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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Gibbon, by James Cotter Morison
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Gibbon
+
+
+Author: James Cotter Morison
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 17, 2006  [eBook #18851]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GIBBON***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Sankar Viswanathan, and
+the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(http://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+English Men of Letters
+
+Edited by John Morley
+
+GIBBON
+
+by
+
+JAMES COTTER MORISON, M.A.
+Lincoln College, Oxford
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London:
+MacMillan and Co.
+1878.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+GIBBON'S EARLY LIFE UP TO THE TIME OF HIS LEAVING OXFORD
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+AT LAUSANNE
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+IN THE MILITIA
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE ITALIAN JOURNEY
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+LITERARY SCHEMES.--THE HISTORY OF SWITZERLAND.--DISSERTATION ON THE
+    SIXTH AENEID.--FATHER'S DEATH.--SETTLEMENT IN LONDON
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+LIFE IN LONDON.--PARLIAMENT.--THE BOARD OF TRADE.--THE DECLINE AND
+    FALL.--MIGRATION TO LAUSANNE
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE FIRST THREE VOLUMES OF THE DECLINE AND FALL
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE LAST TEN TEARS OF HIS LIFE AT LAUSANNE
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE LAST THREE VOLUMES OF THE DECLINE AND FALL
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+LAST ILLNESS.--DEATH.--CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+
+
+GIBBON
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+GIBBON'S EARLY LIFE UP TO THE TIME OF HIS LEAVING OXFORD.
+
+
+Edward Gibbon[1] was born at Putney, near London, on 27th April in
+the year 1737. After the reformation of the calendar his birthday
+became the 8th of May. He was the eldest of a family of seven
+children; but his five brothers and only sister all died in early
+infancy, and he could remember in after life his sister alone, whom he
+also regretted.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Gibbon's Memoirs and Letters are of such easy access that
+I have not deemed it necessary to encumber these pages with references
+to them. Any one who wishes to control my statements will have no
+difficulty in doing so with the Miscellaneous Works, edited by Lord
+Sheffield, in his hand. Whenever I advance anything that seems to
+require corroboration, I have been careful to give my authority.]
+
+He is at some pains in his Memoirs to show the length and quality of
+his pedigree, which he traces back to the times of the Second and
+Third Edwards. Noting the fact, we pass on to a nearer ancestor, his
+grandfather, who seems to have been a person of considerable energy
+of character and business talent. He made a large fortune, which he
+lost in the South-Sea Scheme, and then made another before his death.
+He was one of the Commissioners of Customs, and sat at the Board with
+the poet Prior; Bolingbroke was heard to declare that no man knew
+better than Mr. Edward Gibbon the commerce and finances of England.
+His son, the historian's father, was a person of very inferior stamp.
+He was educated at Westminster and Cambridge, travelled on the
+Continent, sat in Parliament, lived beyond his means as a country
+gentleman, and here his achievements came to an end. He seems to have
+been a kindly but a weak and impulsive man, who however had the merit
+of obtaining and deserving his son's affection by genial sympathy and
+kindly treatment.
+
+Gibbon's childhood was passed in chronic illness, debility, and
+disease. All attempts to give him a regular education were frustrated
+by his precarious health. The longest period he ever passed at school
+were two years at Westminster, but he was constantly moved from one
+school to another. This even his delicacy can hardly explain, and it
+must have been fatal to all sustained study. Two facts he mentions of
+his school life, which paint the manners of the age. In the year 1746
+such was the strength of party spirit that he, a child of nine years
+of age, "was reviled and buffeted for the sins of his Tory ancestors."
+Secondly, the worthy pedagogues of that day found no readier way of
+leading the most studious of boys to a love of science than corporal
+punishment. "At the expense of many tears and some blood I purchased
+the knowledge of the Latin syntax." Whether all love of study would
+have been flogged out of him if he had remained at school, it is
+difficult to say, but it is not an improbable supposition that this
+would have happened. The risk was removed by his complete failure of
+health. "A strange nervous affection, which alternately contracted his
+legs and produced, without any visible symptom, the most excruciating
+pain," was his chief affliction, followed by intervals of languor and
+debility. The saving of his life during these dangerous years Gibbon
+unhesitatingly ascribes to the more than maternal care of his aunt,
+Catherine Porten, on writing whose name for the first time in his
+Memoirs, "he felt a tear of gratitude trickling down his cheek." "If
+there be any," he continues, "as I trust there are some, who rejoice
+that I live, to that dear and excellent woman they must hold
+themselves indebted. Many anxious and solitary hours and days did she
+consume in the patient trial of relief and amusement; many wakeful
+nights did she sit by my bedside in trembling expectation that every
+hour would be my last." Gibbon is rather anxious to get over these
+details, and declares he has no wish to expatiate on a "disgusting
+topic." This is quite in the style of the _ancien regime_. There was
+no blame attached to any one for being ill in those days, but people
+were expected to keep their infirmities to themselves. "People knew
+how to live and die in those days, and kept their infirmities out of
+sight. You might have the gout, but you must walk about all the same
+without making grimaces. It was a point of good breeding to hide one's
+sufferings."[2] Similarly Walpole was much offended by a too faithful
+publication of Madame de Sevigne's _Letters_. "Heaven forbid," he
+says, "that I should say that the letters of Madame de Sevigne were
+bad. I only meant that they were full of family details and mortal
+distempers, to which the most immortal of us are subject." But Gibbon
+was above all things a veracious historian, and fortunately has not
+refrained from giving us a truthful picture of his childhood.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 2: George Sand, quoted in Taine's _Ancien Regime_, p. 181.]
+
+Of his studies, or rather his reading--his early and invincible love
+of reading, which he would not exchange for the treasures of India--he
+gives us a full account, and we notice at once the interesting fact
+that a considerable portion of the historical field afterwards
+occupied by his great work had been already gone over by Gibbon before
+he was well in his teens. "My indiscriminate appetite subsided by
+degrees into the historic line, and since philosophy has exploded all
+innate ideas and natural propensities, I must ascribe the choice to
+the assiduous perusal of the _Universal History_ as the octavo volumes
+successively appeared. This unequal work referred and introduced me to
+the Greek and Roman historians, to as many at least as were accessible
+to an English reader. All that I could find were greedily devoured,
+from Littlebury's lame _Herodotus_ to Spelman's valuable _Xenophon_,
+to the pompous folios of Gordon's _Tacitus_, and a ragged _Procopius_
+of the beginning of the last century." Referring to an accident which
+threw the continuation of Echard's _Roman History_ in his way, he
+says, "To me the reigns of the successors of Constantine were
+absolutely new, and I was immersed in the passage of the Goths over
+the Danube, when the summons of the dinner-bell reluctantly dragged me
+from my intellectual feast.... I procured the second and third
+volumes of Howell's _History of the World_, which exhibit the
+Byzantine period on a larger scale. Mahomet and his Saracens soon
+fixed my attention, and some instinct of criticism directed me to the
+genuine sources. Simon Ockley first opened my eyes, and I was led from
+one book to another till I had ranged round the circle of Oriental
+history. Before I was sixteen I had exhausted all that could be
+learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks,
+and the same ardour urged me to guess at the French of D'Herbelot and
+to construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's _Abulfaragius_." Here is
+in rough outline a large portion at least of the _Decline and Fall_
+already surveyed. The fact shows how deep was the sympathy that Gibbon
+had for his subject, and that there was a sort of pre-established
+harmony between his mind and the historical period he afterwards
+illustrated.
+
+Up to the age of fourteen it seemed that Gibbon, as he says, was
+destined to remain through life an illiterate cripple. But as he
+approached his sixteenth year, a great change took place in his
+constitution, and his diseases, instead of growing with his growth and
+strengthening with his strength, wonderfully vanished. This unexpected
+recovery was not seized by his father in a rational spirit, as
+affording a welcome opportunity of repairing the defects of a hitherto
+imperfect education. Instead of using the occasion thus presented of
+recovering some of the precious time lost, of laying a sound
+foundation of scholarship and learning on which a superstructure at
+the university or elsewhere could be ultimately built, he carried the
+lad off in an impulse of perplexity and impatience, and entered him as
+a gentleman commoner at Magdalen College just before he had completed
+his fifteenth year (1752, April 3). This was perhaps the most unwise
+step he could have taken under the circumstances. Gibbon was too young
+and too ignorant to profit by the advantages offered by Oxford to a
+more mature student, and his status as a gentleman commoner seemed
+intended to class him among the idle and dissipated who are only
+expected to waste their money and their time. A good education is
+generally considered as reflecting no small credit on its possessor;
+but in the majority of cases it reflects credit on the wise solicitude
+of his parents or guardians rather than on himself. If Gibbon escaped
+the peril of being an ignorant and frivolous lounger, the merit was
+his own.
+
+At no period in their history had the English universities sunk to a
+lower condition as places of education than at the time when Gibbon
+went up to Oxford. To speak of them as seats of learning seems like
+irony; they were seats of nothing but coarse living and clownish
+manners, the centres where all the faction, party spirit, and bigotry
+of the country were gathered to a head. In this evil pre-eminence both
+of the universities and all the colleges appear to have been upon a
+level, though Lincoln College, Oxford, is mentioned as a bright
+exception in John Wesley's day to the prevalent degeneracy. The
+strange thing is that, with all their neglect of learning and
+morality, the colleges were not the resorts of jovial if unseemly boon
+companionship; they were collections of quarrelsome and spiteful
+litigants, who spent their time in angry lawsuits. The indecent
+contentions between Bentley and the Fellows of Trinity were no
+isolated scandal. They are best known and remembered on account of the
+eminence of the chief disputants, and of the melancholy waste of
+Bentley's genius which they occasioned. Hearne writes of Oxford in
+1726, "There are such differences now in the University of Oxford
+(hardly one college but where all the members are busied in law
+business and quarrels not at all relating to the promotion of
+learning), that good letters decay every day, insomuch that this
+ordination on Trinity Sunday at Oxford there were no fewer (as I am
+informed) than fifteen denied orders for insufficiency, which is the
+more to be noted because our bishops, and those employed by them, are
+themselves illiterate men."[3] The state of things had not much
+improved twenty or thirty years later when Gibbon went up, but perhaps
+it had improved a little. He does not mention lawsuits as a favourite
+pastime of the Fellows. "The Fellows or monks of my time," he says,
+"were decent, easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder:
+their days were filled by a series of uniform employments--the chapel,
+the hall, the coffee-house, and the common room--till they retired
+weary and well satisfied to a long slumber. From the toil of reading,
+writing, or thinking they had absolved their consciences. Their
+conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics,
+personal anecdotes, and private scandal. Their dull and deep potations
+excused the brisk intemperance of youth, and their constitutional
+toasts were not expressive of the most lively loyalty to the House of
+Hanover." Some Oxonians perhaps could still partly realise the truth
+of this original picture by their recollections of faint and feeble
+copies of it drawn from their experience in youthful days. It seems to
+be certain that the universities, far from setting a model of good
+living, were really below the average standard of the morals and
+manners of the age, and the standard was not high. Such a satire as
+the _Terrae Filius_ of Amhurst cannot be accepted without large
+deductions; but the caricaturist is compelled by the conditions of his
+craft to aim at the _true seeming_, if he neglects the true, and with
+the benefit of this limitation the _Terrae Filius_ reveals a deplorable
+and revolting picture of vulgarity, insolence, and licence. The
+universities are spoken of in terms of disparagement by men of all
+classes. Lord Chesterfield speaks of the "rust" of Cambridge as
+something of which a polished man should promptly rid himself. Adam
+Smith showed his sense of the defects of Oxford in a stern section of
+the _Wealth of Nations_, written twenty years after he had left the
+place. Even youths like Gray and West, fresh from Eton, express
+themselves with contempt for their respective universities. "Consider
+me," says the latter, writing from Christ Church, "very seriously,
+here is a strange country, inhabited by things that call themselves
+Doctors and Masters of Arts, a country flowing with syllogisms and
+ale; where Horace and Virgil are equally unknown." Gray, answering
+from Peterhouse, can only do justice to his feelings by quoting the
+words of the Hebrew prophet, and insists that Isaiah had Cambridge
+equally with Babylon in view when he spoke of the wild beasts and wild
+asses, of the satyrs that dance, of an inhabitation of dragons and a
+court for owls.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 3: _Social Life at the English Universities_. By Christopher
+Wordsworth. Page 57.]
+
+Into such untoward company was Gibbon thrust by his careless father at
+the age of fifteen. That he succumbed to the unwholesome atmosphere
+cannot surprise us. He does not conceal, perhaps he rather
+exaggerates, in his Memoirs, the depth of his fall. As Bunyan in a
+state of grace accused himself of dreadful sins which in all
+likelihood he never committed, so it is probable that Gibbon, in his
+old age, when study and learning were the only passions he knew,
+reflected with too much severity on the boyish freaks of his
+university life. Moreover there appears to have been nothing coarse or
+unworthy in his dissipation; he was simply idle. He justly lays much
+of the blame on the authorities. To say that the discipline was lax
+would be to pay it an unmerited compliment. There was no discipline at
+all. He lived in Magdalen as he might have lived at the Angel or the
+Mitre Tavern. He not only left his college, but he left the
+university, whenever he liked. In one winter he made a tour to Bath,
+another to Buckinghamshire, and he made four excursions to London,
+"without once hearing the voice of admonition, without once feeling
+the hand of control." Of study he had just as much and as little as he
+pleased.
+
+"As soon as my tutor had sounded the insufficiency of his disciple in
+school learning, he proposed that we should read every morning from
+ten to eleven the comedies of Terence. During the first weeks I
+constantly attended these lessons in my tutor's room; but as they
+appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure, I was once tempted to
+try the experiment of a formal apology. The apology was accepted with
+a smile. I repeated the offence with less ceremony: the excuse was
+admitted with the same indulgence; the slightest motive of laziness or
+indisposition, the most trifling avocation at home or abroad was
+allowed as a worthy impediment, nor did my tutor appear conscious of
+my absence or neglect." No wonder he spoke with indignation of such
+scandalous neglect. "To the University of Oxford," he says, "I
+acknowledge no obligation, and she will as readily renounce me for a
+son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen
+months at Magdalen College; they proved the most idle and unprofitable
+of my whole life. The reader will pronounce between the school and the
+scholar." This is only just and fully merited by the abuses denounced.
+One appreciates the anguish of the true scholar mourning over lost
+time as a miser over lost gold. There was another side of the question
+which naturally did not occur to Gibbon, but which may properly occur
+to us. Did Gibbon lose as much as he thought in missing the scholastic
+drill of the regular public school and university man? Something he
+undoubtedly lost: he was never a finished scholar, up to the standard
+even of his own day. If he had been, is it certain that the
+accomplishment would have been all gain? It may be doubted. At a later
+period Gibbon read the classics with the free and eager curiosity of a
+thoughtful mind. It was a labour of love, of passionate ardour,
+similar to the manly zeal of the great scholars of the Renaissance.
+This appetite had not been blunted by enforced toil in a prescribed
+groove. How much of that zest for antiquity, of that keen relish for
+the classic writers which he afterwards acquired and retained through
+life, might have been quenched if he had first made their acquaintance
+as school-books? Above all, would he have looked on the ancient world
+with such freedom and originality as he afterwards gained, if he had
+worn through youth the harness of academical study? These questions do
+not suggest an answer, but they may furnish a doubt. Oxford and
+Cambridge for nearly a century have been turning out crowds of
+thorough-paced scholars of the orthodox pattern. It is odd that the
+two greatest historians who have been scholars as well--Gibbon and
+Grote--were not university-bred men.
+
+As if to prove by experiment where the fault lay, in "the school or
+the scholar," Gibbon had no sooner left Oxford for the long vacation,
+than his taste for study returned, and, not content with reading, he
+attempted original composition. The subject he selected was a curious
+one for a youth in his sixteenth year. It was an attempt to settle the
+chronology of the age of Sesostris, and shows how soon the austere
+side of history had attracted his attention. "In my childish balance,"
+he says, "I presumed to weigh the systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of
+Marsham and of Newton; and my sleep has been disturbed by the
+difficulty of reconciling the Septuagint with the Hebrew computation."
+Of course his essay had the usual value of such juvenile productions;
+that is, none at all, except as an indication of early bias to serious
+study of history. On his return to Oxford, the age of Sesostris was
+wisely relinquished. He indeed soon commenced a line of study which
+was destined to have a lasting influence on the remainder of his
+course through life.
+
+He had an inborn taste for theology and the controversies which have
+arisen concerning religious dogma. "From my childhood," he says, "I
+had been fond of religious disputation: my poor aunt has often been
+puzzled by the mysteries which she strove to believe." How he carried
+the taste into mature life, his great chapters on the heresies and
+controversies of the Early Church are there to show. This inclination
+for theology, co-existing with a very different temper towards
+religious sentiment, recalls the similar case of the author of the
+_Historical and Critical Dictionary_, the illustrious Pierre Bayle,
+whom Gibbon resembled in more ways than one. At Oxford his religious
+education, like everything else connected with culture, had been
+entirely neglected. It seems hardly credible, yet we have his word for
+it, that he never subscribed or studied the Articles of the Church of
+England, and was never confirmed. When he first went up, he was judged
+to be too young, but the Vice-Chancellor directed him to return as
+soon as he had completed his fifteenth year, recommending him in the
+meantime to the instruction of his college. "My college forgot to
+instruct; I forgot to return, and was myself forgotten by the first
+magistrate of the university. Without a single lecture, either public
+or private, either Christian or Protestant, without any academical
+subscription, without any episcopal ordination, I was left by light of
+my catechism to grope my way to the chapel and communion table, where
+I was admitted without question how far or by what means I might be
+qualified to receive the sacrament. Such almost incredible neglect was
+productive of the worst mischiefs." What did Gibbon mean by this last
+sentence? Did he, when he wrote it, towards the end of his life,
+regret the want of early religious instruction? Nothing leads us to
+think so, or to suppose that his subsequent loss of faith was a heavy
+grief, supported, but painful to bear. His mind was by nature
+positive, or even pagan, and he had nothing of what the Germans call
+_religiositaet_ in him. Still there is a passage in his Memoirs where
+he oddly enough laments not having selected the _fat slumbers of the
+Church_ as an eligible profession. Did he reflect that perhaps the
+neglect of his religious education at Oxford had deprived him of a
+bishopric or a good deanery, and the learned leisure which such
+positions at that time conferred on those who cared for it? He could
+not feel that he was morally, or even spiritually, unfit for an office
+filled in his own time by such men as Warburton and Hurd. He would not
+have disgraced the episcopal bench; he would have been dignified,
+courteous, and hospitable; a patron and promoter of learning, we may
+be sure. His literary labours would probably have consisted of an
+edition of a Greek play or two, and certainly some treatise on the
+Evidences of Christianity. But in that case we should not have had the
+_Decline and Fall_.
+
+The "blind activity of idleness" to which he was exposed at Oxford,
+prevented any result of this kind. For want of anything better to do, he
+was led to read Middleton's _Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers
+which are Supposed to have Subsisted in the Christian Church_. Gibbon
+says that the effect of Middleton's "bold criticism" upon him was
+singular, and that instead of making him a sceptic, it made him more of
+a believer. He might have reflected that it is the commonest of
+occurrences for controversialists to produce exactly the opposite result
+to that which they intend, and that as many an apology for Christianity
+has sown the first seeds of infidelity, so an attack upon it might well
+intensify faith. What follows is very curious. "The elegance of style
+and freedom of argument were repelled by a shield of prejudice. I still
+revered the character, or rather the names of the saints and fathers
+whom Dr. Middleton exposes; nor could he destroy my implicit belief
+that the gift of miraculous powers was continued in the Church during
+the first four or five centuries of Christianity. But I was unable to
+resist the weight of historical evidence, that within the same period
+most of the leading doctrines of Popery were already introduced in
+theory and practice. Nor was my conclusion absurd that miracles are the
+test of truth, and that the Church must be orthodox and pure which was
+so often approved by the visible interposition of the Deity. The
+marvellous tales which are boldly attested by the Basils and
+Chrysostoms, the Austins and Jeromes, compelled me to embrace the
+superior merits of celibacy, the institution of the monastic life, the
+use of the sign of the cross, of holy oil, and even of images, the
+invocation of saints, the worship of relics, the rudiments of purgatory
+in prayers for the dead, and the tremendous mystery of the sacrifice of
+the body and the blood of Christ, which insensibly swelled into the
+prodigy of transubstantiation." In this remarkable passage we have a
+distinct foreshadow of the Tractarian movement, which came seventy or
+eighty years afterwards. Gibbon in 1752, at the age of fifteen, took up
+a position practically the same as Froude and Newman took up about the
+year 1830. In other words, he reached the famous _via media_ at a bound.
+But a second spring soon carried him clear of it, into the bosom of the
+Church of Rome.
+
+He had come to what are now called Church principles, by the energy of
+his own mind working on the scanty data furnished him by Middleton. By
+one of those accidents which usually happen in such cases, he made the
+acquaintance of a young gentleman who had already embraced
+Catholicism, and who was well provided with controversial tracts in
+favour of Romanism. Among these were the two works of Bossuet, the
+_Exposition of Catholic Doctrine_ and the _History of the Protestant
+Variations_. Gibbon says: "I read, I applauded, I believed, and surely
+I fell by a noble hand. I have since examined the originals with a
+more discerning eye, and shall not hesitate to pronounce that Bossuet
+is indeed a master of all the weapons of controversy. In the
+_Exposition_, a specious apology, the orator assumes with consummate
+art the tone of candour and simplicity, and the ten horned monster is
+transformed at his magic touch into the milk-white hind, who must be
+loved as soon as she is seen. In the _History_, a bold and well-aimed
+attack, he displays, with a happy mixture of narrative and argument,
+the faults and follies, the changes and contradictions of our first
+Reformers, whose variations, as he dexterously contends, are the mark
+of historical error, while the perpetual unity of the Catholic Church
+is the sign and test of infallible truth. To my present feelings it
+seems incredible that I should ever believe that I believed in
+transubstantiation. But my conqueror oppressed me with the sacramental
+words, '_Hoc est corpus meum_,' and dashed against each other the
+figurative half meanings of the Protestant sects; every objection was
+resolved into omnipotence, and, after repeating at St. Mary's the
+Athanasian Creed, I humbly acquiesced in the mystery of the Real
+Presence."
