hit upon only after Gibbon had sought suitable employment for him far and wide in England. Inasmuch as they confirm what became a life-long connection, an account of how they came to be written may very well include a few remarks upon the early friendship of the collaborators.