+
+Many reflections are suggested on the respective domains of reason and
+faith by these words, but they cannot be enlarged on here. No one,
+nowadays, one may hope, would think of making Gibbon's conversion a
+subject of reproach to him. The danger is rather that it should be
+regarded with too much honour. It unquestionably shows the early and
+trenchant force of his intellect: he mastered the logical position in
+a moment; saw the necessity of a criterion of faith; and being told
+that it was to be found in the practice of antiquity, boldly went
+there, and abided by the result. But this praise to his head does not
+extend to his heart. A more tender and deep moral nature would not
+have moved so rapidly. We must in fairness remember that it was not
+his fault that his religious education had been neglected at home, at
+school, and at college. But we have no reason to think that had it
+been attended to, the result would have been much otherwise. The root
+of spiritual life did not exist in him. It never withered, because it
+never shot up. Thus when he applied his acute mind to a religious
+problem, he contemplated it with the coolness and impartiality of a
+geometer or chess player, his intellect operated _in vacuo_ so to
+speak, untrammelled by any bias of sentiment or early training. He had
+no profound associations to tear out of his heart. He merely altered
+the premisses of a syllogism. When Catholicism was presented to him in
+a logical form, it met with no inward bar and repugnance. The house
+was empty and ready for a new guest, or rather the first guest. If
+Gibbon anticipated the Tractarian movement intellectually, he was
+farther removed than the poles are asunder from the mystic reverent
+spirit which inspired that movement. If we read the _Apologia_ of Dr.
+Newman, we perceive the likeness and unlikeness of the two cases. "As
+a matter of simple conscience," says the latter, "I felt it to be a
+duty to protest against the Church of Rome." At the time he refers to
+Dr. Newman was a Catholic to a degree Gibbon never dreamed of. But in
+the one case conscience and heart-ties "strong as life, stronger
+almost than death," arrested the conclusions of the intellect. Ground
+which Gibbon dashed over in a few months or weeks, the great
+Tractarian took ten years to traverse. So different is the mystic from
+the positive mind.
+
+Gibbon had no sooner settled his new religion than he resolved with a
+frankness which did him all honour to profess it publicly. He wrote to
+his father, announcing his conversion, a letter which he afterwards
+described, when his sentiments had undergone a complete change, as
+written with all the pomp, dignity, and self-satisfaction of a martyr.
+A momentary glow of enthusiasm had raised him, as he said, above all
+worldly considerations. He had no difficulty, in an excursion to
+London, in finding a priest, who perceived in the first interview that
+persuasion was needless. "After sounding the motives and merits of my
+conversion, he consented to admit me into the pale of the Church, and
+at his feet on the 8th of June 1753, I solemnly, though privately,
+abjured the errors of heresy." He was exactly fifteen years and one
+month old. Further details, which one would like to have, he does not
+give. The scene even of the solemn act is not mentioned, nor whether
+he was baptized again; but this may be taken for granted.
+
+The fact of any one "going over to Rome" is too common an occurrence
+nowadays to attract notice. But in the eighteenth century it was a
+rare and startling phenomenon. Gibbon's father, who was "neither a
+bigot nor a philosopher," was shocked and astonished by his "son's
+strange departure from the religion of his country." He divulged the
+secret of young Gibbon's conversion, and "the gates of Magdalen
+College were for ever shut" against the latter's return. They really
+needed no shutting at all. By the fact of his conversion to Romanism
+he had ceased to be a member of the University.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+AT LAUSANNE.
+
+
+The elder Gibbon showed a decision of character and prompt energy in
+dealing with his son's conversion to Romanism, which were by no means
+habitual with him. He swiftly determined to send him out of the
+country, far away from the influences and connections which had done
+such harm. Lausanne in Switzerland was the place selected for his
+exile, in which it was resolved he should spend some years in
+wholesome reflections on the error he had committed in yielding to the
+fascinations of Roman Catholic polemics. No time was lost: Gibbon had
+been received into the Church on the 8th of June, 1753, and on the
+30th of the same month he had reached his destination. He was placed
+under the care of a M. Pavillard, a Calvinist minister, who had two
+duties laid upon him, a general one, to superintend the young man's
+studies, a particular and more urgent one, to bring him back to the
+Protestant faith.
+
+It was a severe trial which Gibbon had now to undergo. He was by
+nature shy and retiring; he was ignorant of French; he was very young;
+and with these disadvantages he was thrown among entire strangers
+alone. After the excitement and novelty of foreign travel were over,
+and he could realise his position, he felt his heart sink within him.
+From the luxury and freedom of Oxford he was degraded to the
+dependence of a schoolboy. Pavillard managed his expenses, and his
+supply of pocket-money was reduced to a small monthly allowance. "I
+had exchanged," he says, "my elegant apartment in Magdalen College for
+a narrow gloomy street, the most unfrequented in an unhandsome town,
+for an old inconvenient house, and for a small chamber ill-contrived
+and ill-furnished, which on the approach of winter, instead of a
+companionable fire, must be warmed by the dull and invisible heat of a
+stove." Under these gloomy auspices he began the most profitable, and
+after a time the most pleasant, period of his whole life, one on which
+he never ceased to look back with unmingled satisfaction as the
+starting-point of his studies and intellectual progress.
+
+The first care of his preceptor was to bring about his religious
+conversion. Gibbon showed an honourable tenacity to his new faith, and
+a whole year after he had been exposed to the Protestant dialectics of
+Pavillard he still, as the latter observed with much regret, continued
+to abstain from meat on Fridays. There is something slightly
+incongruous in the idea of Gibbon _fasting_ out of religious scruples,
+but the fact shows that his religion had obtained no slight hold of
+him, and that although he had embraced it quickly, he also accepted
+with intrepid frankness all its consequences. His was not an intellect
+that could endure half measures and half lights; he did not belong to
+that class of persons who do not know their own minds.
+
+However it is not surprising that his religion, placed where he was,
+was slowly but steadily undermined. The Swiss clergy, he says, were
+acute and learned on the topics of controversy, and Pavillard seems to
+have been a good specimen of his class. An adult and able man, in
+daily contact with a youth in his own house, urging persistently but
+with tact one side of a thesis, could hardly fail in the course of
+time to carry his point. But though Gibbon is willing to allow his
+tutor a handsome share in the work of his conversion, he maintains
+that it was chiefly effected by his own private reflections. And this
+is eminently probable. What logic had set up, logic could throw down.
+He gives us a highly characteristic example of the reflections in
+question. "I still remember my solitary transport at the discovery of
+a philosophical argument against the doctrine of transubstantiation:
+that the text of Scripture which seems to inculcate the Real Presence
+is attested only by a single sense--our sight; while the real presence
+itself is disproved by three of our senses--the sight, the touch, and
+the taste." He was unaware of the distinction between the logical
+understanding and the higher reason, which has been made since his
+time to the great comfort of thinkers of a certain stamp. Having
+reached so far, his progress was easy and rapid. "The various articles
+of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream, and after a full
+conviction, on Christmas-day, 1754, I received the sacrament in the
+church of Lausanne. It was here that I suspended my religious
+inquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets and
+mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and
+Protestants." He thus had been a Catholic for about eighteen months.
+
+Gibbon's residence at Lausanne was a memorable epoch in his life on
+two grounds. Firstly, it was during the five years he spent there that
+he laid the foundations of that deep and extensive learning by which
+he was afterwards distinguished. Secondly, the foreign education he
+there received, at the critical period when the youth passes into the
+man, gave a permanent bent to his mind, and made him a continental
+European rather than an insular Englishman--two highly important
+factors in his intellectual growth.
+
+He says that he went up to Oxford with a "stock of erudition which
+might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a
+schoolboy might have been ashamed." Both erudition and ignorance were
+left pretty well undisturbed during his short and ill-starred
+university career. At Lausanne he found himself, for the first time,
+in possession of the means of successful study, good health, calm,
+books, and tuition, up to a certain point: that point did not reach
+very far. The good Pavillard, an excellent man, for whom Gibbon ever
+entertained a sincere regard, was quite unequal to the task of forming
+such a mind. There is no evidence that he was a ripe or even a fair
+scholar, and the plain fact is that Gibbon belongs to the honourable
+band of self-taught men. "My tutor," says Gibbon, "had the good sense
+to discern how far he could be useful, and when he felt that I
+advanced beyond his speed and measure, he wisely left me to my
+genius." Under that good guidance he formed an extensive plan of
+reviewing the Latin classics, in the four divisions of (1) Historians,
+(2) Poets, (3) Orators, and (4) Philosophers, in "chronological series
+from the days of Plautus and Sallust to the decline of the language
+and empire of Rome." In one year he read over the following authors:
+Virgil, Sallust, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Valerius Maximus, Tacitus,
+Suetonius, Quintus Curtius, Justin, Florus, Plautus, Terence, and
+Lucretius. We may take his word when he says that this review, however
+rapid, was neither hasty nor superficial. Gibbon had the root of all
+scholarship in him, the most diligent accuracy and an unlimited
+faculty of taking pains. But he was a great scholar, not a minute one,
+and belonged to the robust race of the Scaligers and the Bentleys,
+rather than to the smaller breed of the Elmsleys and Monks, and of
+course he was at no time a professed philologer, occupied chiefly with
+the niceties of language. The point which deserves notice in this
+account of his studies is their wide sweep, so superior and bracing,
+as compared with that narrow restriction to the "authors of the best
+period," patronised by teachers who imperfectly comprehend their own
+business. Gibbon proceeded on the common-sense principle, that if you
+want to obtain a real grasp of the literature, history, and genius of
+a people, you must master that literature with more or less
+completeness from end to end, and that to select arbitrarily the
+authors of a short period on the grounds that they are models of
+style, is nothing short of foolish. It was the principle on which
+Joseph Scaliger studied Greek, and indeed occurs spontaneously to a
+vigorous mind eager for real knowledge.[4]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 4: Vix delibatis conjugationibus Graecis, Homerum cum
+interpretatione arreptum uno et viginti diebus totum didici. Reliquos vero
+poetas Graecos omnes intra quatuor menses devoravi. Neque ullum oratorem aut
+historicum prius attigi quam poetas omnes tenerem.--_Scaligeri Epistolae,
+Lib. 1. Epis. 1._]
+
+Nor did he confine himself to reading: he felt that no one is sure of
+knowing a language who limits his study of it to the perusal of
+authors. He practised diligently Latin prose composition, and this in
+the simplest and most effectual way. "I translated an epistle of
+Cicero into French, and after throwing it aside till the words and
+phrases were obliterated from my memory, I retranslated my French into
+such Latin as I could find, and then compared each sentence of my
+imperfect version with the ease, the grace, the propriety of the Roman
+orator." The only odd thing in connection with this excellent method
+is that Gibbon in his Memoirs seems to think it was a novel discovery
+of his own, and would recommend it to the imitation of students,
+whereas it is as old as the days of Ascham at least. There is no
+indication that he ever in the least degree attempted Latin verse, and
+it is improbable that he should have done so, reading alone in
+Lausanne, under the slight supervision of such a teacher as Pavillard.
+The lack of this elegant frivolity will be less thought of now than it
+would some years ago. But we may admit that it would have been
+interesting to have a copy of hexameters or elegiacs by the historian
+of Rome. So much for Latin. In Greek he made far less progress. He had
+attained his nineteenth year before he learned the alphabet, and even
+after so late a beginning he did not prosecute the study with much
+energy.
+
+M. Pavillard seems to have taught him little more than the rudiments.
+"After my tutor had left me to myself I worked my way through about
+half the _Iliad_, and afterwards interpreted alone a large portion of
+Xenophon and Herodotus. But my ardour, destitute of aid and emulation,
+gradually cooled, and from the barren task of searching words in a
+lexicon I withdrew to the free and familiar conversation of Virgil and
+Tacitus." This statement of the Memoirs is more than confirmed by the
+journal of his studies, where we find him, as late as the year 1762,
+when he was twenty-five years of age, painfully reading Homer, it
+would appear, for the first time. He read on an average about a book a
+week, and when he had finished the _Iliad_ this is what he says: "I
+have so far met with the success I hoped for, that I have acquired a
+great facility in reading the language, and treasured up a very great
+stock of words. What I have rather neglected is the grammatical
+construction of them, and especially the many various inflections of
+the verbs." To repair this defect he wisely resolved to bestow some
+time every morning on the perusal of the Greek Grammar of Port Royal.
+Thus we see that at an age when many men are beginning to forget their
+Greek, Gibbon was beginning to learn it. Was this early deficiency
+ever repaired in Greek as it was in Latin? I think not. He never was
+at home in old Hellas as he was in old Rome. This may be inferred from
+the discursive notes of his great work, in which he has with admirable
+skill incorporated so much of his vast and miscellaneous reading. But
+his references to classic Greek authors are relatively few and timid
+compared with his grasp and mastery of the Latin. His judgments on
+Greek authors are also, to say the least, singular. When he had
+achieved the _Decline and Fall_, and was writing his Memoirs in the
+last years of his life, the Greek writer whom he selects for especial
+commendation is Xenophon. "Cicero in Latin and Xenophon in Greek are
+indeed the two ancients whom I would first propose to a liberal
+scholar, not only for the merit of their style and sentiments, but for
+the admirable lessons which may be applied almost to every situation
+of public and private life." Of the merit of Xenophon's sentiments,
+most people would now admit that the less said the better. The warmth
+of Gibbon's language with regard to Xenophon contrasts with the
+coldness he shows with regard to Plato. "I involved myself," he says,
+"in the philosophic maze of the writings of Plato, of which perhaps
+the dramatic is more interesting than the argumentative part." That
+Gibbon knew amply sufficient Greek for his purposes as an historian no
+one doubts, but his honourable candour enables us to see that he was
+never a Greek scholar in the proper sense of the word.
+
+It would be greatly to misknow Gibbon to suppose that his studies at
+Lausanne were restricted to the learned languages. He obtained
+something more than an elementary knowledge of mathematics, mastered
+De Crousaz' _Logic_ and Locke's _Essay_, and filled up his spare time
+with that wide and discursive reading to which his boundless curiosity
+was always pushing him. He was thoroughly happy and contented, and
+never ceased throughout his life to congratulate himself on the
+fortunate exile which had placed him at Lausanne. In one respect he
+did not use his opportunities while in Switzerland. He never climbed a
+mountain all the time he was there, though he lived to see in his
+later life the first commencement of the Alpine fever. On the other
+hand, as became a historian and man of sense, the social and political
+aspects of the country engaged his attention, as well they might. He
+enjoyed access to the best society of the place, and the impression he
+made seems to have been as favourable as the one he received.
+
+The influence of a foreign training is very marked in Gibbon,
+affecting as it does his general cast of thought, and even his style.
+It would be difficult to name any writer in our language, especially
+among the few who deserve to be compared with him, who is so
+un-English, not in a bad sense of the word, as implying objectionable
+qualities, but as wanting the clear insular stamp and native flavour.
+If an intelligent Chinese or Persian were to read his book in a French
+translation, he would not readily guess that it was written by an
+Englishman. It really bears the imprint of no nationality, and is
+emphatically European. We may postpone the question whether this is a
+merit or a defect, but it is a characteristic. The result has
+certainly been that he is one of the best-known of English prose
+writers on the Continent, and one whom foreigners most readily
+comprehend. This peculiarity, of which he himself was fully aware, we
+may agree with him in ascribing to his residence at Lausanne. At the
+"flexible age of sixteen he soon learned to endure, and gradually to
+adopt," foreign manners. French became the language in which he
+spontaneously thought; "his views were enlarged, and his prejudices
+were corrected." In one particular he cannot be complimented on the
+effect of his continental education, when he congratulates himself
+"that his taste for the French theatre had abated his idolatry for the
+gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is inculcated from our infancy
+as the first duty of Englishmen." Still it is well to be rid of
+idolatry and bigotry even with regard to Shakespeare. We must remember
+that the insular prejudices from which Gibbon rejoiced to be free were
+very different in their intensity and narrowness from anything of the
+kind which exists now. The mixed hatred and contempt for foreigners
+which prevailed in his day, were enough to excite disgust in any
+liberal mind.
+
+The lucid order and admirable literary form of Gibbon's great work are
+qualities which can escape no observant reader. But they are
+qualities which are not common in English books. The French have a
+saying, "Les Anglais ne savent pas faire un livre." This is unjust,
+taken absolutely, but as a general rule it is not without foundation.
+It is not a question of depth or originality of thought, nor of the
+various merits belonging to style properly so-called. In these
+respects English authors need not fear competition. But in the art of
+clear and logical arrangement, of building up a book in such order and
+method that each part contributes to the general effect of the whole,
+we must own that we have many lessons to learn of our neighbours. Now
+in this quality Gibbon is a Frenchman. Not Voltaire himself is more
+perspicuous than Gibbon. Everything is in its place, and disposed in
+such apparently natural sequence that the uninitiated are apt to think
+the matter could not have been managed otherwise. It is a case, if
+there ever was one, of consummate art concealing every trace, not only
+of art, but even of effort. Of course the grasp and penetrating
+insight which are implied here, were part of Gibbon's great endowment,
+which only Nature could give. But it was fortunate that his genius was
+educated in the best school for bringing out its innate quality.
+
+It would be difficult to explain why, except on that principle of
+decimation by which Macaulay accounted for the outcry against Lord
+Byron, Gibbon's solitary and innocent love passage has been made the
+theme of a good deal of malicious comment. The parties most
+interested, and who, we may presume, knew the circumstances better
+than any one else, seem to have been quite satisfied with each other's
+conduct. Gibbon and Mdlle. Curchod, afterwards Madame Necker, remained
+on terms of the _most_ intimate friendship till the end of the
+former's life. This might be supposed sufficient. But it has not been
+so considered by evil tongues. The merits of the case, however, may be
+more conveniently discussed in a later chapter. At this point it will
+be enough to give the facts.
+
+Mdlle. Susanne Curchod was born about the year 1740; her father was
+the Calvinist minister of Crassier, her mother a French Huguenot who
+had preferred her religion to her country. She had received a liberal
+and even learned education from her father, and was as attractive in
+person as she was accomplished in mind. "She was beautiful with that
+pure virginal beauty which depends on early youth" (Sainte-Beuve). In
+1757 she was the talk of Lausanne, and could not appear in an assembly
+or at the play without being surrounded by admirers; she was called La
+Belle Curchod. Gibbon's curiosity was piqued to see such a prodigy,
+and he was smitten with love at first sight. "I found her" he says
+"learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment,
+and elegant in manners." He was twenty and she seventeen years of age;
+no impediment was placed in the way of their meeting; and he was a
+frequent guest in her father's house. In fact Gibbon paid his court
+with an assiduity which makes an exception in his usually unromantic
+nature. "She listened," he says, "to the voice of truth and passion,
+and I might presume to hope that I had made some impression on a
+virtuous heart." We must remember that this and other rather glowing
+passages in his Memoirs were written in his old age, when he had
+returned to Lausanne, and when, after a long separation and many
+vicissitudes, he and Madame Necker were again thrown together in an
+intimacy of friendship which revived old memories. Letters of hers to
+him which will be quoted in a later chapter show this in a striking
+light. 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. "All for love" is a very pretty maxim,
+but it is apt to entail trouble when practically applied. Jean-Jacques
+Rousseau, who had the most beautiful sentiments on paper, but who in
+real life was not always a model of self-denial, found, as we shall
+see, grave fault with Gibbon's conduct. Gibbon, as a plain man of
+rather prosaic good sense, behaved neither heroically nor meanly.
+Time, absence, and the scenes of a new life, which he found in
+England, had their usual effect; his passion vanished. "My cure," he
+says, "was accelerated by a faithful report of the tranquillity and
+cheerfulness of the lady herself, and my love subsided in friendship
+and esteem." The probability, indeed, that he and Mdlle. Curchod would
+ever see each other again, must have seemed remote in the extreme.
+Europe and England were involved in the Seven Years War; he was fixed
+at home, and an officer in the militia; Switzerland was far off: when
+and where were they likely to meet? They did, contrary to all
+expectation, meet again, and renewed terms not so much of friendship
+as of affection. Mdlle. Curchod, as the wife of Necker, became
+somewhat of a celebrity, and it is chiefly owing to these last-named
+circumstances that the world has ever heard of Gibbon's early love.
+
+While he was at Lausanne Gibbon made the acquaintance of Voltaire, but
+it led to no intimacy or fruitful reminiscence. "He received me with
+civility as an English youth, but I cannot boast of any peculiar
+notice or distinction." Still he had "the satisfaction of hearing--an
+uncommon circumstance--a great poet declaim his own productions on the
+stage." One is often tempted, in reading Gibbon's Memoirs, to regret
+that he adopted the austere plan which led him "to condemn the
+practice of transforming a private memorial into a vehicle of satire
+or praise." As he truly says, "It was assuredly in his power to amuse
+the reader with a gallery of portraits and a collection of anecdotes."
+This reserve is particularly disappointing when a striking and
+original figure like Voltaire passes across the field, without an
+attempt to add one stroke to the portraiture of such a physiognomy.
+
+Gibbon had now (1758) been nearly five years at Lausanne, when his
+father suddenly intimated that he was to return home immediately. The
+Seven Years War was at its height, and the French had denied a passage
+through France to English travellers. Gibbon, or more properly his
+Swiss friends, thought that the alternative road through Germany might
+be dangerous, though it might have been assumed that the Great
+Frederick, so far as he was concerned, would make things as pleasant
+as possible to British subjects, whose country had just consented to
+supply him with a much-needed subsidy. The French route was preferred,
+perhaps as much from a motive of frolic as anything else. Two Swiss
+officers of his acquaintance undertook to convey Gibbon from France as
+one of their companions, under an assumed name, and in borrowed
+regimentals. His complete mastery of French removed any chance of
+detection on the score of language, and with a "mixture of joy and
+regret" on the 11th April, 1758, Gibbon left Lausanne. He had a
+pleasant journey, but no adventures, and returned to his native land
+after an absence of four years, ten months, and fifteen days.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+IN THE MILITIA.
+
+
+The only person whom, on his return, Gibbon had the least wish to see
+was his aunt, Catherine Porten. To her house he at once hastened, and
+"the evening was spent in the effusions of joy and tenderness." He
+looked forward to his first meeting with his father with no slight
+anxiety, and that for two reasons. First, his father had parted from
+him with anger and menace, and he had no idea how he would be received
+now. Secondly, his mother's place was occupied by a second wife, and
+an involuntary but strong prejudice possessed him against his
+step-mother. He was most agreeably disappointed in both respects. His
+father "received him as a man, as a friend, all constraint was
+banished at our first interview, and we ever after continued on the
+same terms of easy and equal politeness." So far the prospect was
+pleasant. But the step-mother remained a possible obstacle to all
+comfort at home. He seems to have regarded his father's second
+marriage as an act of displeasure with himself, and he was disposed to
+hate the rival of his mother. Gibbon soon found that the injustice was
+in his own fancy, and the imaginary monster was an amiable and
+deserving woman. "I could not be mistaken in the first view of her
+understanding; her knowledge and the elegant spirit of her
+conversation, her polite welcome, and her assiduous care to study and
+gratify my wishes announced at least that the surface would be smooth;
+and my suspicions of art and falsehood were gradually dispelled by the
+full discovery of her warm and exquisite sensibility." He became
+indeed deeply attached to his step-mother. "After some reserve on my
+side, our minds associated in confidence and friendship, and as Mrs.
+Gibbon had neither children nor the hopes of children, we more easily
+adopted the tender names and genuine characters of mother and son." A
+most creditable testimony surely to the worth and amiability of both
+of them. The friendship thus begun continued without break or coolness
+to the end of Gibbon's life. Thirty-five years after his first
+interview with his step-mother, and only a few months before his own
+death, when he was old and ailing, and the least exertion, by reason
+of his excessive corpulence, involved pain and trouble, he made a long
+journey to Bath for the sole purpose of paying Mrs. Gibbon a visit. He
+was very far from being the selfish Epicurean that has been sometimes
+represented.
+
+He had brought with him from Lausanne the first pages of a work which,
+after much bashfulness and delay, he at length published in the French
+language, under the title of _Essai sur l'Etude de la Litterature_, in
+the year 1761, that is two years after its completion. In one respect
+this juvenile work of Gibbon has little merit. The style is at once
+poor and stilted, and the general quality of remark eminently
+commonplace, where it does not fall into paradox. On the other hand,
+it has an interesting and even original side. The main idea of the
+little book, so far as it has one, was excellent, and really above the
+general thought of the age, namely, the vindication of classical
+literature and history generally from the narrow and singular
+prejudice which prevailed against them, especially in France. When
+Gibbon ascribes the design of his first work to a "refinement of
+vanity, the desire of justifying and praising the object of a
+favourite pursuit," he does himself less than justice. This first
+utterance of his historic genius was prompted by an unconscious but
+deep reaction against that contempt for the past, which was the
+greatest blot in the speculative movement of the eighteenth century.
+He resists the temper of his time rather from instinct than reason,
+and pleads the cause of learning with the hesitation of a man who has
+not fully seen round his subject, or even mastered his own thoughts
+upon it. Still there is his protest against the proposal of
+D'Alembert, who recommended that after a selection of facts had been
+made at the end of every century the remainder should be delivered to
+the flames. "Let us preserve them all," he says, "most carefully. A
+Montesquieu will detect in the most insignificant, relations which the
+vulgar overlook." He resented the haughty pretensions of the
+mathematical sciences to universal dominion, with sufficient vigour to
+have satisfied Auguste Comte. "Physics and mathematics are at present
+on the throne. They see their sister sciences prostrate before them,
+chained to their chariot, or at most occupied in adorning their
+triumph. Perhaps their downfall is not far off." To speak of a
+positive downfall of exact sciences was a mistake. But we may fairly
+suppose that Gibbon did not contemplate anything beyond a relative
+change of position in the hierarchy of the sciences, by which history
+and politics would recover or attain to a dignity which was denied
+them in his day. In one passage Gibbon shows that he had dimly
+foreseen the possibility of the modern inquiries into the conditions
+of savage life and prehistoric man. "An Iroquois book, even were it
+full of absurdities, would be an invaluable treasure. It would offer a
+unique example of the nature of the human mind placed in circumstances
+which we have never known, and influenced by manners and religious
+opinions, the complete opposite of ours." In this sentence Gibbon
+seems to call in anticipation for the researches which have since been
+prosecuted with so much success by eminent writers among ourselves,
+not to mention similar inquirers on the Continent.
+
+But in the meantime Gibbon had entered on a career which removed him
+for long months from books and study. Without sufficiently reflecting
+on what such a step involved, he had joined the militia, which was
+embodied in the year 1760; and for the next two and a half years led,
+as he says, a wandering life of military servitude. At first, indeed,
+he was so pleased with his new mode of life that he had serious
+thoughts of becoming a professional soldier. But this enthusiasm
+speedily wore off, and our "mimic Bellona soon revealed to his eyes
+her naked deformity." It was indeed no mere playing at soldiering that
+he had undertaken. He was the practical working commander of "an
+independent corps of 476 officers and men." "In the absence, or even
+in the presence of the two field officers" (one of whom was his
+father, the major) "I was intrusted with the effective labour of
+dictating the orders and exercising the battalion." And his duty did
+not consist in occasional drilling and reviews, but in serious
+marches, sometimes of thirty miles in a day, and camping under canvas.
+One encampment, on Winchester Downs, lasted four months. Gibbon does
+not hesitate to say that the superiority of his grenadiers to the
+detachments of the regular army, with which they were often mingled,
+was so striking that the most prejudiced regular could not have
+hesitated a moment to admit it. But the drilling, and manoeuvring, and
+all that pertained to the serious side of militia business interested
+Gibbon, and though it took up time it gave him knowledge of a special
+kind, of which he quite appreciated the value. He was much struck, for
+instance, by the difference between the nominal and effective force of
+every regiment he had seen, even when supposed to be complete, and
+gravely doubts whether a nominal army of 100,000 men often brings
+_fifty_ thousand into the field. What he found unendurable was the
+constant shifting of quarters, the utter want of privacy and leisure
+it often entailed, and the distasteful society in which he was forced
+to live. For eight months at a stretch he never took a book in his
+hand. "From the day we marched from Blandford, I had hardly a moment I
+could call my own, being almost continually in motion, or if I was
+fixed for a day, it was in the guardroom, a barrack, or an inn." Even
+worse were the drinking and late hours; sometimes in "rustic" company,
+sometimes in company in which joviality and wit were more abundant
+than decorum and common sense, which will surprise no one who hears
+that the famous John Wilkes, who was colonel of the Buckingham
+militia, was not unfrequently one of his boon companions. A few
+extracts from his journal will be enough. "To-day (August 28, 1762),
+Sir Thomas Worsley," the colonel of the battalion, "came to us to
+dinner. Pleased to see him, we kept bumperising till after
+roll-calling, Sir Thomas assuring us every fresh bottle how infinitely
+sober he was growing." September 23rd. "Colonel Wilkes, of the
+Buckingham militia, dined with us, and renewed the acquaintance Sir
+Thomas and myself had begun with him at Reading. I scarcely ever met
+with a better companion; he has inexhaustible spirits, infinite wit
+and humour, and a great deal of knowledge.... This proved a very
+debauched day; we drank a great deal both after dinner and supper; and
+when at last Wilkes had retired, Sir Thomas and some others (of whom I
+was not one) broke into his room and made him drink a bottle of claret
+in bed." December 17. "We found old Captain Meard at Arlesford with
+the second division of the Fourteenth. He and all his officers supped
+with us, which made the evening rather a drunken one." Gibbon might
+well say that the militia was unfit for and unworthy of him.
+
+Yet it is quite astonishing to see, as recorded in his journal, how
+keen an interest he still managed to retain in literature in the midst
+of all this dissipation, and how fertile he was of schemes and
+projects of future historical works to be prosecuted under more
+favourable auspices. Subject after subject occurred to him as eligible
+and attractive; he caresses the idea for a time, then lays it aside
+for good reasons. First, he pitched upon the expedition of Charles
+VIII. of France into Italy. He read and meditated upon it, and wrote a
+dissertation of ten folio pages, besides large notes, in which he
+examined the right of Charles VIII. to the crown of Naples, and the
+rival claims of the houses of Anjou and Aragon. In a few weeks he
+gives up this idea, firstly, for the rather odd reason that the
+subject was too remote from us; and, secondly, for the very good
+reason that the expedition was rather the introduction to great events
+than great and important in itself. He then successively chose and
+rejected the Crusade of Richard the First; the Barons' War against
+John and Henry III.; the history of Edward the Black Prince; the lives
+and comparisons of Henry V. and the Emperor Titus; the life of Sir
+Philip Sidney, and that of the Marquis of Montrose. At length he fixed
+on Sir Walter Raleigh as his hero. On this he worked with all the
+assiduity that his militia life allowed, read a great quantity of
+original documents relating to it, and, after some months of labour,
+declared that "his subject opened upon him, and in general improved
+upon a nearer prospect." But half a year later he "is afraid he will
+have to drop his hero." And he covers half a page with reasons to
+persuade himself that he was right in doing so. Besides the obvious
+one that he would be able to add little that was not already
+accessible in Oldys' _Life of Raleigh_, that the topic was exhausted,
+and so forth, he goes on to make these remarks, which have more
+signification to us now than perhaps they had to him when he wrote
+them. "Could I even surmount these obstacles, I should shrink with
+terror from the modern history of England, where every character is a
+problem and every reader a friend or an enemy: when a writer is
+supposed to hoist a flag of party, and is devoted to damnation by the
+adverse faction. Such would be _my_ reception at home; and abroad the
+historian of Raleigh must encounter an indifference far more bitter
+than censure or reproach. The events of his life are interesting; but
+his character is ambiguous; his actions are obscure; his writings are
+English, and his fame is confined to the narrow limits of our language
+and our island. _I must embrace a safer and more extensive theme._"
+Here we see the first gropings after a theme of cosmopolitan interest.
+He has arrived at two negative conclusions: that it must not be
+English, and must not be narrow. What it is to be, does not yet
+appear, for he has still a series of subjects to go through, to be
+taken up and discarded. The history of the liberty of the Swiss, which
+at a later period he partially achieved, was one scheme; the history
+of Florence under the Medici was another. He speaks with enthusiasm of
+both projects, adding that he will most probably fix upon the latter;
+but he never did anything of the kind.
+
+These were the topics which occupied Gibbon's mind during his service
+in the militia, escaping when he could from the uproar and vulgarity
+of the camp and the guardroom to the sanctuary of the historic muse,
+to worship in secret. But these private devotions could not remove his
+disgust at "the inn, the wine, and the company" he was forced to
+endure, and latterly the militia became downright insupportable to
+him. But honourable motives kept him to his post. "From a service
+without danger I might have retired without disgrace; but as often as
+I hinted a wish of resigning, my fetters were riveted by the friendly
+intreaties of the colonel, the parental authority of the major, and my
+own regard for the welfare of the battalion." At last the
+long-wished-for day arrived, when the militia was disbanded. "Our two
+companies," he writes in his journal, "were disembodied (December
+23rd, 1762), mine at Alton, my father's at Buriton. They fired three
+volleys, lodged the major's colours, delivered up their arms, received
+their money, partook of a dinner at the major's expense, and then
+separated, with great cheerfulness and regularity. Thus ended the
+militia." The compression that his spirit had endured was shown by the
+rapid energy with which he sought a change of scene and oblivion of
+his woes. Within little more than a month after the scene just
+described, Gibbon was in Paris beginning the grand tour.
+
+With that keen sense of the value of time which marked him, Gibbon
+with great impartiality cast up and estimated the profit and loss of
+his "bloodless campaigns." Both have been alluded to already. He
+summed up with great fairness in the entry that he made in his journal
+on the evening of the day on which he recovered his liberty. "I am
+glad that the militia has been, and glad that it is no more." This
+judgment he confirmed thirty years afterwards, when he composed his
+Memoirs. "My principal obligation to the militia was the making me an
+Englishman and a soldier. After my foreign education, with my reserved
+temper, I should long have continued a stranger in my native country,
+had I not been shaken in this various scene of new faces and new
+friends; had not experience forced me to feel the characters of our
+leading men, the state of parties, the forms of office, the operations
+of our civil and military system. In this peaceful service I imbibed
+the rudiments of the language and science of tactics, which opened a
+new field of study and observation. I diligently read and meditated
+the _Memoires Militaires_ of Quintus Icilius, the only writer who has
+united the merits of a professor and a veteran. The discipline and
+evolution of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the
+phalanx and the legion, and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers
+(the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the
+Roman Empire." No one can doubt it who compares Gibbon's numerous
+narratives of military operations with the ordinary performances of
+civil historians in those matters. The campaigns of Julian,
+Belisarius, and Heraclius, not to mention many others, have not only
+an uncommon lucidity, but also exhibit a clear appreciation of the
+obstacles and arduousness of warlike operations, which is rare or
+unknown to non-military writers. Macaulay has pointed out that Swift's
+party pamphlets are superior in an especial way to the ordinary
+productions of that class, in consequence of Swift's unavowed but very
+serious participation in the cabinet councils of Oxford and
+Bolingbroke. In the same manner Gibbon had an advantage through his
+military training, which gives him no small superiority to even the
+best historical writers who have been without it.
+
+The course of foreign travel which Gibbon was now about to commence
+had been contemplated before, but the war and the militia had
+postponed it for nearly three years. It appears that as early as the
+year 1760 the elder Gibbon had conceived the project of procuring a
+seat in Parliament for his son, and was willing to incur the
+anticipated expense of L1500 for that object. Young Gibbon, who seems
+to have very accurately gauged his own abilities at that early age,
+was convinced that the money could be much better employed in another
+way. He wrote in consequence, under his father's roof, a letter to the
+latter which does such credit to his head and to his heart, that,
+although it is somewhat long, it cannot with propriety be omitted
+here.
+
+     EDWARD GIBBON TO HIS FATHER.
+
+     "DEAR SIR,
+
+     "An address in writing from a person who has the pleasure of
+     being with you every day may appear singular. However I have
+     preferred this method, as upon paper I can speak without a
+     blush and be heard without interruption. If my letter
+     displeases you, impute it, dear sir, to yourself. You have
+     treated me, not like a son, but like a friend. Can you be
+     surprised that I should communicate to a friend all my
+     thoughts and all my desires? Unless the friend approve them,
+     let the father never know them; or at least let him know at
+     the same time that however reasonable, however eligible, my
+     scheme may appear to me, I would rather forget it for ever
+     than cause him the slightest uneasiness.
+
+     "When I first returned to England, attentive to my future
+     interests, you were so good as to give me hopes of a seat in
+     Parliament. This seat, it was supposed, would be an expense
+     of fifteen hundred pounds. This design flattered my vanity,
+     as it might enable me to shine in so august an assembly. It
+     flattered a nobler passion: I promised myself that, by the
+     means of this seat, I might one day be the instrument of
+     some good to my country. But I soon perceived how little
+     mere virtuous inclination, unassisted by talents, could
+     contribute towards that great end, and a very short
+     examination discovered to me that those talents had not
+     fallen to my lot. Do not, dear sir, impute this declaration
+     to a false modesty--the meanest species of pride. Whatever
+     else I may be ignorant of, I think I know myself, and shall
+     always endeavour to mention my good qualities without vanity
+     and my defects without repugnance. I shall say nothing of
+     the most intimate acquaintance with his country and
+     language, so absolutely necessary to every senator; since
+     they may be acquired, to allege my deficiency in them would
+     seem only the plea of laziness. But I shall say with great
+     truth that I never possessed that gift of speech, the first
+     requisite of an orator, which use and labour may improve,
+     but which nature can alone bestow; that my temper, quiet,
+     retired, somewhat reserved, could neither acquire
+     popularity, bear up against opposition, nor mix with ease in
+     the crowds of public life; that even my genius (if you allow
+     me any) is better qualified for the deliberate compositions
+     of the closet than for the extempore discourses of
+     Parliament. An unexpected objection would disconcert me, and
+     as I am incapable of explaining to others what I do not
+     understand myself, I should be meditating when I ought to be
+     answering. I even want necessary prejudices of party and of
+     nation. In popular assemblies it is often necessary to
+     inspire them, and never orator inspired well a passion which
+     he did not feel himself. Suppose me even mistaken in my own
+     character, to set out with the repugnance such an opinion
+     must produce offers but an indifferent prospect. But I hear
+     you say it is not necessary that every man should enter into
+     Parliament with such exalted hopes. It is to acquire a title
+     the most glorious of any in a free country, and to employ
+     the weight and consideration it gives in the service of
+     one's friends. Such motives, though not glorious, yet are
+     not dishonourable, and if we had a borough in our command,
+     if you could bring me in without any great expense, or if
+     our fortune enabled us to despise that expense, then indeed
+     I should think them of the greatest strength. But with our
+     private fortune, is it worthwhile to purchase at so high a
+     rate a title honourable in itself, but which I must share
+     with every fellow that can lay out 1500 pounds? Besides,
+     dear sir, a merchandise is of little value to the owner when
+     he is resolved not to sell it.
+
+     "I should affront your penetration did I not suppose you now
+     see the drift of this letter. It is to appropriate to
+     another use the sum with which you destined to bring me into
+     Parliament; to employ it, not in making me great, but in
+     rendering me happy. I have often heard you say yourself that
+     the allowance you had been so indulgent as to grant me,
+     though very liberal in regard to your estate, was yet but
+     small when compared with the almost necessary extravagances
+     of the age. I have indeed found it so, notwithstanding a
+     good deal of economy, and an exemption from many of the
+     common expenses of youth. This, dear sir, would be a way of
+     supplying these deficiencies without any additional expense
+     to you. But I forbear--if you think my proposals reasonable,
+     you want no intreaties to engage you to comply with them, if
+     otherwise all will be without effect.
+
+     "All that I am afraid of, dear sir, is that I should seem
+     not so much asking a favour, as this really is, as exacting
+     a debt. After all I can say, you will remain the best judge
+     of my good and your own circumstances. Perhaps, like most
+     landed gentlemen, an addition to my annuity would suit you
+     better than a sum of money given at once; perhaps the sum
+     itself may be too considerable. Whatever you may think
+     proper to bestow on me, or in whatever manner, will be
+     received with equal gratitude.
+
+     "I intended to stop here, but as I abhor the least
+     appearance of art, I think it better to lay open my whole
+     scheme at once. The unhappy war which now desolates Europe
+     will oblige me to defer seeing France till a peace. But that
+     reason can have no influence on Italy, a country which every
+     scholar must long to see. Should you grant my request, and
+     not disapprove of my manner of employing your bounty, I
+     would leave England this autumn and pass the winter at
+     Lausanne with M. de Voltaire and my old friends. In the
+     spring I would cross the Alps, and after some stay in Italy,
+     as the war must then be terminated, return home through
+     France, to live happily with you and my dear mother. I am
+     now two-and-twenty; a tour must take up a considerable time;
+     and although I believe you have no thoughts of settling me
+     soon (and I am sure I have not), yet so many things may
+     intervene that the man who does not travel early runs a
+     great risk of not travelling at all. But this part of my
+     scheme, as well as the whole of it, I submit entirely to
+     you.
+
+     "Permit me, dear sir, to add that I do not know whether the
+     complete compliance with my wishes could increase my love
+     and gratitude, but that I am very sure no refusal could
+     diminish those sentiments with which I shall always remain,
+     dear sir, your most dutiful and obedient son and servant.
+
+     "E. GIBBON, JUN."
+
+Instead of going to Italy in the autumn of 1760, as he fondly hoped
+when he wrote this letter, Gibbon was marching about the south of
+England at the head of his grenadiers. But the scheme sketched in the
+above letter was only postponed, and ultimately realised in every
+particular. The question of a seat in Parliament never came up again
+during his father's life, and no doubt the money it would have cost
+was, according to his wise suggestion, devoted to defray the expenses
+of his foreign tour, which he is now about to begin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE ITALIAN JOURNEY.
+
+
+Gibbon reached Paris on the 28th January, 1763; thirty-six days, as he
+tells us, after the disbanding of the militia. He remained a little
+over three months in the French capital, which on the whole pleased
+him so well that he thinks that if he had been independent and rich,
+he might have been tempted to make it his permanent residence.
+
+On the other hand he seems to have been little if at all aware of the
+extraordinary character of the society of which he became a spectator
+and for a time a member. He does not seem to have been conscious that
+he was witnessing one of the most singular social phases which have
+yet been presented in the history of man. And no blame attaches to him
+for this. No one of his contemporaries saw deeper in this direction
+than he did. It is a remarkable instance of the way in which the
+widest and deepest social movements are veiled to the eyes of those
+who see them, precisely because of their width and depth. Foreigners,
+especially Englishmen, visited Paris in the latter half of the
+eighteenth century and reported variously of their experience and
+impressions. Some, like Hume and Sterne, are delighted; some, like
+Gibbon, are quietly, but thoroughly pleased; some, like
+Walpole--though he perhaps is a class by himself--are half pleased and
+half disgusted. They all feel that there is something peculiar in what
+they witness, but never seem to suspect that nothing like it was ever
+seen before in the world. One is tempted to wish that they could have
+seen with our eyes, or, much more, that we could have had the
+privilege of enjoying their experience, of spending a few months in
+that singular epoch when "society," properly so called, the assembling
+of men and women in drawing-rooms for the purpose of conversation, was
+the most serious as well as the most delightful business of life. Talk
+and discussion in the senate, the market-place, and the schools are
+cheap; even barbarians are not wholly without them. But their
+refinement and concentration in the _salon_--of which the president is
+a woman of tact and culture--this is a phenomenon which never appeared
+but in Paris in the eighteenth century. And yet scholars, men of the
+world, men of business passed through this wonderland with eyes
+blindfolded. They are free to enter, they go, they come, without a
+sign that they have realised the marvellous scene that they were
+permitted to traverse. One does not wonder that they did not perceive
+that in those graceful drawing-rooms, filled with stately company of
+elaborate manners, ideas and sentiments were discussed and evolved
+which would soon be more explosive than gunpowder. One does not wonder
+that they did not see ahead of them--men never do. One does rather
+wonder that they did not see what was before their eyes. But wonder is
+useless and a mistake. People who have never seen a volcano cannot be
+expected to fear the burning lava, or even to see that a volcano
+differs from any other mountain.
+
+Gibbon had brought good introductions from London, but he admits that
+they were useless, or rather superfluous. His nationality and his
+_Essai_ were his best recommendations. It was the day of Anglomania,
+and, as he says, "every Englishman was supposed to be a patriot and a
+philosopher." "I had rather be," said Mdlle. de Lespinasse to Lord
+Shelburne, "the least member of the House of Commons than even the
+King of Prussia." Similar things must have been said to Gibbon, but he
+has not recorded them; and generally it may be said that he is
+disappointingly dull and indifferent to Paris, though he liked it well
+enough when there. He never caught the Paris fever as Hume did, and
+Sterne, or even as Walpole did, for all the hard things he says of the
+underbred and overbearing manners of the philosophers. Gibbon had
+ready access to the well-known houses of Madame Geoffrin, Madame
+Helvetius and the Baron d'Holbach; and his perfect mastery of the
+language must have removed every obstacle in the way of complete
+social intercourse. But no word in his Memoirs or Letters shows that
+he really saw with the eyes of the mind the singularities of that
+strange epoch. And yet he was there at an exciting and important
+moment. The Order of the Jesuits was tottering to its fall; the latter
+volumes of the _Encyclopedia_ were being printed, and it was no
+secret; the coruscating wit and audacity of the _salons_ were at their
+height. He is not unjust or prejudiced, but somewhat cold. He dines
+with Baron d'Holbach, and says his dinners were excellent, but nothing
+of the guests. He goes to Madame Geoffrin, and pronounces her house an
+excellent one. Such faint and commonplace praise reflects on the
+eulogist. The only man of letters of whom he speaks with warmth is
+Helvetius. He does not appear in this first visit to have known Madame
+du Deffand, who was still keeping her _salon_ with the help of the
+pale deep-eyed L'Espinasse, though the final rupture was imminent.
+Louis Racine died, and so did Marivaux, while he was in Paris. The old
+Opera-house in the Palais Royal was burnt down when he had been there
+a little over a month, and the representations were transferred to the
+Salle des Machines, in the Tuileries. The equestrian statue of Louis
+XV. was set up in the Place to which it gave its name (where the Luxor
+column now stands, in the Place de la Concorde) amidst the jeers and
+insults of the mob, who declared it would never be got to pass the
+hotel of Madame de Pompadour. How much or how little of all this
+touched Gibbon, we do not know. We do know one thing, that his English
+clothes were unfashionable and looked very foreign, the French being
+"excessively long-waisted." Doubtless his scanty purse could not
+afford a new outfit, such as Walpole two years afterwards, under the
+direction of Lady Hertford, promptly procured. On the 8th of May he
+hurried off to Lausanne.[5]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 5: The chronicle of events which occurred during Gibbon's
+sojourn in Paris will be found in the interesting _Memoires de
+Bachaumont._]
+
+His ultimate object was Italy. But he wisely resolved to place a
+period of solid study between the lively dissipation of Paris and his
+classic pilgrimage. He knew the difference between seeing things he
+had read about and reading about things after he had seen them; how
+the mind, charged with associations of famous scenes, is delicately
+susceptible of impressions, and how rapidly old musings take form and
+colour, when, stirred by outward realities; and contrariwise, how slow
+and inadequate is the effort to reverse this process, and to clothe
+with memories, monuments and sites over which the spirit has not sent
+a halo of previous meditation. So he settled down quietly at Lausanne
+for the space of nearly a year, and commenced a most austere and
+systematic course of reading on the antiquities of Italy. The list of
+learned works which he perused "with his pen in his hand" is
+formidable, and fills a quarto page. But he went further than this,
+and compiled an elaborate treatise on the nations, provinces, and
+towns of ancient Italy (which we still have) digested in alphabetical
+order, in which every Latin author, from Plautus to Rutilius, is laid
+under contribution for illustrative passages, which are all copied out
+in full. This laborious work was evidently Gibbon's own guidebook in
+his Italian travels, and one sees not only what an admirable
+preparation it was for the object in view, but what a promise it
+contained of that scrupulous thoroughness which was to be his mark as
+an historian. His mind was indeed rapidly maturing, and becoming
+conscious in what direction its strength lay.
+
+His account of his first impressions of Rome has been often quoted,
+and deserves to be so again. "My temper is not very susceptible of
+enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned
+to affect. But at the distance of twenty-five years I can neither
+forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I
+first approached and entered the Eternal City. After a sleepless
+night, I trod with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum. Each memorable
+spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once
+present to my eye, and several days of intoxication were lost and
+enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute examination." He
+gave eighteen weeks to the study of Rome only, and six to Naples, and
+we may rest assured that he made good use of his time. But what makes
+this visit to Rome memorable in his life and in literary history is
+that it was the occasion and date of the first conception of his great
+work. "It was at Rome, on the 15th October, 1764, as I sat musing amid
+the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing
+vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline
+and fall of the city first started to my mind." The scene, the
+contrast of the old religion and the new, the priests of Christ
+replacing the flamens of Jupiter, the evensong of Catholic Rome
+swelling like a dirge over the prostrate Pagan Rome might well
+concentrate in one grand luminous idea the manifold but unconnected
+thoughts with which his mind had so long been teeming. Gibbon had
+found his work, which was destined to fill the remainder of his life.
+Henceforth there is a fixed centre around which his thoughts and
+musings cluster spontaneously. Difficulties and interruptions are not
+wanting. The plan then formed is not taken in hand at once; on the
+contrary, it is contemplated at "an awful distance"; but it led him on
+like a star guiding his steps, till he reached his appointed goal.
+
+After crossing the Alps on his homeward journey, Gibbon had had some
+thoughts of visiting the southern provinces of France. But when he
+reached Lyons he found letters "expressive of some impatience" for his
+return. Though he does not exactly say as much, we may justly conclude
+that the elder Gibbon's pecuniary difficulties were beginning to be
+oppressive. So the traveller, with the dutifulness that he ever showed
+to his father, at once bent his steps northward. Again he passed
+through Paris, and the place had a new attraction in his eyes in the
+person of Mdlle. Curchod, now become Madame Necker, and wife of the
+great financier.
+
+This perhaps will be the most convenient place to notice and estimate
+a certain amount of rather spiteful gossip, of which Gibbon was the
+subject in Switzerland about this time. Rousseau and his friend
+Moultou have preserved it for us, and it is probable that it has lost
+none of its pungency in passing through the hands of the latter. The
+substance of it is this:--that in the year 1763, when Gibbon revisited
+Lausanne, as we have seen, Susanne Curchod was still in a pitiable
+state of melancholy and well nigh broken-hearted at Gibbon's manifest
+coldness, which we know he considered to be "friendship and esteem."
+Whether he even saw her on this visit cannot be considered certain,
+but it is at least highly probable. Be that as it may: this is the
+picture of her condition as drawn by Moultou in a letter to Rousseau:
+"How sorry I am for our poor Mdlle. Curchod! Gibbon, whom she loves,
+and to whom I know she has sacrificed some excellent matches, has come
+to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of his old
+passion as she is far from cure. She has written me a letter that
+makes my heart ache." Rousseau says in reply, "He who does not
+appreciate Mdlle. Curchod is not worthy of her; he who appreciates her
+and separates himself from her is a man to be despised. She does not
+know what she wants. Gibbon serves her better than her own heart. I
+would rather a hundred times that he left her poor and free among you
+than that he should take her off to be rich and miserable in
+England." One does not quite see how Gibbon could have acted to the
+contentment of Jean-Jacques. For not taking Mdlle. Curchod to
+England--as we may presume he would have done if he had married
+her--he is contemptible. Yet if he does take her he will make her
+miserable, and Rousseau would rather a hundred times he left her
+alone--precisely what he was doing; but then he was despicable for
+doing it. The question is whether there is not a good deal of
+exaggeration in all this. Only a year after the tragic condition in
+which Moultou describes Mdlle. Curchod she married M. Necker, and
+became devoted to her husband. A few months after she married Necker
+she cordially invited Gibbon to her house every day of his sojourn in
+Paris. If Gibbon had behaved in the unworthy way asserted, if she had
+had her feelings so profoundly touched and lacerated as Moultou
+declares, would she, or even could she, have acted thus? If she was
+conscious of being wronged, and he was conscious--as he must have
+been--of having acted basely, or at least unfeelingly, is it not as
+good as certain that both parties would have been careful to see as
+little of each other as possible? A broken-off love-match, even
+without complication of unworthy conduct on either side, is generally
+an effective bar to further intercourse. But in this case the
+intercourse is renewed on the very first opportunity, and never
+dropped till the death of one of the persons concerned.
+
+Two letters have been preserved of Gibbon and Madame Necker
+respectively, nearly of the same date, and both referring to this
+rather delicate topic of their first interviews after her marriage.
+Gibbon writes to his friend Holroyd, "The Curchod (Madame Necker) I
+saw in Paris. She was very fond of me, and the husband particularly
+civil. Could they insult me more cruelly? Ask me every evening to
+supper, go to bed and leave me alone with his wife--what impertinent
+security! It is making an old lover of mighty little consequence. She
+is as handsome as ever, and much genteeler; seems pleased with her
+wealth rather than proud of it. I was exalting Nanette d'Illens's good
+luck and the fortune" (this evidently refers to some common
+acquaintance, who had changed her name to advantage). "'What fortune,'
+she said with an air of contempt:--'not above twenty thousand livres a
+year.' I smiled, and she caught herself immediately, 'What airs I give
+myself in despising twenty thousand livres a year, who a year ago
+looked upon eight hundred as the summit of my wishes.'"
+
+Let us turn to the lady's account of the same scenes. "I do not know
+if I told you," she writes to a friend at Lausanne, "that I have seen
+Gibbon, and it has given me more pleasure than I know how to express.
+Not indeed that I retain any sentiment for a man who I think does not
+deserve much" (this little toss of pique or pride need not mislead
+us); "but my feminine vanity could not have had a more complete and
+honest triumph. He stayed two weeks in Paris, and I had him every day
+at my house; he has become soft, yielding, humble, decorous to a
+fault. He was a constant witness of my husband's kindness, wit, and
+gaiety, and made me remark for the first time, by his admiration for
+wealth, the opulence with which I am surrounded, and which up to this
+moment had only produced a disagreeable impression upon me."
+Considering the very different points of view of the writers, these
+letters are remarkably in unison. The solid fact of the daily visits
+is recorded in both. It is easy to gather from Madame Necker's letter
+that she was very glad to show Mr. Gibbon that for going farther and
+not marrying him she had not fared worse. The rather acid allusion to
+"opulence" is found in both letters; but much more pronounced in hers
+than in his. Each hints that the other thought too much of wealth. But
+he does so with delicacy, and only by implication; she charges him
+coarsely with vulgar admiration for it. We may reasonably suspect that
+riches had been the subject of not altogether smooth conversation
+between them, in the later part of the evening, perhaps, after M.
+Necker had retired in triumph to bed. One might even fancy that there
+was a tacit allusion by Madame Necker to the dialogue recorded by
+Gibbon to Holroyd, when his smile checked her indirect pride in her
+own wealth, and that she remembered that smile with just a touch of
+resentment. If so, nothing was more natural and comforting than to
+charge him with the failing that he had detected in her. But here are
+the facts. Eight months after her marriage, Madame Necker admits that
+she had Gibbon every day to her house. He says that she was very
+cordial. She would have it understood that she received him only for
+the sake of gratifying a feminine vanity. For her own sake one might
+prefer his interpretation to hers. It is difficult to believe that the
+essentially simple-minded Madame Necker would have asked a man every
+day to her house merely to triumph over him; and more difficult still
+to believe that the man would have gone if such had been the object. A
+little tartness in these first interviews, following on a relation of
+some ambiguity, cannot surprise one. But it was not the dominant
+ingredient, or the interviews must have ceased of their own accord. In
+any case few will admit that either of the persons concerned would
+have written as they did if Moultou's statement were correct. In
+neither epistle is there any trace of a grand passion felt or
+slighted. We discover the much lower level of vanity and badinage. And
+the subsequent relations of Gibbon and Madame Necker all tend to prove
+that this was the real one.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+LITERARY SCHEMES.--THE HISTORY OF SWITZERLAND.--DISSERTATION ON THE
+SIXTH AENEID.--FATHER'S DEATH.--SETTLEMENT IN LONDON.
+
+
+Gibbon now (June, 1765) returned to his father's house, and remained
+there till the latter's death in 1770. He describes these five years
+as having been the least pleasant and satisfactory of his whole life.
+The reasons were not far to seek. The unthrifty habits of the elder
+Gibbon were now producing their natural result. He was saddled with
+debt, from which two mortgages, readily consented to by his son, and
+the sale of the house at Putney, only partially relieved him. Gibbon
+now began to fear that he had an old age of poverty before him. He had
+pursued knowledge with single-hearted loyalty and now became aware
+that from a worldly point of view knowledge is not often a profitable
+investment. A more dejecting discovery cannot be made by the sincere
+scholar. He is conscious of labour and protracted effort, which the
+prosperous professional man and tradesman who pass him on their road
+to wealth with a smile of scornful pity have never known. He has
+forsaken comparatively all for knowledge, and the busy world meets him
+with a blank stare, and surmises shrewdly that he is but an idler,
+with an odd taste for wasting his time over books. It says much for
+Gibbon's robustness of spirit that he did not break down in these
+trying years, that he did not weakly take fright at his prospect, and
+make hasty and violent efforts to mend it. On the contrary, he
+remained steadfast and true to the things of the mind. With diminished
+cheerfulness perhaps, but with no abatement of zeal, he pursued his
+course and his studies, thereby proving that he belonged to the select
+class of the strong and worthy who, penetrated with the loveliness of
+science, will not be turned away from it.
+
+His first effort to redeem the time was a project of a history of
+Switzerland. His choice was decided by two circumstances: (1) his love
+for a country which he had made his own by adoption; (2) by the fact
+that he had in his friend Deyverdun, a fellow-worker who could render
+him most valuable assistance. Gibbon never knew German, which is not
+surprising when we reflect what German literature amounted to, in
+those days; and he soon discovered that the most valuable authorities
+of his projected work were in the German language. But Deyverdun was a
+perfect master of that tongue, and translated a mass of documents for
+the use of his friend. They laboured for two years in collecting
+materials, before Gibbon felt himself justified in entering on the
+"more agreeable task of composition." And even then he considered the
+preparation insufficient, as no doubt it was. He felt he could not do
+justice to his subject; uninformed as he was "by the scholars and
+statesmen, and remote from the archives and libraries of the Swiss
+republic." Such a beginning was not of good augury for the success of
+the undertaking. He never wrote more than about sixty quarto pages of
+the projected work, and these, as they were in French, were submitted
+to the judgment of a literary society of foreigners in London, before
+whom the MS. was read. The author was unknown, and Gibbon attended the
+meeting, and thus listened without being observed "to the free
+strictures and unfavourable sentence of his judges." He admits that
+the momentary sensation was painful; but the condemnation was ratified
+by his cooler thoughts: and he declares that he did not regret the
+loss of a slight and superficial essay, though it "had cost some
+expense, much labour, and more time." He says in his Memoirs that he
+burnt the sheets. But this, strange to say, was a mistake on his part.
+They were found among his papers after his death, and though not
+published by Lord Sheffield in the first two volumes of his
+Miscellaneous Works, which the latter edited in 1796, they appeared in
+the supplemental third volume which came out in 1815. We thus can
+judge for ourselves of their value. One sees at once why and how they
+failed to satisfy their author's mature judgment. They belong to that
+style of historical writing which consists in the rhetorical
+transcription and adornment of the original authorities, but in which
+the writer never gets close enough to his subject to apply the
+touchstone of a clear and trenchant criticism. Such criticism indeed
+was not common in Switzerland in his day, and one cannot blame Gibbon
+for not anticipating the researches of modern investigators. But his
+historical sense was aroused to suspicion by the story of William
+Tell, which he boldly sets down as a fable. Altogether, one may
+pronounce the sketch to be pleasantly written in a flowing,
+picturesque narrative, and showing immense advance in style beyond the
+essay on the Study of Literature. David Hume, to whom he submitted
+it, urged him to persevere, and the advice was justified under the
+circumstances, although one cannot now regret that it was not
+followed.
+
+After the failure of this scheme Gibbon, still in connection with
+Deyverdun, planned a periodical work under the title of _Memoires
+Litteraires de la Grande Bretagne_. Only two volumes ever appeared,
+and the speculation does not seem to have met with much success.
+Gibbon "presumes to say that their merit was superior to their
+reputation, though they produced more reputation than emolument." The
+first volume is executed with evident pains, and gives a fair picture
+of the literary and social condition of England at the time. The heavy
+review articles are interspersed with what is intended to be lighter
+matter on the fashions, foibles, and prominent characters of the day.
+Gibbon owns the authorship of the first article on Lord Lyttelton's
+history of Henry the Second, and his hand is discernible in the
+account of the fourth volume of Lardner's work _On the Credibility of
+the Gospel History_. The first has no merit beyond a faithful report.
+The latter is written with much more zest and vigour, and shows the
+interest that he already took in Christian antiquities. Other
+articles, evidently from the pen of Deyverdun, on the English theatre
+and Beau Nash of Bath, are the liveliest in the collection. The
+magazine was avowedly intended for Continental readers, and might have
+obtained success if it had been continued long enough. But it died
+before it had time to make itself known.[6]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 6: Two volumes appeared of the _Memoires Litteraires_. Of
+these only the first is to be found in the British Museum. It is a
+small 12mo, containing 230 pages. Here is the Table des
+Matieres:--(1) Histoire de Henri II., par Milord Lyttelton; (2) Le
+Nouveau Guide de Bath; (3) Essai sur l'Histoire de la Societe Civile,
+par M. Ferguson; (4) Conclusions des Memoires de Miss Sydney Bidulph;
+Theologie (5) Recueil des Temoignages Anciens, par Lardner; (6) Le
+Confessional; (7) Transactions Philosophiques; (8) Le Gouverneur, par
+D. L. F. Spectacles, Beaux Arts, Nouvelles Litteraires.]
+
+When the _Memoires Litteraires_ collapsed Gibbon was again left
+without a definite object to concentrate his energy, and with his work
+still to seek. One might wonder why he did not seriously prepare for
+the _Decline and Fall_. It must have been chiefly at this time that it
+was "contemplated at an awful distance," perhaps even with numbing
+doubt whether the distance would ever be lessened and the work
+achieved, or even begun. The probability is he had too little peace of
+mind to undertake anything that required calm and protracted labour.
+"While so many of my acquaintance were married, or in Parliament, or
+advancing with a rapid step in the various roads of honour or fortune
+I stood alone, immovable, and insignificant.... The progress and the
+knowledge of our domestic disorders aggravated my anxiety, and I began
+to apprehend that in my old age I might be left without the fruits of
+either industry or inheritance." Perhaps a reasonable apprehension of
+poverty is more paralysing than the reality. In the latter case prompt
+action is so imperatively commanded that the mind has no leisure for
+the fatal indulgence of regrets; but when indigence seems only
+imminent, and has not yet arrived, a certain lethargy is apt to be
+produced out of which only the most practical characters can rouse
+themselves, and these are not, as a rule, scholars by nature. We need
+not be surprised that Gibbon during these years did nothing serious,
+and postponed undertaking his great work. The inspiration needed to
+accomplish such a long and arduous course as it implied could not be
+kindled in a mind harassed by pecuniary cares. The fervent heat of a
+poet's imagination may glow as brightly in poverty as in opulence, but
+the gentle yet prolonged enthusiasm of the historian is likely to be
+quenched when the resources of life are too insecure.[7]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 7: Scholarship has been frequently cultivated amidst great
+poverty; but from the time of Thucydides, the owner of mines, to
+Grote, the banker, historians seem to have been in, at least, easy
+circumstances.]
+
+It is perhaps not wholly fanciful to suspect that Gibbon's next
+literary effort was suggested and determined by the inward
+discomposure he felt at this time. By nature he was not a
+controversialist; not that he wanted the abilities to support that
+character, but his mind was too full, fertile, and fond of real
+knowledge to take much pleasure in the generally barren occupation of
+gainsaying other men. But at this point in his life he made an
+exception, and an unprovoked exception. When he wrote his famous
+vindication of the first volume of the _Decline and Fall_ he was
+acting in self-defence, and repelling savage attacks upon his
+historical veracity. But in his _Critical Observations on the Sixth
+Book of the AEneid_ he sought controversy for its own sake, and became
+a polemic--shall we say out of gaiety or bitterness of heart? That
+inward unrest easily produces an aggressive spirit is a matter of
+common observation, and it may well have been that in attacking
+Warburton he sought a diversion from the worry of domestic cares. Be
+that as it may, his _Observations_ are the most pungent and dashing
+effusion he ever allowed himself. It was his first effort in English
+prose, and it is doubtful whether he ever managed his mother tongue
+better, if indeed he ever managed it so well. The little tract is
+written with singular spirit and rapidity of style. It is clear,
+trenchant, and direct to a fault. It is indeed far less critical than
+polemical, and shows no trace of lofty calm, either moral or
+intellectual. We are not repelled much by his eagerness to refute and
+maltreat his opponent. That was not alien from the usages of the time,
+and Warburton at least had no right to complain of such a style of
+controversy. But there is no width and elevation of view. The writer
+does not carry the discussion up to a higher level, and dominate his
+adversary from a superior standpoint. Controversy is always ephemeral
+and vulgar, unless it can rise to the discussion and establishment of
+facts and principles valuable for themselves, independently of the
+particular point at issue. It is this quality which has made the
+master-works of Chillingworth and Bentley supereminent. The particular
+point for which the writers contended is settled or forgotten. But in
+moving up to that point they touched--such was their large discourse
+of reason--on topics of perennial interest, did such justice, though
+only in passing, to certain other truths, that they are gratefully
+remembered ever after. Thus Bentley's dissertation on Phalaris is
+read, not for the main thesis--proof of the spuriousness of the
+letters--but for the profound knowledge and admirable logic with which
+subsidiary positions are maintained on the way to it. Tried by this
+standard, and he deserves to be tried by a high standard, Gibbon fails
+not much, but entirely. The _Observations_ are rarely, if ever,
+quoted as an authority of weight by any one engaged on classical or
+Virgilian literature. This arises from the attitude of the writer, who
+is nearly solely occupied with establishing negative conclusions that
+AEneas was _not_ a lawgiver, that the Sixth AEneid is _not_ an allegory,
+that Virgil had _not_ been initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries when
+he wrote it, and so forth. Indeed the best judges now hold that he has
+not done full justice to the grain of truth that was to be found in
+Warburton's clumsy and prolix hypothesis.[8] It should be added that
+Gibbon very candidly admits and regrets the acrimonious style of the
+pamphlet, and condemns still more "in a personal attack his cowardly
+concealment of his name and character."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 8: Conington, _Introduction to the Sixth AEneid_. "A reader
+of the present day will, I think, be induced to award the palm of
+learning and ingenuity to Warburton." "The language and imagery of the
+sixth book more than once suggest that Virgil intended to embody in
+his picture the poetical view of that inner side of ancient religion
+which the mysteries may be supposed to have presented."--_Suggestion
+on the Study of the AEneid_, by H. Nettleship, p. 13.]
+
+The _Observations_ were the last work which Gibbon published in his
+father's lifetime. His account of the latter's death (November 10,
+1770) is feelingly written, and shows the affectionate side of his own
+nature to advantage. He acknowledges his father's failings, his
+weakness and inconstancy, but insists that they were compensated by
+the virtues of the head and heart, and the warmest sentiments of
+honour and humanity. "His graceful person, polite address, gentle
+manners, and unaffected cheerfulness recommended him to the favour of
+every company." And Gibbon recalls with emotion "the pangs of shame,
+tenderness, and self-reproach" which preyed on his father's mind at
+the prospect, no doubt, of leaving an embarrassed estate and
+precarious fortune to his son and widow. He had no taste for study in
+the fatal summer of 1770, and declares that he would have been ashamed
+if he had. "I submitted to the order of nature," he says, in words
+which recall his resignation on losing his mistress--"I submitted to
+the order of nature, and my grief was soothed by the conscious
+satisfaction that I had discharged all the duties of filial piety." We
+see Gibbon very fairly in this remark. He had tenderness, steady and
+warm attachments, but no passion.
+
+Nearly two years elapsed after his father's death, before he was able
+to secure from the wreck of his estate a sufficient competence to
+establish himself in London. His house was No. 7, Bentinck Street,
+near Manchester Square, then a remote suburb close to the country
+fields. His housekeeping was that of a solitary bachelor, who could
+afford an occasional dinner-party. Though not absolutely straitened in
+means, we shall presently see that he was never quite at his ease in
+money matters while he remained in London. But he had now freedom and
+no great anxieties, and he began seriously to contemplate the
+execution of his great work.
+
+Gibbon, as we have seen, looked back with little satisfaction on the
+five years between his return from his travels and his father's death.
+They are also the years during which his biographer is able to follow
+him with the least certainty. Hardly any of his letters which refer to
+that period have been preserved, and he has glided rapidly over it in
+his Memoirs. Yet it was, in other respects besides the matter of
+pecuniary troubles, a momentous epoch in his life. The peculiar views
+which he adopted and partly professed on religion must have been
+formed then. But the date, the circumstance, and the occasion are left
+in darkness. Up to December 18, 1763, Gibbon was evidently a believer.
+In an entry in his private journal under that date he speaks of a
+Communion Sunday at Lausanne as affording an "edifying spectacle," on
+the ground that there is "neither business nor parties, and they
+interdict even whist" on that day. How soon after this his opinions
+began to change, it is impossible to say. But we are conscious of a
+markedly different tone in the _Observations_, and a sneer at "the
+ancient alliance between the avarice of the priests and the credulity
+of the people" is in the familiar style of the Deists from Toland to
+Chubb. There is no evidence of his familiarity with the widely
+diffused works of the freethinkers, and as far as I am aware he does
+not quote or refer to them even once. But they could hardly have
+escaped his notice. Still his strong historic sense and solid
+erudition would be more likely to be repelled than attracted by their
+vague and inaccurate scholarship, and chimerical theories of the light
+of Nature. Still we know that he practically adopted, in the end, at
+least the negative portion of these views, and the question is, When
+did he do so? His visit to Paris, and the company that he frequented
+there, might suggest that as a probable date of his change of
+opinions. But the entry just referred to was subsequent by several
+months to that visit, and we may with confidence assume that no
+freethinker of the eighteenth century would pronounce the austerities
+of a Communion Sunday in a Calvinist town an edifying spectacle. It is
+probable that his relinquishing of dogmatic faith was gradual, and for
+a time unconscious. It was an age of tepid belief, except among the
+Nonjurors and Methodists; and with neither of these groups could he
+have had the least sympathy. His acquaintance with Hume, and his
+partiality for the writings of Bayle, are more probable sources of a
+change of sentiment which was in a way predestined by natural bias and
+cast of mind. Any occasion would serve to precipitate the result. In
+any case, this result had been attained some years before the
+publication of the first volume of the _Decline and Fall_, in 1776.
+Referring to his preparatory studies for the execution of that work,
+he says, "As I believed, and as I still believe, that the propagation
+of the Gospel and the triumph of the Church are inseparably connected
+with the decline of the Roman monarchy, I weighed the causes and
+effects of the revolution, and contrasted the narratives and apologies
+of the Christians themselves with the glances of candour or enmity
+which the pagans have cast on the rising sects. The Jewish and heathen
+testimonies, as they are collected and illustrated by Dr. Lardner,
+directed without superseding my search of the originals, and in an
+ample dissertation on the miraculous darkness of the Passion I
+privately drew my conclusions from the silence of an unbelieving age."
+Here we have the argument which concludes the sixteenth chapter
+distinctly announced. But the previous travail of spirit is not
+indicated. Gibbon has marked with precision the stages of his
+conversion to Romanism. But the following chapters of the history of
+his religious opinions he has not written, or he has suppressed them,
+and we can only vaguely guess their outline.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+LIFE IN LONDON.--PARLIAMENT.--THE BOARD OF TRADE.--THE DECLINE AND
+FALL.--MIGRATION TO LAUSANNE.
+
+
+Gibbon's settlement in London as master in his own house did not come
+too soon. A few more years of anxiety and dependence, such as he had
+passed of late with his father in the country, would probably have
+dried up the spring of literary ambition and made him miss his career.
+He had no tastes to fit him for a country life. The pursuit of farming
+only pleased him in Virgil's _Georgics_. He seems neither to have
+liked nor to have needed exercise, and English rural sports had no
+charms for him. "I never handled a gun, I seldom mounted a horse, and
+my philosophic walks were soon terminated by a shady bench, where I
+was long detained by the sedentary amusement of reading or
+meditation." He was a born _citadin_. "Never," he writes to his friend
+Holroyd, "never pretend to allure me by painting in odious colours the
+dust of London. I love the dust, and whenever I move into the Weald it
+is to visit you, and not your trees." His ideal was to devote the
+morning, commencing early--at seven, say--to study, and the afternoon
+and evening to society and recreation, not "disdaining the innocent
+amusement of a game at cards." And this plan of a happy life he very
+fairly realised in his little house in Bentinck Street. The letters
+that we have of his relating to this period are buoyant with spirits
+and self-congratulation at his happy lot. He writes to his step-mother
+that he is every day more satisfied with his present mode of life,
+which he always believed was most calculated to make him happy. The
+stable and moderate stimulus of congenial society, alternating with
+study, was what he liked. The excitement and dissipation of a town
+life, which purchase pleasure to-day at the expense of fatigue and
+disgust to-morrow, were as little to his taste as the amusements of
+the country. In 1772, when he settled in London, he was young in
+years, but he was old in tastes, and he enjoyed himself with the
+complacency often seen in healthy old men. "My library," he writes to
+Holroyd in 1773, "Kensington Gardens, and a few parties with new
+acquaintance, among whom I reckon Goldsmith and Sir Joshua Reynolds,"
+(poor Goldsmith was to die the year following), "fill up my time, and
+the monster _ennui_ preserves a very respectful distance. By the by,
+your friends Batt, Sir John Russell, and Lascelles dined with me one
+day before they set off: _for I sometimes give the prettiest little
+dinner in the world_." One can imagine Gibbon, the picture of
+plumpness and content, doing the honours of his modest household.
+Still he was never prominent in society, even after the publication of
+his great work had made him famous. Lord Sheffield says that his
+conversation was superior to his writings, and in a circle of intimate
+friends it is probable that this was true. But in the free encounter
+of wit and argument, the same want of readiness that made him silent
+in parliament would most likely restrict his conversational power. It
+may be doubted if there is a striking remark or saying of his on
+record. His name occurs in Boswell, but nearly always as a _persona
+muta_. Certainly the arena where Johnson and Burke encountered each
+other was not fitted to bring out a shy and not very quick man.
+Against Johnson he manifestly harboured a sort of grudge, and if he
+ever felt the weight of Ursa Major's paw it is not surprising.
+
+He rather oddly preserved an instance of his conversational skill, as
+if aware that he would not easily get credit for it. The scene was in
+Paris. "At the table of my old friend M. de Foncemagne, I was involved
+in a dispute with the Abbe de Mably.... As I might be partial in my
+own cause, I shall transcribe the words of an unknown critic. 'You
+were, my dear Theodon, at M. de Foncemagne's house, when the Abbe de
+Mably and Mr. Gibbon dined there along with a number of guests. The
+conversation ran almost entirely on history. The Abbe, being a
+profound politician, turned it while at dessert on the administration
+of affairs, and as by genius and temper, and the habit of admiring
+Livy, he values only the republican system, he began to boast of the
+excellence of republics, being well persuaded that the learned
+Englishman would approve of all he said and admire the profoundity of
+genius that had enabled a Frenchman to discover all these advantages.
+But Mr. Gibbon, knowing by experience the inconveniences of a popular
+government, was not at all of his opinion, and generously took up the
+defence of monarchy. The Abbe wished to convince him out of Livy, and
+by some arguments drawn from Plutarch in favour of the Spartans. Mr.
+Gibbon, being endowed with a most excellent memory, and having all
+events present to his mind, soon got the command of the conversation.
+The Abbe grew angry, they lost possession of themselves, and said hard
+things of each other. The Englishman retaining his native coolness,
+watched for his advantages, and pressed the Abbe with increasing
+success in proportion as he was more disturbed by passion. The
+conversation grew warmer, and was broken off by M. de Foncemagne's
+rising from table and passing into the parlour, where no one was
+tempted to renew it."
+
+But if not brilliant in society, he was very _repandu_, and was
+welcomed in the best circles. He was a member of Boodle's, White's,
+Brooks's, and Almack's,[9] and "there were few persons in the literary
+or political world to whom he was a stranger." It is to be regretted
+that the best sketch of him at this period borders on caricature. "The
+learned Gibbon," says Colman, "was a curious counterbalance to the
+learned (may I not say the less learned) Johnson. Their manners and
+tastes, both in writing and conversation, were as different as their
+habiliments. On the day I first sat down with Johnson in his
+rusty-brown suit and his black worsted stockings, Gibbon was placed
+opposite to me in a suit of flowered velvet, with a bag and sword.
+Each had his measured phraseology, and Johnson's famous parallel
+between Dryden and Pope might be loosely parodied in reference to
+himself and Gibbon. Johnson's style was grand, and Gibbon's elegant:
+the stateliness of the former was sometimes pedantic, and the latter
+was occasionally finical. Johnson marched to kettledrums and trumpets,
+Gibbon moved to flutes and hautboys. Johnson hewed passages through
+the Alps, while Gibbon levelled walks through parks and gardens.
+Mauled as I had been by Johnson, Gibbon poured balm upon my bruises by
+condescending once or twice in the course of the evening to talk with
+me. The great historian was light and playful, suiting his matter to
+the capacity of the boy: but it was done _more suo_--still his
+mannerism prevailed, still he tapped his snuff-box, still he smirked
+and smiled, and rounded his periods with the same air of
+good-breeding, as if he were conversing with men. His mouth,
+mellifluous as Plato's, was a round hole nearly in the centre of his
+visage." (Quoted in Croker's _Boswell_.)
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 9: Not the assembly-room of that name, but a gaming-club
+where the play was high. I find no evidence that Gibbon ever yielded
+to the prevalent passion for gambling.]
+
+Now and then he even joins in a masquerade, "the finest thing ever
+seen," which costs two thousand guineas. But the chief charm of it to
+him seems to have been the pleasure that it gave to his Aunt Porten.
+These little vanities are however quite superficial, and are never
+allowed to interfere with work.
+
+Now indeed he was no loiterer. In three years after his settlement in
+London he had produced the first volume of the _Decline and Fall_: an
+amount of diligence which will not be underrated by those who
+appreciate the vast difference between commencing and continuing an
+undertaking of that magnitude. "At the outset," he says, "all was dark
+and doubtful; even the title of the work, the true aera of the decline
+and fall of the empire, the limits of the Introduction, the division
+of the chapters, and the order of the narrative,--and I was often
+tempted to cast away the labour of seven years;"--alternations no
+doubt of hope and despair familiar to every sincere and competent
+student. But he had taken the best and only reliable means of securing
+himself from the danger of these fluctuations of spirit. He finished
+his reading and preparation before he began to write, and when he at
+last put pen to paper his course lay open before him, with no fear of
+sudden and disquieting stoppages arising from imperfect knowledge and
+need of further inquiry. It is a pity that we cannot follow the
+elaboration of the work in detail. That portion of his Memoirs in
+which he speaks of it is very short and fragmentary, and the defect is
+not supplied by his letters. He seems to have worked with singular
+ease and mastery of his subject, and never to have felt his task as a
+strain or a fatigue. Even his intimate friends were not aware that he
+was engaged on a work of such magnitude, and it is amusing to see his
+friend Holroyd warn him against a hasty and immature publication when
+he learned that the book was in the press. He had apparently heard
+little of it before. This alone would show with what ease and
+smoothness Gibbon must have worked. He had excellent health--a strange
+fact after his sickly childhood; society unbent his mind instead of
+distracting it; his stomach was perfect--perhaps too good, as about
+this time he began to be admonished by the gout. He never seems to
+have needed change. "Sufficient for the summer is the evil thereof,
+viz., one distant country excursion." There was an extraordinary
+difference in this respect between the present age and those which
+went before it; restlessness and change of scene have become almost a
+necessity of life with us, whereas our ancestors could continue
+healthy and happy for months and years without stirring from home.
+What is there to explain the change? We must not pretend that we work
+harder than they did.[10] However, Gibbon was able to keep himself in
+good condition with his long spell of work in the morning, and his
+dinner-parties at home or elsewhere in the afternoon, and to have kept
+at home as much as he could. Whenever he went away to the country, it
+was on invitations which he could not well refuse. The result was a
+leisurely, unhasting fulness of achievement, calm stretches of
+thorough and contented work, which have left their marks on the
+_Decline and Fall_. One of its charms is a constant good humour and
+complacency; not a sign is visible that the writer is pressed for
+time, or wants to get his performance out of hand; but, on the
+contrary, a calm lingering over details, sprightly asides in the
+notes, which the least hurry would have suppressed or passed by, and a
+general impression conveyed of thorough enjoyment in the immensity of
+the labour.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 10: The most remarkable instance of all is the case of
+Newton, who, according to Dr. Whewell, resided in Trinity College "for
+thirty-five years without the interruption of a month."--_Hist. of the
+Inductive Sciences_, vol. ii. book vii.]
+
+One would have liked to see this elaboration more clearly, to have
+been allowed a glimpse into his workshop while he was so engaged.
+Unfortunately the editor of his journals has selected the relatively
+unimportant records of his earlier studies, and left us in the dark as
+regards this far more interesting period. He was such an indefatigable
+diarist that it is unlikely that he neglected to keep a journal in
+this crisis of his studies. But it has not been published, and it may
+have been destroyed. All that we have is this short paragraph in his
+Memoirs:--
+
+     "The classics, as low as Tacitus and the younger Pliny and
+     Juvenal, were my old and familiar companions. I insensibly
+     plunged into the ocean of the Augustan history, and in the
+     descending series I investigated, with my pen almost always
+     in my hand, the original records, both Greek and Latin, from
+     Dion Cassius to Ammianus Marcellinus, from the reign of
+     Trajan to the last age of the Western Caesars. The subsidiary
+     rays of medals and inscriptions of geography and chronology,
+     were thrown on their proper objects, and I applied the
+     collections of Tillemont to fix and arrange within my reach
+     the loose and scattered atoms of historical information.
+     Through the darkness of the middle ages I explored my way in
+     the _Annals and Antiquities of Italy_ of the learned
+     Muratori, and diligently compared them with the parallel or
+     transverse lines of Sigonius and Maffei, Baronius and Pagi,
+     till I almost grasped the ruins of Rome in the fourteenth
+     century, without suspecting that this final chapter must be
+     attained by the labour of six quartos and twenty years."
+
+When the time for composition arrived, he showed a fastidiousness
+which was full of good augury. "Three times did I compose the first
+chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably
+satisfied with their effect." His hand grew firmer as he advanced. But
+the two final chapters interposed a long delay, and needed "three
+successive revisals to reduce them from a volume to their present
+size." Gibbon spent more time over his first volume than over any one
+of the five which followed it. To these he devoted almost regularly
+two years apiece, more or less, whereas the first cost him three
+years--so disproportionately difficult is the start in matters of this
+kind.
+
+While engaged in the composition of the first volume, he became a
+member of Parliament. One morning at half past seven, "as he was
+destroying an army of barbarians," he heard a double rap at his door.
+It was a friend who came to inquire if he was desirous of entering
+the House of Commons. The answer may be imagined, and he took his seat
+as member for the borough of Liskeard after the general election in
+1774.
+
+Gibbon's political career is the side of his history from which a
+friendly biographer would most readily turn away. Not that it was
+exceptionally ignoble or self-seeking if tried by the standard of the
+time, but it was altogether commonplace and unworthy of him. The fact
+that he never even once opened his mouth in the House is not in itself
+blameworthy, though disappointing in a man of his power. It was indeed
+laudable enough if he had nothing to say. But why had he nothing to
+say? His excuse is timidity and want of readiness. We may reasonably
+assume that the cause lay deeper. With his mental vigour he would soon
+have overcome such obstacles if he had really wished and tried to
+overcome them. The fact is that he never tried because he never
+wished. It is a singular thing to say of such a man, but nevertheless
+true, that he had no taste or capacity whatever for politics. He lived
+at one of the most exciting periods of our history; he assisted at
+debates in which constitutional and imperial questions of the highest
+moment were discussed by masters of eloquence and state policy, and he
+hardly appears to have been aware of the fact. It was not that he
+despised politics as Walpole affected to do, or that he regarded party
+struggles as "barbarous and absurd faction," as Hume did; still less
+did he pass by them with the supercilious indifference of a mystic
+whose eyes are fixed on the individual spirit of man as the one spring
+of good and evil. He never rose to the level of the ordinary citizen
+or even partisan, who takes an exaggerated view perhaps of the
+importance of the politics of the day, but who at any rate thereby
+shows a sense of social solidarity and the claims of civic communion.
+He called himself a Whig, but he had no zeal for Whig principles. He
+voted steadily with Lord North, and quite approved of taxing and
+coercing America into slavery; but he had no high notions of the royal
+prerogative, and was lukewarm in this as in everything. With such
+absence of passion one might have expected that he would be at least
+shrewd and sagacious in his judgments on politics. But he is nothing
+of the kind. In his familiar letters he reserves generally a few lines
+for parliamentary gossip, amid chat about the weather and family
+business. He never approaches to a broad survey of policy, or
+expresses serious and settled convictions on home or foreign affairs.
+Throughout the American war he never seems to have really made up his
+mind on the nature of the struggle, and the momentous issues that it
+involved. Favourable news puts him in high spirits, which are promptly
+cooled by the announcement of reverses; not that he ever shows any
+real anxiety or despondency about the commonwealth. His opinions on
+the subject are at the mercy of the last mail. It is disappointing to
+find an elegant trifler like Horace Walpole not only far more
+discerning in his appreciation of such a crisis, but also far more
+patriotically sensitive as to the wisdom of the means of meeting it,
+than the historian of Rome. Gibbon's tone often amounts to levity, and
+he chronicles the most serious measures with an unconcern really
+surprising. "In a few days we stop the ports of New England. I cannot
+write volumes: but I am more and more convinced that with firmness all
+may go well: yet I sometimes doubt." (February 8, 1775.) "Something
+will be done this year; but in the spring the force of the country
+will be exerted to the utmost: Scotch Highlanders, Irish Papists,
+Hanoverians, Canadians, Indians, &c., will all in various shapes be
+employed." (August 1, 1775.) "What think you of the season, of Siberia
+is it not? A pleasant campaign in America." (January 29, 1776.) At
+precisely the same time the sagacious coxcomb of Strawberry Hill was
+writing thus: "The times are indeed very serious. Pacification with
+America is not the measure adopted. More regiments are ordered
+thither, and to-morrow a plan, I fear equivalent to a declaration of
+war, is to be laid before both Houses. They are bold ministers
+methinks who do not hesitate on civil war, in which victory may bring
+ruin, and disappointment endanger their heads.... Acquisition alone
+can make burdens palatable, and in a war with our own colonies we must
+inflict instead of acquiring them, and we cannot recover them without
+undoing them. I am still to learn wisdom and experience, if these
+things are not so." (Letter to Mann, January 25, 1775.) "A war with
+our colonies, which is now declared, is a proof how much influence
+jargon has on human actions. A war on our own trade is popular."
+(February 15, 1775.) "The war with America goes on briskly, that is as
+far as voting goes. A great majority in both houses is as brave as a
+mob ducking a pick-pocket. They flatter themselves they shall terrify
+the colonies into submission in three months, and are amazed to hear
+that there is no such probability. They might as well have
+excommunicated them, and left it to the devil to put the sentence into
+execution." (February 18, 1775.) Not only is Walpole's judgment wiser,
+but the elements of a wise judgment were present to him in a way in
+which they were not so to Gibbon. When the latter does attempt a
+forecast, he shows, as might be expected, as little penetration of the
+future as appreciation of the present. Writing from Paris on August
+11, 1777, when all French society was ablaze with enthusiasm for
+America, and the court just on the point of yielding to the current,
+he is under no immediate apprehensions of a war with France, and
+"would not be surprised if next summer the French were to lend their
+cordial assistance to England as the weaker party." The emptiness of
+his letters as regards home politics perhaps admits of a more
+favourable explanation, and may be owing to the careful suppression by
+their editor, Lord Sheffield, of everything of real interest. It is
+impossible to estimate the weight of this consideration, but it may be
+great. Still we have a sufficient number of his letters to be able to
+say that on the whole they are neither thoughtful nor graphic: they
+give us neither pictures of events nor insight into the times. It must
+be, however, remembered that Gibbon greatly disliked letter-writing,
+and never wrote unless he was obliged.
+
+It was no secret that Gibbon wanted a place under government. Moderate
+as his establishment seems to have been, it was more expensive than he
+could afford, and he looked, not without warrant, to a supplement of
+income from one of the rich windfalls which, in that time of sinecures
+were wont to refresh the spirits of sturdy supporters of
+administration. He had influential friends, and even relatives, in and
+near the government, and but for his parliamentary nullity he would
+probably have been provided with a comfortable berth at an early
+period. But his "sincere and silent vote" was not valuable enough to
+command a high price from his patrons. Once only was he able to help
+them with his pen, when he drew up, at the request of Lords Thurlow
+and Weymouth, his _Memoire Justificatif_, in French, in which "he
+vindicated against the French manifesto the justice of the British
+arms." It was a service worthy of a small fee, which no doubt he
+received. He had to wait till 1779, when he had been five years in
+Parliament, before his cousin Mr. Eliot, and his friend Wedderburne,
+the Attorney-General, were able to find him a post as one of the Lords
+Commissioners of Trade and Plantations. The Board of Trade, of which
+he became one of the eight members, survives in mortal memory only
+from being embalmed in the bright amber of one of Burke's great
+speeches. "This board, Sir, has had both its original formation and
+its regeneration in a job. In a job it was conceived, and in a job its
+mother brought it forth.... This board is a sort of temperate bed of
+influence: a sort of gently ripening hothouse, where eight members of
+Parliament receive salaries of a thousand a year for a certain given
+time, in order to mature at a proper season a claim to two thousand,
+granted for doing less" (_Speech on Economical Reform_). Gibbon, with
+entire good humour, acknowledges the justice of Burke's indictment,
+and says he was "heard with delight, even by those whose existence he
+proscribed." After all, he only enjoyed the emolument of his office
+for three years, and he places that emolument at a lower figure than
+Burke did. He could not have received more than between two and three
+thousand pounds of public money; and when we consider what manner of
+men have fattened on the national purse, it would be churlish to
+grudge that small sum to the historian of the _Decline and Fall_. The
+misfortune is that, reasonably or otherwise, doubts were raised as to
+Gibbon's complete straightforwardness and honourable adhesion to party
+ties in accepting office. He says himself: "My acceptance of a place
+provoked some of the leaders of opposition with whom I had lived in
+habits of intimacy, and I was most unjustly accused of deserting a
+party in which I had never enlisted." There is certainly no evidence
+that those who were most qualified to speak, those who gave him the
+place and reckoned on his vote, ever complained of want of allegiance.
+On the other hand, Gibbon's own letter to Edward Elliot, accepting the
+place, betrays a somewhat uneasy conscience. He owns that he was far
+from approving all the past measures of the administration, even some
+of those in which he himself had silently concurred; that he saw many
+capital defects in the characters of some of the present ministers,
+and was sorry that in so alarming a situation of public affairs the
+country had not the assistance of several able and honest men who were
+now in opposition. Still, for various reasons, he did not consider
+himself in any way implicated, and rather suspiciously concludes with
+an allusion to his pecuniary difficulties and a flourish. "The
+addition of the salary which is now offered will make my situation
+perfectly easy, but I hope that you will do me the justice to believe
+that my mind could not be so unless I were conscious of the rectitude
+of my conduct."
+
+The strongest charge against Gibbon in reference to this matter is
+asserted to come from his friend Fox, in this odd form. "In June 1781,
+Mr. Fox's library came to be sold. Amongst his other books the first
+volume of Mr. Gibbon's history was brought to the hammer. In the
+blank leaf of this was a note in the handwriting of Mr. Fox, stating a
+remarkable declaration of our historian at a well-known tavern in Pall
+Mall, and contrasting it with Mr. Gibbon's political conduct
+afterwards. 'The author,' it observed, 'at Brooks's said that there
+was no salvation for this country until six heads of the principal
+persons in administration' (Lord North being then prime minister)
+'were laid upon the table. Yet,' as the observation added, 'eleven
+days afterwards this same gentleman accepted a place of a lord of
+trade under these very ministers, and has acted with them ever
+since.'" It is impossible to tell what amount of truth there is in
+this story, and not very important to inquire. It rests on the
+authority of a strong personal enemy, and the cordial intimacy which
+ever subsisted between Gibbon and Fox seems to show that it was mere
+calumny. Perhaps the fact that Gibbon had really no opinions in
+politics may have led persons of opposite parties to think that he
+agreed with them more than he did, and when he merely followed his own
+interest, they may have inferred that he was deserting their
+principles. After losing his post on the Board of Trade he still hoped
+for Government employ, "either a secure seat at the Board of Customs
+or Excise," or in a diplomatic capacity. He was disappointed. If Lord
+Sheffield is to be believed, it was his friend Fox who frustrated his
+appointment as secretary of embassy at Paris, when he had been already
+named to that office.
+
+The way in which Gibbon acted and afterwards spoke in reference to the
+celebrated Coalition gives perhaps the best measure of his political
+calibre. He voted among the rank and file of Lord North's followers
+for the Coalition with meek subserviency. He speaks of a "principle of
+gratitude" which actuated him on this occasion. Lord North had given
+him his seat, and if a man's conscience allows him to think rather of
+his patron than of his country, there is nothing to be said, except
+that his code of political ethics is low. We may admit that his vote
+was pledged; but there is also no doubt that any gratitude that there
+was in the matter was stimulated by a lively sense of favours to come.
+The Portland ministry had not been long in office when he wrote in the
+following terms to his friend Deyverdun: "You have not forgotten that
+I went into Parliament without patriotism and without ambition, and
+that all my views tended to the convenient and respectable place of a
+lord of trade. This situation I at length obtained. I possessed it for
+three years, from 1779 to 1782, and the net produce, which amounted to
+750_l._ sterling, augmented my income to my wants and desires. But in
+the spring of last year the storm burst over our heads. Lord North was
+overthrown, your humble servant turned out, and even the Board of
+Trade, of which I was a member, abolished and broken up for ever by
+Mr. Burke's reform. To complete my misfortunes, I still remain a
+member of the Lower House. At the end of the last Parliament, Mr.
+Eliot withdrew his nomination. But the favour of Lord North
+facilitated my re-election, and gratitude imposed on me the duty of
+making available for his service the rights which I held in part from
+him. That winter we fought under the allied standards of Lord North
+and Mr. Fox: we triumphed over Lord Shelburne and the peace, and my
+friend (_i.e._ Lord North) remounted his steed in the quality of a
+secretary of state. Now he can easily say to me, 'It was a great deal
+for me, it was nothing for you;' and in spite of the strongest
+assurances, I have too much reason to allow me to have much faith.
+With great genius and very respectable talents, he has now neither the
+title nor the credit of prime minister; more active colleagues carry
+off the most savoury morsels which their voracious creatures
+immediately devour; our misfortunes and reforms have diminished the
+number of favours; either through pride or through indolence I am but
+a bad suitor, and if at last I obtain something, it may perhaps be on
+the eve of a fresh revolution, which will in an instant snatch from me
+that which has cost me so many cares and pains."
+
+Such a letter speaks for itself. Gibbon might well say that he entered
+parliament without patriotism and without ambition. The only redeeming
+feature is the almost cynical frankness with which he openly regards
+politics from a personal point of view. However, it may be pleaded
+that the letter was written to a bosom friend at a moment of great
+depression, and when Gibbon's pecuniary difficulties were pressing him
+severely. The Coalition promised him a place, and that was enough; the
+contempt for all principle which had brought it about was not thought
+of. But even this minute excuse does not apply to the way in which,
+years after, when he was in comfort at Lausanne, he refers to the
+subject in his Memoirs. The light in which the Coalition deserved to
+be regarded was clear by that time. Yet he speaks of it, not only
+without blame or regret, but contrives to cast suspicion on the
+motives of those who were disgusted by it, and bestowed their
+allegiance elsewhere.
+
+     "It is not the purpose of this narrative to expatiate on the
+     public or secret history of the times: the schism which
+     followed the death of the Marquis of Rockingham, the
+     appointment of the Earl of Shelbourne, the resignation of
+     Mr. Fox and his famous coalition with Lord North. But I may
+     assert with some degree of assurance that in their political
+     conflict those great antagonists had never felt any personal
+     animosity to each other, that their reconciliation was easy
+     and sincere, and that their friendship has never been
+     clouded by the shadow of suspicion or jealousy. The _most
+     violent_ or _venal_ of their respective followers embraced
+     this fair occasion of revolt, but their alliance still
+     commanded a majority of the House of Commons, the peace was
+     censured, Lord Shelbourne resigned, and the two friends
+     knelt on the same cushion to take the oath of secretary of
+     state. From a principle of gratitude I adhered to the
+     Coalition; my vote was counted in the day of battle, but I
+     was overlooked in the division of the spoil."
+
+From this we learn that it was only the _violent_ and the _venal_ who
+disapproved of the Coalition. One would like to know how Gibbon
+explained the fact that at the general election of 1784 no less than
+one hundred and sixty of the supporters of the Coalition lost their
+seats, and that Fox's political reputation was all but irretrievably
+ruined from this time forward.
+
+Meanwhile, he had not neglected, his own proper work. The first volume
+of his history was published in February, 1776. It derived, he says,
+"more credit from the name of the shop than from that of the author."
+In the first instance he intended to print only five hundred copies,
+but the number was doubled by the "prophetic taste" of his printer,
+Mr. Strahan. The book was received with a burst of applause--it was a
+_succes fou_. The first impression was exhausted in a few days, and a
+second and third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand. The
+wiser few were as warm in their eulogies as the general public. Hume
+declared that if he had not been personally acquainted with the
+author, he should have been surprised by such a performance coming
+from any Englishman in that age. Dr. Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and
+Horace Walpole joined in the chorus. Walpole betrays an amusing
+mixture of admiration and pique at not having found the author out
+before. "I know him a little, and never suspected the extent of his
+talents; for he is perfectly modest, or I want penetration, which I
+know too; but I intend to know him a great deal more." He oddly enough
+says that Gibbon was the "son of a foolish alderman," which shows at
+least how little the author was known in the great world up to this
+time. Now, however, society was determined to know more of him, the
+surest proof, not of merit, but of success. It must have been a rather
+intoxicating moment, but Gibbon had a cool head not easily turned. It
+would be unfair not to add that he had something much better, a really
+warm and affectionate regard for old friends, the best preservative
+against the fumes of flattery and sudden fame. Holroyd, Deyverdun,
+Madame Necker were more to him than all the great people with whom he
+now became acquainted. Necker and his wife came over from Paris and
+paid him a long visit in Bentinck Street, when his laurels were just
+fresh. "I live with her" he writes, "just as I used to do twenty years
+ago, laugh at her Paris varnish, and oblige her to become a simple
+reasonable Suissesse. The man, who might read English husbands lessons
+of proper and dutiful behaviour, is a sensible, good-natured
+creature." The next year he returned the visit to Paris. His fame had
+preceded him, and he received the cordial but discriminating welcome
+which _the ancien regime_ at that time specially reserved for _gens
+d'esprit_. Madame du Deffand writes to Walpole, "Mr. Gibbon has the
+greatest success here; it is quite a struggle to get him." He did not
+deny himself a rather sumptuous style of living while in Paris.
+Perhaps the recollection of the unpleasant effect of his English
+clothes and the long waists of the French on his former visit dwelt in
+his mind, for now, like Walpole, he procured a new outfit at once.
+"After decking myself out with silks and silver, the ordinary
+establishment of coach, lodgings, servants, eating, and pocket
+expenses, does not exceed 60_l._ per month. Yet I have two footmen in
+handsome liveries behind my coach, and my apartment is hung with
+damask."
+
+The remainder of his life in London has nothing important. He
+persevered assiduously with his history, and had two more quartos
+ready in 1781. They were received with less enthusiasm than the first,
+although they were really superior. Gibbon was rather too modestly
+inclined to agree with the public and "to believe that, especially in
+the beginning, they were more prolix and less entertaining" than the
+previous volume. He also wasted some weeks on his vindication of the
+fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of that volume, which had excited a
+host of feeble and ill-mannered attacks. His defence was complete, and
+in excellent temper. But the piece has no permanent value. His
+assailants were so ignorant and silly that they gave no scope for a
+great controversial reply. Neither perhaps did the subject admit of
+it. A literary war generally makes people think of Bentley's
+incomparable _Phalaris_. But that was almost a unique occasion and
+victory in the history of letters. Bentley himself, the most
+pugnacious of men, never found such another.
+
+And so the time glided by, till we come to the year 1783. Lord North
+had resigned office, the Board of Trade was abolished, and Gibbon had
+lost his convenient salary. The outlook was not pleasant. The seat on
+the Board of Customs or Excise with which his hopes had been for a
+time kept up, receded into a remote distance, and he came to the
+conclusion "that the reign of pensions and sinecures was at an end."
+It was clearly necessary to take some important step in the way of
+retrenchment. After he had lost his official income, his expenses
+exceeded his revenue by something like four hundred pounds. A less
+expensive style of living in London never seems to have presented
+itself as an alternative. So, like many an Englishman before and
+since, he resolved to go abroad to economise.
+
+His old friend Deyverdun was now settled in a comfortable house at
+Lausanne, overlooking the Lake of Geneva. They had not met for eight
+years. But the friendship had begun a quarter of a century before, in
+the old days when Gibbon was a boarder in Pavillard's house, and the
+embers of old associations only wanted stirring to make them shoot up
+into flame. In a moment of expansion Gibbon wrote off a warm and eager
+letter to his friend, setting forth his unsatisfactory position, and
+his wish and even necessity to change it. He gradually and with much
+delicacy discloses his plan, that he and Deyverdun, both now old
+bachelors, should combine their solitary lives in a common household
+and carry out an old project, often discussed in younger days, of
+living together. "You live in a charming house. I see from here my
+apartment, the rooms we shall share with one another, our table, our
+walks. But such a marriage is worthless unless it suits both parties,
+and I easily feel that circumstances, new tastes, and connections may
+frustrate a design which appeared charming in the distance. To settle
+my mind and to avoid regrets, you must be as frank as I have been, and
+give me a true picture, external and internal, of George Deyverdun."
+
+This letter, written in fluent and perfect French, is one of the best
+that we have of Gibbon. Deyverdun answered promptly, and met his
+friend's advances with at least equal warmth. The few letters that
+have been preserved of his connected with this subject give a highly
+favourable idea of his mind and character, and show he was quite
+worthy of the long and constant attachment that Gibbon felt for him.
+He cannot express the delight he has felt at his friend's proposal; by
+the rarest piece of good fortune, it so happens that he himself is in
+a somewhat similar position of uncertainty and difficulty; a year ago
+Gibbon's letter would have given him pleasure, now it offers
+assistance and support. After a few details concerning the tenant who
+occupies a portion of his house, he proceeds to urge Gibbon to carry
+out the project he had suggested, to break loose from parliament and
+politics, for which he was not fit, and to give himself up to the
+charms of study and friendship. "Call to mind, my dear friend," he
+goes on, "that I saw you enter parliament with regret, and I think I
+was only too good a prophet. I am sure that career has caused you more
+privations than joys, more pains than pleasures. Ever since I have
+known you I have been convinced that your happiness lay in your study
+and in society, and that any path which led you elsewhere was a
+departure from happiness." Through nine pages of gentle and friendly
+eloquence Deyverdun pursues his argument to induce his friend to
+clinch the bargain. "I advise you not only not to solicit a place, but
+to refuse one if it were offered to you. Would a thousand a year make
+up to you for the loss of five days a week?... By making this retreat
+to Switzerland, besides the beauty of the country and the pleasures of
+its society, you will acquire two blessings which you have lost,
+liberty and competence. You will also be useful, your works will
+continue to enlighten us, and, independently of your talents, the man
+of honour and refinement is never useless." He then skilfully exhibits
+the attractions he has to offer. "You used to like my house and
+garden; what would you do now? On the first floor, which looks on the
+declivity of Ouchy, I have fitted up an apartment which is enough for
+me. I have a servant's room, two _salons_, two cabinets. On a level
+with the terrace two other _salons_, of which one serves as a
+dining-room in summer, and the other a drawing-room for company. I
+have arranged three more rooms between the house and the coachhouse,
+so that I can offer you all the large apartment, which consists
+actually of eleven rooms, great and small, looking east and south, not
+splendidly furnished, I allow, but with a certain elegance which I
+hope you will like. The terrace is but little altered ... it is lined
+from end to end with boxes of orange-trees. The vine-trellis has
+prospered, and extends nearly to the end. I have purchased the
+vineyard below the garden, and in front of the house made it into a
+lawn, which is watered by the water of the fountain.... In a word,
+strangers come to see the place, and in spite of my pompous
+description of it I think you will like it.... If you come, you will
+find a tranquillity which you cannot have in London, and a friend who
+has not passed a single day without thinking of you, and who, in spite
+of his defects, his foibles, and his inferiority, is still one of the
+companions who suits you best."
+
+More letters followed from both sides in a similar strain. Yet Gibbon
+quailed before a final resolution. His aunt, Mrs. Porten, his mother,
+Mrs. Gibbon, his friend, Lord Sheffield, all joined in deprecating his
+voluntary exile. "That is a nonsensical scheme," said the latter, "you
+have got into your head of returning to Lausanne--a pretty fancy; you
+remember how much you liked it in your youth, but now you have seen
+more of the world, and if you were to try it again you would find
+yourself woefully disappointed." Deyverdun, with complete sympathy,
+begged him not to be in too great a hurry to decide on a course which
+he himself desired so much. "I agree with you," he wrote to Gibbon,
+"that this is a sort of marriage, but I could never forgive myself if
+I saw you dissatisfied in the sequel, and in a position to reproach
+me." Gibbon felt it was a case demanding decision of character, and he
+came to a determination with a promptitude and energy not usual with
+him. He promised Deyverdun in the next letter an ultimatum, stating
+whether he meant to _go_ or to _stay_, and a week after he wrote, "I
+go." He had prudently refrained from consulting Lord Sheffield during
+this critical period, knowing that his certain disapprobation of the
+scheme would only complicate matters and render decision more
+difficult. Then he wrote, "I have given Deyverdun my word of honour to
+be at Lausanne at the beginning of October, and no power of
+persuasion can divert me from this _irrevocable_ resolution, which I
+am every day proceeding to execute."
+
+This was no exaggeration. He cancelled the lease of his house in
+Bentinck Street, packed the more necessary portion of his books and
+shipped them for Rouen, and as his postchaise moved over Westminster
+Bridge, "bade a long farewell to the _fumum et opes strepitumque
+Romae_." The only real pang he felt in leaving arose from the "silent
+grief" of his Aunt Porten, whom he did not hope to see again. Nor did
+he. He started on September 15, 1783, slept at Dover, was flattered
+with the hope of making Calais harbour by the same tide in "three
+hours and a half, as the wind was brisk and fair," but was driven into
+Boulogne. He had not a symptom of seasickness. Then he went on by easy
+stages through Aire, Bethune, Douay, Cambray, St. Quentin, La Fere,
+Laon, Rheims, Chalons, St. Dizier, Langres, Besancon, and arrived at
+Lausanne on the 27th. The inns he found more agreeable to the palate
+than to the sight or the smell. At Langres he had an excellent bed
+about six feet high from the ground. He beguiled the time with Homer
+and Clarendon, talking with his servant, Caplin, and his dog Muff, and
+sometimes with the French postilions, and he found them the least
+rational of the animals mentioned.
+
+He reached his journey's end, to alight amid a number of minor
+troubles, which to a less easy tempered man would have been real
+annoyances. He found that Deyverdun had reckoned without his host, or
+rather his tenant, and that they could not have possession of the
+house for several months, so he had to take lodgings. Then he sprained
+his ankle, and this brought on a bad attack of the gout, which laid
+him up completely. However, his spirits never gave way. In time his
+books arrived, and the friends got installed in their own house. His
+satisfaction has then no bounds, with the people, the place, the way
+of living, and his daily companion. We must now leave him for a short
+space in the enjoyment of his happiness, while we briefly consider the
+labours of the previous ten years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE FIRST THREE VOLUMES OF THE DECLINE AND FALL.
+
+
+The historian who is also an artist is exposed to a particular
+drawback from which his brethren in other fields are exempt. The mere
+lapse of time destroys the value and even the fidelity of his
+pictures. In other arts correct colouring and outline remain correct,
+and if they are combined with imaginative power, age rather enhances
+than diminishes their worth. But the historian lives under another
+law. His reproduction of a past age, however full and true it may
+appear to his contemporaries, appears less and less true to his
+successors. The way in which he saw things ceases to be satisfactory;
+we may admit his accuracy, but we add a qualification referring to the
+time when he wrote, the point of view that he occupied. And we feel
+that what was accurate for him is no longer accurate for us. This
+superannuation of historical work is not similar to the superseding of
+scientific work which is ever going on, and is the capital test of
+progress. Scientific books become rapidly old-fashioned, because the
+science to which they refer is in constant growth, and a work on
+chemistry or biology is out of date by reason of incompleteness or
+the discovery of unsuspected errors. The scientific side of history,
+if we allow it to have a scientific side, conforms to this rule, and
+presents no singularity. Closer inspection of our materials, the
+employment of the comparative method, occasionally the bringing to
+light of new authorities--all contribute to an increase of real
+knowledge, and historical studies in this respect do not differ from
+other branches of research. But this is not the sole or the chief
+cause of the renovation and transformation constantly needed in
+historic work. That depends on the ever-moving standpoint from which
+the past is regarded, so that society in looking back on its previous
+history never sees it for long together at quite the same angle, never
+sees, we may say, quite the same thing. The past changes to us as we
+move down the stream of time, as a distant mountain changes through
+the windings of the road on which we travel away from it. To drop
+figure and use language now becoming familiar, the social organism is
+in constant growth, and receiving new additions, and each new addition
+causes us to modify our view of the whole. The historian, in fact, is
+engaged in the study of an unfinished organism, whose development is
+constantly presenting him with surprises. It is as if the biologist
+were suddenly to come upon new and unheard-of species and families
+which would upset his old classification, or as if the chemist were to
+find his laws of combination replaced by others which were not only
+unknown to him, but which were really new and recent in the world.
+Other inquirers have the whole of the phenomena with which their
+science is concerned before them, and they may explore them at their
+leisure. The sociologist has only an instalment, most likely a very
+small instalment, of the phenomena with which his science is
+concerned before him. They have not yet happened, are not yet
+phenomena, and as they do happen and admit of investigation they
+necessarily lead to constant modification of his views and deductions.
+Not only does he acquire new knowledge like other inquirers, but he is
+constantly having the subject-matter from which he derives his
+knowledge augmented. Even in modern times society has thrown out with
+much suddenness rapid and unexpected developments, of such scope and
+volume that contemporaries have often lost self-possession at the
+sight of them, and wondered if social order could survive. The
+Reformation and the French Revolution are cases in point. And what a
+principal part do these two great events always play in any
+speculations instituted subsequent to them! How easy it is to see
+whether a writer lived before the Reign of Terror, or after it, from
+his gait and manner of approaching social inquiries! Is there any
+reason to suppose that such mutations are now at an end? None. The
+probability, well nigh a certainty, is that metamorphoses of the
+social organism are in store for us which will equal, if they do not
+vastly exceed, anything that the past has offered.
+
+Considerations of this kind need to be kept in view if we would be
+just in our appreciation of historical writings which have already a
+certain age. It is impossible that a history composed a century ago
+should fully satisfy us now; but we must beware of blaming the writer
+for his supposed or real shortcomings, till we have ascertained how
+far they arose from his personal inadequacy to his task, and were not
+the result of his chronological position. It need not be said that
+this remark does not refer to many books which are called histories,
+but are really contemporary memoirs and original authorities
+subservient to history proper. The works of Clarendon and Burnet, for
+instance, can never lose a certain value on this account. The immortal
+book which all subsequent generations have agreed to call a possession
+for ever, is the unapproachable ideal of this class. But neither
+Thucydides nor Clarendon were historians in the sense in which Gibbon
+was an historian, that is, engaged in the delineation of a remote
+epoch by the help of such materials as have escaped the ravages of
+time. It is historians like Gibbon who are exposed to the particular
+unhappiness referred to a little way back--that of growing out of date
+through no fault of their own, but through the changed aspect
+presented by the past in consequence of the movement which has brought
+us to the present. But if this is the field of historical disaster, it
+is also the opportunity of historical genius. In proportion as a
+writer transcends the special limitations of his time, will "age fail
+to wither him." That he cannot entirely shake off the fetters which
+fasten him to his epoch is manifest. But in proportion as his vision
+is clear, in proportion as he has with singleness of eye striven to
+draw the past with reverent loyalty, will his bondage to his own time
+be loosened, and his work will remain faithful work for which due
+gratitude will not be withheld.
+
+The sudden and rapid expansion of historic studies in the middle of
+the eighteenth century constitutes one of the great epochs in
+literature. Up to the year 1750 no great historical work had appeared
+in any modern language.[11] The instances that seem to make against
+this remark will be found to confirm it. They consist of memoirs,
+contemporary documents, in short materials for history, but not
+history itself. From Froissart and De Comines, or even from the
+earlier monastic writers to St. Simon (who was just finishing his
+incomparable Memoirs), history with wide outlook and the conception of
+social progress and interconnection of events did not exist. Yet
+history in its simple forms is one of the most spontaneous of human
+achievements. Stories of mighty deeds, of the prowess and death of
+heroes, are among the earliest productions of even semi-civilised
+man--the earliest subjects of epic and lyric verse. But this
+rudimentary form is never more than biographical. With increasing
+complexity of social evolution it dies away, and history proper, as
+distinct from annals and chronicle, does not arise till circumstances
+allow of general and synthetic views, till societies can be surveyed
+from a sufficient distance and elevation for their movements to be
+discerned. Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus do not appear till Greece and
+Home have reached their highest point of homogeneous national life.
+The tardy dawn of history in the modern world was owing to its immense
+complexity. Materials also were wanting. They gradually emerged out of
+manuscript all over Europe, during what may be called the great pedant
+age (1550-1650), under the direction of meritorious antiquaries,
+Camden, Savile, Duchesne, Gale, and others. Still official documents
+and state papers were wanting, and had they been at hand would hardly
+have been used with competence. The national and religious
+limitations were still too marked and hostile to permit a free survey
+over the historic field. The eighteenth century, though it opened with
+a bloody war, was essentially peaceful in spirit: governments made
+war, but men and nations longed for rest. The increased interest in
+the past was shown by the publication nearly contemporary of the great
+historic collections of Rymer (A.D. 1704), Leibnitz (1707), and
+Muratori (1723). Before the middle of the century the historic muse
+had abundant oil to feed her lamp. Still the lamp would probably not
+have been lighted but for the singular pass to which French thought
+had come.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 11: Mezeray's great history of France is next to valueless
+till he reaches the sixteenth century, that was a period bordering on
+his own. Thuanus deals with contemporary events.]
+
+From the latter years of Louis XIV. till the third quarter of the
+eighteenth century was all but closed, France had a government at once
+so weak and wicked, so much below the culture of the people it
+oppressed, that the better minds of the nation turned away in disgust
+from their domestic ignominy, and sought consolation in contemplating
+foreign virtue wherever they thought it was to be found; in short,
+they became cosmopolitan. The country which has since been the
+birthplace of Chauvinism, put away national pride almost with passion.
+But this was not all. The country whose king was called the Eldest Son
+of the Church, and with which untold pains had been taken to keep it
+orthodox, had lapsed into such an abhorrence of the Church and of
+orthodoxy that anything seemed preferable to them in its eyes.
+
+Thus, as if by enchantment, the old barriers disappeared, both
+national and religious. Man and his fortunes, in all climes and all
+ages, became topics of intense interest, especially when they tended
+to degrade by contrast the detested condition of things at home. This
+was the weak side of historical speculation in France: it was
+essentially polemical; prompted less by genuine interest in the past
+than by strong hatred of the present. Of this perturbation note must
+be taken. But it is none the less true that the disengagement of
+French thought from the narrow limits of nation and creed produced, as
+it were in a moment, a lofty conception of history such as subsequent
+ages may equal, but can hardly surpass.
+
+The influence of French thought was European, and nowhere more
+beneficial than in England. In other countries it was too despotic,
+and produced in Germany, at least, Lessing's memorable reaction. But
+the robust national and political life of England reduced it to a
+welcome flavouring of our insular temperament. The Scotch, who had a
+traditional connection with France, were the first importers of the
+new views. Hume, who had practically grown in the same soil as
+Voltaire, was only three years behind him in the historic field. The
+_Age of Louis XIV._ was published in 1751, and the first volume of the
+_History of England_ in 1754. Hume was no disciple of Voltaire; he
+simply wrote under the stimulus of the same order of ideas. Robertson,
+who shortly followed him, no doubt drew direct inspiration from
+Voltaire, and his weightiest achievement, the View of the State of
+Europe, prefixed to his _History of Charles V._, was largely
+influenced, if it was not absolutely suggested, by the _Essay on
+Manners_. But both Hume and Robertson surpassed their masters, if we
+allow, as seems right, that the French were their masters. The Scotch
+writers had no quarrel with their country or their age as the French
+had. One was a Tory, the other a Whig; and Hume allowed himself to be
+unworthily affected by party bias in his historical judgment. But
+neither was tempted to turn history into a covert attack on the
+condition of things amid which they lived. Hence a calmness and
+dignity of tone and language, very different from the petulant
+brilliancy of Voltaire, who is never so happy as when he can make the
+past look mean and ridiculous, merely because it was the parent of the
+odious present. But, excellent as were the Scotch historians--Hume, in
+style nearly perfect; Robertson, admirable for gravity and shrewd
+sense--they yet left much to be desired. Hume had despatched his five
+quartos, containing the whole history of England from the Roman period
+to the Revolution, in nine years. Considering that the subject was new
+to him when he began, such rapidity made genuine research out of the
+question. Robertson had the oddest way of consulting his friends as to
+what subject it would be advisable for him to treat, and was open to
+proposals from any quarter with exemplary impartiality; this only
+showed how little the stern conditions of real historic inquiry were
+appreciated by him. In fact it is not doing them injustice to say that
+these eminent men were a sort of modern Livies, chiefly occupied with
+the rhetorical part of their work, and not over inclined to waste
+their time in ungrateful digging in the deep mines of historic lore.
+Obviously the place was open for a writer who should unite all the
+broad spirit of comprehensive survey, with the thorough and minute
+patience of a Benedictine; whose subject, mellowed by long brooding,
+should have sought him rather than he it; whose whole previous course
+of study had been an unconscious preparation for one great effort
+which was to fill his life. When Gibbon sat down to write his book,
+the man had been found who united these difficult conditions.
+
+The decline and fall of Rome is the greatest event in history. It
+occupied a larger portion of the earth's surface, it affected the
+lives and fortunes of a larger number of human beings, than any other
+revolution on record. For it was essentially one, though it took
+centuries to consummate, and though it had for its theatre the
+civilised world. Great evolutions and catastrophes happened before it,
+and have happened since, but nothing which can compare with it in
+volume and mere physical size. Nor was it less morally. The
+destruction of Rome was not only a destruction of an empire, it was
+the destruction of a phase of human thought, of a system of human
+beliefs, of morals, politics, civilisation, as all these had existed
+in the world for ages. The drama is so vast, the cataclysm so
+appalling, that even at this day we are hardly removed from it far
+enough to take it fully in. The mind is oppressed, the imagination
+flags under the load imposed upon it. The capture and sack of a town
+one can fairly conceive: the massacre, outrage, the flaming roofs, the
+desolation. Even the devastation of a province can be approximately
+reproduced in thought. But what thought can embrace the devastation
+and destruction of all the civilised portions of Europe, Africa, and
+Asia? Who can realise a Thirty Years War lasting five hundred years? a
+devastation of the Palatinate extending through fifteen generations?
+If we try to insert into the picture, as we undoubtedly should do, the
+founding of the new, which was going on beside this destruction of the
+old, the settling down of the barbarian hosts in the conquered
+provinces, the expansion of the victorious Church, driving paganism
+from the towns to the country and at last extinguishing it entirely,
+the effort becomes more difficult than ever. The legend of the Seven
+Sleepers testifies to the need men felt, even before the tragedy had
+come to an end, to symbolize in a manageable form the tremendous
+changes they saw going on around them. But the legend only refers to
+the changes in religion. The fall of Rome was much more than that. It
+was the death of the old pagan world and the birth of the new
+Christian world--the greatest transition in history.
+
+This, and no less than this, is Gibbon's subject.
+
+He has treated it in such a way as even now fills competent judges
+with something like astonishment. His accuracy, coupled with the
+extraordinary range of his matter, the variety of his topics, the
+complexity of his undertaking, the fulness and thoroughness of his
+knowledge, never failing at any point over the vast field, the ease
+and mastery with which he lifts the enormous load, are appreciated in
+proportion to the information and abilities of his critic. One
+testimonial will suffice. Mr. Freeman says: "That Gibbon should ever
+be displaced seems impossible. That wonderful man monopolised, so to
+speak, the historical genius and the historical learning of a whole
+generation, and left little, indeed, of either for his contemporaries.
+He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern
+research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside. We may
+correct and improve from the stores which have been opened since
+Gibbon's time; we may write again large parts of his story from other
+and often truer and more wholesome points of view, but the work of
+Gibbon as a whole, as the encyclopaedic history of 1300 years, as the
+grandest of historical designs, carried out alike with wonderful power
+and with wonderful accuracy, must ever keep its place. Whatever else
+is read, Gibbon must be read too."
+
+Gibbon's immense scheme did not unfold itself to him at once: he
+passed through at least two distinct stages in the conception of his
+work. The original idea had been confined to the decline and fall of
+the city of Rome. Before he began to write, this had been expanded to
+the fall of the empire of the West. The first volume, which we saw him
+publish in the last chapter, was only an instalment, limited to the
+accession of Constantine, through a doubt as to how his labours would
+be received. The two following volumes, published in 1781, completed
+his primitive plan. Then he paused exactly a year before he resolved
+to carry on his work to its true end, the taking of Constantinople by
+the Turks in 1453. The latter portion he achieved in three volumes
+more, which he gave to the world on his fifty-first birthday, in 1788.
+Thus the work naturally falls into two equal parts. It will be more
+convenient to disregard in our remarks the interval of five years
+which separated the publication of the first volume from its two
+immediate companions. The first three volumes constitute a whole in
+themselves, which we will now consider.
+
+From the accession of Commodus, A.D. 180, to the last of the Western
+Caesars, A.D. 476, three centuries elapsed. The first date is a real
+point of departure, the commencement of a new stage of decay in the
+empire. The second is a mere official record of the final
+disappearance of a series of phantom sovereigns, whose vanishing was
+hardly noticed. Between these limits the empire passed from the
+autumnal calm of the Antonine period, through the dreadful century of
+anarchy between Pertinax and Diocletian, through the relative peace
+brought about by Diocletian's reforms, the civil wars of the sons of
+Constantine, the disastrous defeat of Julian, the calamities of the
+Gothic war, the short respite under Theodosius, the growing anarchy
+and misery under his incompetent sons, the three sieges of Rome and
+its sack by the Goths, the awful appearance of Attila and his Huns,
+the final submergence of the Western Empire under the barbarians, and
+the universal ruin which marked the close of the fifth century. This
+was the temporal side of affairs. On the spiritual, we have the silent
+occult growth of the early Church, the conversion of Constantine, the
+tremendous conflict of hostile sects, the heresy of Arius, the final
+triumph of Athanasius, the spread of monasticism, the extinction of
+paganism. Antiquity has ended, the middle ages have begun.
+
+Over all this immense field Gibbon moves with a striking attitude of
+power, which arose from his consciousness of complete preparation.
+What there was to be known of his subject he felt sure that he knew.
+His method of treatment is very simple, one might say primitive, but
+it is very effective. He masters his materials, and then condenses and
+clarifies them into a broad, well-filled narrative, which is always or
+nearly always perfectly lucid through his skill in grouping events and
+characters, and his fine boldness in neglecting chronological sequence
+for the sake of clearness and unity of action. It is doing the book
+injustice to consult it only as a work of reference, or even to read
+it in detached portions. It should be read through, if we would
+appreciate the art with which the story is told. No part can be
+fairly judged without regard to the remainder. In fact, Gibbon was
+much more an artist than perhaps be suspected, and less of a
+philosophic thinker on history than he would have been willing to
+allow. His shortcomings in this latter respect will be adverted to
+presently; we are now considering his merits. And among these the very
+high one of lofty and vigorous narrative stands pre-eminent. The
+campaigns of Julian, Belisarius, and Heraclius are painted with a dash
+and clearness which few civil historians have equalled. His
+descriptive power is also very great. The picture of Constantinople in
+the seventeenth chapter is, as the writer of these pages can testify,
+a wonderful achievement, both for fidelity and brilliancy, coming from
+a man who had never seen the place.
+
+     "If we survey Byzantium in the extent which it acquired with
+     the august name of Constantinople, the figure of the
+     imperial city may be represented under that of an unequal
+     triangle. The obtuse point, which advances towards the east
+     and the shores of Asia, meets and repels the waves of the
+     Thracian Bosphorus. The northern side of the city is bounded
+     by the harbour; and the southern is washed by the Propontis,
+     or Sea of Marmora. The basis of the triangle is opposed to
+     the west, and terminates the continent of Europe. But the
+     admirable form and division of the circumjacent land and
+     water cannot, without a more ample explanation, be clearly
+     or sufficiently understood.
+
+     "The winding channel through which the waters of the Euxine
+     flow with rapid and incessant course towards the
+     Mediterranean received the appellation of Bosphorus, a name
+     not less celebrated in the history than in the fables of
+     antiquity. A crowd of temples and of votive altars,
+     profusely scattered along its steep and woody banks,
+     attested the unskilfulness, the terrors, and the devotion of
+     the Grecian navigators, who, after the example of the
+     Argonauts, explored the dangers of the inhospitable Euxine.
+     On these banks tradition long preserved the memory of the
+     palace of Phineus, infested by the obscene Harpies, and of
+     the sylvan reign of Amycus, who defied the son of Leda to
+     the combat of the cestus. The straits of the Bosphorus are
+     terminated by the Cyanean rocks, which, according to the
+     description of the poets, had once floated on the surface of
+     the waters, and were destined by the gods to protect the
+     entrance of the Euxine against the eye of profane curiosity.
+     From the Cyanean rocks to the point and harbour of Byzantium
+     the winding length of the Bosphorus extends about sixteen
+     miles, and its most ordinary breadth may be computed at
+     about one mile and a half. The _new_ castles of Europe and
+     Asia are constructed on either continent upon the
+     foundations of two celebrated temples of Serapis and Jupiter
+     Urius. The _old_ castles, a work of the Greek emperors,
+     command the narrowest part of the channel, in a place where
+     the opposite banks advance within five hundred yards of each
+     other. These fortresses were destroyed and strengthened by
+     Mahomet the Second when he meditated the siege of
+     Constantinople; but the Turkish conqueror was most probably
+     ignorant that near two thousand years before his reign
+     Darius had chosen the same situation to connect the two
+     continents by a bridge of boats. At a small distance from
+     the old castles we discover the little town of Chrysopolis
+     or Scutari, which may almost be considered as the Asiatic
+     suburb of Constantinople. The Bosphorus, as it begins to
+     open into the Propontis, passes between Byzantium and
+     Chalcedon. The latter of these two cities was built by the
+     Greeks a few years before the former, and the blindness of
+     its founders, who overlooked the superior advantages of the
+     opposite coast, has been stigmatised by a proverbial
+     expression of contempt.
+
+     "The harbour of Constantinople, which may be considered as
+     an arm of the Bosphorus, obtained in a very remote period,
+     the denomination of the _Golden Horn_. The curve which it
+     describes might be compared to the horn of a stag, or as it
+     should seem with more propriety, to that of an ox. The
+     epithet of _golden_ was expressive of the riches which every
+     wind wafted from the most distant countries into the secure
+     and capacious port of Constantinople. The river Lycus,
+     formed by the conflux of two little streams, pours into the
+     harbour a perpetual supply of fresh water, which serves to
+     cleanse the bottom and to invite the periodical shoals of
+     fish to seek their retreat in that convenient recess. As the
+     vicissitudes of the tides are scarcely felt in those seas,
+     the constant depth of the harbour allows goods to be landed
+     on the quays without the assistance of boats, and it has
+     been observed that in many places the largest vessels may
+     rest their prows against the houses while their sterns are
+     floating in the water. From the mouth of the Lycus to that
+     of the harbour, this arm of the Bosphorus is more than seven
+     miles in length. The entrance is about five hundred yards
+     broad, and a strong chain could be occasionally drawn across
+     it, to guard the port and the city from the attack of an
+     hostile navy.
+
+     "Between the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, the shores of
+     Europe and Asia receding on either side include the Sea of
+     Marmora, which was known to the ancients by the denomination
+     of the Propontis. The navigation from the issue of the
+     Bosphorus to the entrance of the Hellespont is about one
+     hundred and twenty miles. Those who steer their westward
+     course through the middle of the Propontis may at once
+     descry the highlands of Thrace and Bithynia and never lose
+     sight of the lofty summit of Mount Olympus, covered with
+     eternal snows. They leave on the left a deep gulf, at the
+     bottom of which Nicomedia was seated, the imperial residence
+     of Diocletian, and they pass the small islands of Cyzicus
+     and Proconnesus before they cast anchor at Gallipoli, where
+     the sea which separates Asia from Europe is again contracted
+     to a narrow channel.
+
+     "The geographers, who with the most skilful accuracy have
+     surveyed the form and extent of the Hellespont, assign about
+     sixty miles for the winding course and about three miles for
+     the ordinary breadth of those celebrated straits. But the
+     narrowest part of the channel is found to the northward of
+     the old Turkish castles between the cities of Sestos and
+     Abydos. It was here that the adventurous Leander braved the
+     passage of the flood for the possession of his mistress. It
+     was here, likewise, in a place where the distance between
+     the opposite banks cannot exceed five hundred paces, that
+     Xerxes imposed a stupendous bridge of boats for the purpose
+     of transporting into Europe an hundred and seventy myriads
+     of barbarians. A sea contracted within such narrow limits
+     may seem but ill to deserve the singular epithet of _broad_,
+     which Homer, as well as Orpheus, has frequently bestowed on
+     the Hellespont. But our ideas of greatness are of a relative
+     nature; the traveller, and especially the poet, who sailed
+     along the Hellespont, who pursued the windings of the stream
+     and contemplated the rural scenery which appeared on every
+     side to terminate the prospect, insensibly lost the
+     remembrance of the sea, and his fancy painted those
+     celebrated straits with all the attributes of a mighty river
+     flowing with a swift current in the midst of a woody and
+     inland country, and at length through a wide mouth
+     discharging itself into the AEgean or Archipelago. Ancient
+     Troy, seated on an eminence at the foot of Mount Ida,
+     overlooked the mouth of the Hellespont, which scarcely
+     received an accession of waters from the tribute of those
+     immortal rivulets the Simois and Scamander. The Grecian camp
+     had stretched twelve miles along the shore from the Sigaean
+     to the Rhaetian promontory, and the flanks of the army were
+     guarded by the bravest chiefs who fought under the banners
+     of Agamemnon. The first of these promontories was occupied
+     by Achilles with his invincible Myrmidons, and the dauntless
+     Ajax pitched his tents on the other. After Ajax had fallen a
+     sacrifice to his disappointed pride and to the ingratitude
+     of the Greeks, his sepulchre was erected on the ground where
+     he had defended the navy against the rage of Jove and
+     Hector, and the citizens of the rising town of Rhaetium
+     celebrated his memory with divine honours. Before
+     Constantine gave a just preference to the situation of
+     Byzantium he had conceived the design of erecting the seat
+     of empire on this celebrated spot, from whence the Romans
+     derived their fabulous origin. The extensive plain which
+     lies below ancient Troy towards the Rhaetian promontory was
+     first chosen for his new capital; and though the undertaking
+     was soon relinquished, the stately remains of unfinished
+     walls and towers attracted the notice of all who sailed
+     through the straits of the Hellespont.
+
+     "We are at present qualified to view the advantageous
+     position of Constantinople; which appears to have been
+     formed by nature for the centre and capital of a great
+     monarchy. Situated in the forty-first degree of latitude,
+     the imperial city commanded from her seven hills the
+     opposite shores of Europe and Asia; the climate was healthy
+     and temperate; the soil fertile; the harbour secure and
+     capacious; and the approach on the side of the continent was
+     of small extent and easy defence. The Bosphorus and the
+     Hellespont may be considered as the two gates of
+     Constantinople, and the prince who possesses those important
+     passages could always shut them against a naval enemy and
+     open them to the fleets of commerce. The preservation of the
+     eastern provinces may in some degree be ascribed to the
+     policy of Constantine, as the barbarians of the Euxine, who
+     in the preceding age had poured their armaments into the
+     heart of the Mediterranean, soon desisted from the exercise
+     of piracy, and despaired of forcing this insurmountable
+     barrier. When the gates of the Hellespont and Bosphorus were
+     shut, the capital still enjoyed within their spacious
+     inclosure every production which could supply the wants or
+     gratify the luxury of its numerous inhabitants. The
+     sea-coasts of Thrace and Bithynia, which languish under the
+     weight of Turkish oppression, still exhibit a rich prospect
+     of vineyards, of gardens, and of plentiful harvests; and the
+     Propontis has ever been renowned for an inexhaustible store
+     of the most exquisite fish that are taken in their stated
+     seasons without skill and almost without labour. But when
+     the passages of the straits were thrown open for trade, they
+     alternately admitted the natural and artificial riches of
+     the north and south, of the Euxine and the Mediterranean.
+     Whatever rude commodities were collected in the forests of
+     Germany and Scythia, and as far as the sources of the Tanais
+     and Borysthenes; whatsoever was manufactured by the skill of
+     Europe or Asia, the corn of Egypt, the gems and spices of
+     the furthest India, were brought by the varying winds into
+     the port of Constantinople, which for many ages attracted
+     the commerce of the ancient world.
+
+     "The prospect of beauty, of safety, and of wealth united in
+     a single spot was sufficient to justify the choice of
+     Constantine. But as some mixture of prodigy and fable has in
+     every age been supposed to reflect a becoming majesty on the
+     origin of great cities, the emperor was desirous of
+     ascribing his resolution not so much to the uncertain
+     counsels of human policy as to the eternal and infallible
+     decrees of divine wisdom. In one of his laws he has been
+     careful to instruct posterity that in obedience to the
+     commands of God he laid the everlasting foundations of
+     Constantinople, and though he has not condescended to relate
+     in what manner the celestial inspiration was communicated to
+     his mind, the defect of his modest silence has been
+     liberally supplied by the ingenuity of succeeding writers,
+     who describe the nocturnal vision which appeared to the
+     fancy of Constantine as he slept within the walls of
+     Byzantium. The tutelar genius of the city, a venerable
+     matron sinking under the weight of years and infirmities,
+     was suddenly transformed into a blooming maid, whom his own
+     hands adorned with all the symbols of imperial greatness.
+     The monarch awoke, interpreted the auspicious omen, and
+     obeyed without hesitation the will of Heaven. The day which
+     gave birth to a city or a colony was celebrated by the
+     Romans with such ceremonies as had been ordained by a
+     generous superstition: and though Constantine might omit
+     some rites which savoured too strongly of their pagan
+     origin, yet he was anxious to leave a deep impression of
+     hope and respect on the minds of the spectators. On foot,
+     with a lance in his hand, the emperor himself led the solemn
+     procession: and directed the line which was traced as the
+     boundary of the destined capital: till the growing
+     circumference was observed with astonishment by the
+     assistants, who at length ventured to observe that he had
+     already exceeded the most ample measure of a great city. 'I
+     shall still advance,' replied Constantine, 'till HE, the
+     invisible Guide who marches before me, thinks proper to
+     stop.'"
+
+Gibbon proceeds to describe the extent, limits, and edifices of
+Constantinople. Unfortunately the limits of our space prevent us from
+giving more than a portion of his brilliant picture.
+
+     "In the actual state of the city the palace and gardens of
+     the Seraglio occupy the eastern promontory, the first of the
+     seven hills, and cover about one hundred and fifty acres of
+     our own measure. The seat of Turkish jealousy and despotism
+     is erected on the foundations of a Grecian republic: but it
+     may be supposed that the Byzantines were tempted by the
+     conveniency of the harbour to extend their habitations on
+     that side beyond the modern limits of the Seraglio. The new
+     walls of Constantine stretched from the port to the
+     Propontis across the enlarged breadth of the triangle, at
+     the distance of fifteen stadia from the ancient
+     fortifications: and with the city of Byzantium they inclosed
+     five of the seven hills, which to the eyes of those who
+     approach Constantinople appear to rise above each other in
+     beautiful order. About a century after the death of the
+     founder the new buildings, extending on one side up the
+     harbour, and on the other the Propontis, already covered the
+     narrow ridge of the sixth and the broad summit of the
+     seventh hill. The necessity of protecting those suburbs from
+     the incessant inroads of the barbarians engaged the younger
+     Theodosius to surround his capital with an adequate and
+     permanent inclosure of walls. From the eastern promontory to
+     the Golden Gate, the extreme length of Constantinople was
+     above three Roman miles; the circumference measured between
+     ten and eleven; and the surface might be computed as equal
+     to about two thousand English acres. It is impossible to
+     justify the vain and credulous exaggerations of modern
+     travellers, who have sometimes stretched the limits of
+     Constantinople over the adjacent villages of the European
+     and even Asiatic coasts. But the suburbs of Pera and Galata,
+     though situate beyond the harbour, may deserve to be
+     considered as a part of the city, and this addition may
+     perhaps authorise the measure of a Byzantine historian, who
+     assigns sixteen Greek (about sixteen Roman) miles for the
+     circumference of his native city. Such an extent may seem
+     not unworthy of an imperial residence. Yet Constantinople
+     must yield to Babylon and Thebes, to ancient Rome, to
+     London, and even to Paris....
+
+     "Some estimate may be formed of the expense bestowed with
+     imperial liberality on Constantinople, by the allowance of
+     about two millions five hundred thousand pounds for the
+     construction of the walls, the porticoes, and the aqueducts.
+     The forests that overshadowed the shores of the Euxine, and
+     the celebrated quarries of white marble in the little
+     island of Proconnesus, supplied an inexhaustible stock of
+     materials ready to be conveyed by the convenience of a short
+     water carriage to the harbour of Byzantium. A multitude of
+     labourers and artificers urged the conclusion of the work
+     with incessant toil, but the impatience of Constantine soon
+     discovered that in the decline of the arts the skill as well
+     as the number of his architects bore a very unequal
+     proportion to the greatness of his design.... The buildings
+     of the new city were executed by such artificers as the age
+     of Constantine could afford, but they were decorated by the
+     hands of the most celebrated masters of the age of Pericles
+     and Alexander.... By Constantine's command the cities of
+     Greece and Asia were despoiled of their most valuable
+     ornaments. The trophies of memorable wars, the objects of
+     religious veneration, the most finished statues of the gods
+     and heroes, of the sages and poets of ancient times,
+     contributed to the splendid triumph of Constantinople.
+
+     "... The Circus, or Hippodrome, was a stately building of
+     about four hundred paces in length and one hundred in
+     breadth. The space between the two _metae_, or goals, was
+     filled with statues and obelisks, and we may still remark a
+     very singular fragment of antiquity--the bodies of three
+     serpents twisted into one pillar of brass. Their triple
+     heads had once supported the golden tripod which, after the
+     defeat of Xerxes, was consecrated in the temple of Delphi by
+     the victorious Greeks. The beauty of the Hippodrome has been
+     long since defaced by the rude hands of the Turkish
+     conquerors; but, under the similar appellation of Atmeidan,
+     it still serves as a place of exercise for their horses.
+     From the throne whence the emperor viewed the Circensian
+     games a winding staircase descended to the palace, a
+     magnificent edifice, which scarcely yielded to the residence
+     of Rome itself, and which, together with the dependent
+     courts, gardens, and porticoes, covered a considerable
+     extent of ground upon the banks of the Propontis between the
+     Hippodrome and the church of St. Sophia. We might likewise
+     celebrate the baths, which still retained the name of
+     Zeuxippus, after they had been enriched by the magnificence
+     of Constantine with lofty columns, various marbles, and
+     above three score statues of bronze. But we should deviate
+     from the design of this history if we attempted minutely to
+     describe the different buildings or quarters of the city....
+     A particular description, composed about a century after its
+     foundation, enumerates a capitol or school of learning, a
+     circus, two theatres, eight public and one hundred and
+     fifty-three private baths, fifty-two porticoes, five
+     granaries, eight aqueducts or reservoirs of water, four
+     spacious halls for the meeting of the senate or courts of
+     justice, fourteen churches, fourteen palaces, and four
+     thousand three hundred and eighty-eight houses, which for
+     their size or beauty deserved to be distinguished from the
+     multitude of plebeian habitations."
+
+Gibbon's conception of history was that of a spacious panorama, in
+which a series of tableaux pass in succession before the reader's eye.
+He adverts but little, far too little, to that side of events which
+does not strike the visual sense. He rarely generalises or sums up a
+widely-scattered mass of facts into pregnant synthetic views. But
+possibly he owes some of the permanence of his fame to this very
+defect. As soon as ever a writer begins to support a thesis, to prove
+a point, he runs imminent danger of one-sidedness and partiality in
+his presentation of events. Gibbon's faithful transcript of the past
+has neither the merit nor the drawback of generalisation, and he has
+come in consequence to be regarded as a common mine of authentic facts
+to which all speculators can resort.
+
+The first volume, which was received with such warm acclamation, is
+inferior to those that followed. He seems to have been partly aware of
+this himself, and speaks of the "concise and superficial narrative
+from Commodus to Alexander." But the whole volume lacks the grasp and
+easy mastery which distinguish its successors. No doubt the
+subject-matter was comparatively meagre and ungrateful. The century
+between Commodus and Diocletian was one long spasm of anarchy and
+violence, which was, as Niebuhr said, incapable of historical
+treatment. The obscure confusion of the age is aggravated into almost
+complete darkness by the wretched materials which alone have survived,
+and the attempt to found a dignified narrative on such scanty and
+imperfect authorities was hardly wise. Gibbon would have shown a
+greater sense of historic proportion if he had passed over this period
+with a few bold strokes, and summed up with brevity such general
+results as may be fairly deduced. We may say of the first volume that
+it was tentative in every way. In it the author not only sounded his
+public, but he was also trying his instrument, running over the keys
+in preparatory search for the right note. He strikes it full and clear
+in the two final chapters on the Early Church; these, whatever
+objections may be made against them on other grounds, are the real
+commencement of the Decline and Fall.
+
+From this point onwards he marches with the steady and measured tramp
+of a Roman legion. His materials improve both in number and quality.
+The fourth century, though a period of frightful anarchy and disaster
+if compared to a settled epoch, is a period of relative peace and
+order when compared to the third century. The fifth was calamitous
+beyond example; but ecclesiastical history comes to the support of
+secular history in a way which might have excited more gratitude in
+Gibbon than it did. From Constantine to Augustulus Gibbon is able to
+put forth all his strength. His style is less superfine, as his matter
+becomes more copious; and the more definite cleavage of events brought
+about by the separation between the Eastern and Western Empires,
+enables him to display the higher qualities which marked him as an
+historian.
+
+The merit of his work, it is again necessary to point out, will not be
+justly estimated unless the considerations suggested at the beginning
+of this chapter be kept in view. We have to remember that his culture
+was chiefly French, and that his opinions were those which prevailed
+in France in the latter half of the eighteenth century. He was the
+friend of Voltaire, Helvetius, and D'Holbach; that is, of men who
+regarded the past as one long nightmare of crime, imposture, and
+folly, instigated by the selfish machinations of kings and priests. A
+strong infusion of the spirit which animated not only Voltaire's
+_Essay on Manners_, but certain parts of Hume's _History of England_
+might have been expected as a matter of course. It is essentially
+absent. Gibbon's private opinions may have been what they will, but he
+has approved his high title to the character of an historian by
+keeping them well in abeyance. When he turned his eyes to the past and
+viewed it with intense gaze, he was absorbed in the spectacle, his
+peculiar prejudices were hushed, he thought only of the object before
+him and of reproducing it as well as he could. This is not the common
+opinion, but, nevertheless, a great deal can be said to support it.
+
+It will be as well to take two concrete tests--his treatment of two
+topics which of all others were most likely to betray him into
+deviations from historic candour. If he stands these, he may be
+admitted to stand any less severe. Let them be his account of Julian,
+and his method of dealing with Christianity.
+
+The snare that was spread by Julian's apostasy for the philosophers of
+the last century, and their haste to fall into it, are well known.
+The spectacle of a philosopher on the throne who proclaimed
+toleration, and contempt for Christianity, was too tempting and too
+useful controversially to allow of much circumspection in handling it.
+The odious comparisons it offered were so exactly what was wanted for
+depreciating the Most Christian king and his courtly Church, that all
+further inquiry into the apostate's merits seemed useless. Voltaire
+finds that Julian had all the qualities of Trajan without his defects;
+all the virtues of Cato without his ill-humour; all that one admires
+in Julius Caesar without his vices; he had the continency of Scipio,
+and was in all ways equal to Marcus Aurelius, the first of men. Nay,
+more. If he had only lived longer, he would have retarded the fall of
+the Roman Empire, if he could not arrest it entirely. We here see the
+length to which "polemical fury" could hurry a man of rare insight.
+Julian had been a subject of contention for years between the hostile
+factions. While one party made it a point of honour to prove that he
+was a monster, warring consciously against the Most High, the other
+was equally determined to prove that he was a paragon of all virtue,
+by reason of his enmity to the Christian religion. The deep interest
+attaching to the pagan reaction in the fourth century, and the social
+and moral problems it suggests, were perceived by neither side, and it
+is not difficult to see why they were not. The very word reaction, in
+its modern sense, will hardly be found in the eighteenth century, and
+the thing that it expresses was very imperfectly conceived. We, who
+have been surrounded by reactions, real or supposed, in politics, in
+religion, in philosophy, recognise an old acquaintance in the efforts
+of the limited, intense Julian to stem the tide of progress as
+represented in the Christian Church. It is a fine instance of the way
+in which the ever-unfolding present is constantly lighting up the
+past. Julian and his party were the Ultramontanes of their day in
+matters of religion, and the Romantics in matters of literature. Those
+radical innovators and reformers, the Christians, were marching from
+conquest to conquest, over the old faith, making no concealment of
+their revolutionary aims and intentions to wipe out the past as
+speedily as possible. The conservatives of those times, after long
+despising the reformers, passed easily to fearing them and hating them
+as their success became threatening. "The attachment to paganism,"
+says Neander, "lingered especially in many of the ancient and noble
+families of Greece and Rome." Old families, or new rich ones who
+wished to be thought old, would be sure to take up the cause of
+ancestral wisdom as against modern innovation. Before Julian came to
+the throne, a pagan reaction was imminent, as Neander points out.
+Julian himself was a remarkable man, as men of his class usually are.
+In the breaking up of old modes of belief, as Mill has said, "the most
+strong-minded and discerning, next to those who head the movement, are
+generally those who bring up the rear." The energy of his mind and
+character was quite exceptional, and if we reflect that he only
+reigned sixteen months, and died in his thirty-second year, we must
+admit that the mark he has left in history is very surprising. He and
+his policy are now discussed with entire calm by inquirers of all
+schools, and sincere Christians like Neander and Dean Milman are as
+little disposed to attack him with acrimony, as those of a different
+way of thought are inclined to make him a subject of unlimited
+panegyric.
+
+Through this difficult subject Gibbon has found his way with a
+prudence and true insight which extorted admiration, even in his own
+day. His account of Julian is essentially a modern account. The
+influence of his private opinions can hardly be traced in the
+brilliant chapters that he has devoted to the Apostate. He sees
+through Julian's weaknesses in a way in which Voltaire never saw or
+cared to see. His pitiful superstition, his huge vanity, his weak
+affectation are brought out with an incisive clearness and subtle
+penetration into character which Gibbon was not always so ready to
+display. At the same time he does full justice to Julian's real
+merits. And this is perhaps the most striking evidence of his
+penetration. An error on the side of injustice to Julian is very
+natural in a man who, having renounced allegiance to Christianity, yet
+fully realises the futility of attempting to arrest it in the fourth
+century. A certain intellectual disdain for the reactionary emperor is
+difficult to avoid. Gibbon surmounts it completely, and he does so,
+not in consequence of a general conception of the reactionary spirit,
+as a constantly emerging element in society, but by sheer historical
+insight, clear vision of the fact before him. It may be added that
+nowhere is Gibbon's command of vivid narrative seen to greater
+advantage than in the chapters that he has devoted to Julian. The
+daring march from Gaul to Illyricum is told with immense spirit; but
+the account of Julian's final campaign and death in Persia is still
+better, and can hardly be surpassed. It has every merit of clearness
+and rapidity, yet is full of dignity, which culminates in this fine
+passage referring to the night before the emperor received his mortal
+wound.
+
+     "While Julian struggled with the almost insuperable
+     difficulties of his situation, the silent hours of the night
+     were still devoted to study and contemplation. Whenever he
+     closed his eyes in short and interrupted slumbers, his mind
+     was agitated by painful anxiety; nor can it be thought
+     surprising that the Genius of the empire should once more
+     appear before him, covering with a funereal veil his head
+     and his horn of abundance, and slowly retiring from the
+     Imperial tent. The monarch started from his couch, and,
+     stepping forth to refresh his wearied spirits with the
+     coolness of the midnight air, he beheld a fiery meteor,
+     which shot athwart the sky and suddenly vanished. Julian was
+     convinced that he had seen the menacing countenance of the
+     god of war: the council which he summoned, of Tuscan
+     Haruspices, unanimously pronounced that he should abstain
+     from action; but on this occasion necessity and reason were
+     more prevalent than superstition, and the trumpets sounded
+     at the break of day."[12]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 12: It is interesting to compare Gibbon's admirable picture
+with the harsh original Latin of his authority, Ammianus Marcellinus.
+"Ipse autem ad sollicitam suspensamque quietem paullisper protractus,
+cum somno (ut solebat) depulso, ad aemulationem Caesaris Julii quaedam
+sub pellibus scribens, obscuro noctis altitudine sensus cujusdam
+philosophi teneretur, vidit squalidius, ut confessus est proximis,
+speciem illam Genii publici, quam quum ad Augustum surgeret culmen,
+conspexit in Galliis, velata cum capite cornucopia per aulaea tristius
+discedentem. Et quamquam ad momentum haesit, stupore defixus, omni
+tamen superior metu, ventura decretis caelestibus commendabat; relicto
+humi strato cubili, adulta jam excitus nocte, et numinibus per sacra
+depulsoria supplicans, flagrantissimam facem cadenti similem visam,
+aeris parte sulcata evanuisse existimavit: horroreque perfusus est, ne
+ita aperte minax Martis adparuerit sidus."--_Amm. Marc._ lib. xxv.
+cap. 2.]
+
+It will not be so easy to absolve Gibbon from the charge of prejudice
+in reference to his treatment of the Early Church. It cannot be denied
+that in the two famous chapters, at least, which concluded his first
+volume, he adopted a tone which must be pronounced offensive, not only
+from the Christian point of view, but on the broad ground of
+historical equity. His preconceived opinions were too strong for him
+on this occasion, and obstructed his generally clear vision. Yet a
+distinction must be made. The offensive tone in question is confined
+to these two chapters. We need not think that it was in consequence of
+the clamour they raised that he adopted a different style with
+reference to church matters in his subsequent volumes. A more
+creditable explanation of his different tone, which will be presently
+suggested, is at least as probable. In any case, these two chapters
+remain the chief slur on his historical impartiality, and it is worth
+while to examine what his offence amounts to.
+
+Gibbon's account of the early Christians is vitiated by his narrow and
+distorted conception of the emotional side of man's nature. Having no
+spiritual aspirations himself, he could not appreciate or understand
+them in others. Those emotions which have for their object the unseen
+world and its centre, God, had no meaning for him; and he was tempted
+to explain them away when he came across them, or to ascribe their
+origin and effects to other instincts which were more intelligible to
+him. The wonderland which the mystic inhabits was closed to him, he
+remained outside of it and reproduced in sarcastic travesty the
+reports he heard of its marvels. What he has called the secondary
+causes of the growth of Christianity, were much rather its effects.
+The first is "the inflexible and intolerant zeal of the Christians"
+and their abhorrence of idolatry. With great power of language, he
+paints the early Christian "encompassed with infernal snares in every
+convivial entertainment, as often as his friends, invoking the
+hospitable deities, poured out libations to each other's happiness.
+When the bride, struggling with well-affected reluctance, was forced
+in hymenaeal pomp over the threshold of her new habitation, or when the
+sad procession of the dead slowly moved towards the funeral pile, the
+Christian on these interesting occasions was compelled to desert the
+persons who were dearest to him, rather than contract the guilt
+inherent in those impious ceremonies." It is strange that Gibbon did
+not ask himself what was the cause of this inflexible zeal. The zeal
+produced the effects alleged, but what produced the zeal? He says that
+it was derived from the Jewish religion, but neglects to point out
+what could have induced Gentiles of every diversity of origin to
+derive from a despised race tenets and sentiments which would make
+their lives one long scene of self-denial and danger. The whole vein
+of remark is so completely out of date, that it is not worth dwelling
+on, except very summarily.
+
+The second cause is "the doctrine of a future life, improved by every
+additional circumstance which could give weight and efficacy to that
+important truth." Again we have an effect treated as a cause. "The
+ancient Christians were animated by a contempt for their present
+existence, and by a just confidence of immortality." Very true; but
+the fact of their being so animated was what wanted explaining. Gibbon
+says it "was no wonder that so advantageous an offer" as that of
+immortality was accepted. Yet he had just before told us that the
+ablest orators at the bar and in the senate of Rome, could expose
+this offer of immortality to ridicule without fear of giving offence.
+Whence arose, then, the sudden blaze of conviction with which the
+Christians embraced it?
+
+The third cause is the miraculous powers _ascribed_ to the primitive
+Church. Gibbon apparently had not the courage to admit that he agreed
+with his friend Hume in rejecting miracles altogether. He conceals his
+drift in a cloud of words, suggesting indirectly with innuendo and
+sneer his real opinion. But this does not account for the stress he
+lays on the _ascription_ of miracles. He seems to think that the claim
+of supernatural gifts somehow had the same efficacy as the gifts
+themselves would have had, if they had existed.
+
+The fourth cause is the virtues of the primitive Christians. The
+paragraphs upon it, Dean Milman considers the most uncandid in all the
+history, and they certainly do Gibbon no credit. With a strange
+ignorance of the human heart, he attributes the austere morals of the
+early Christians to their care for their reputation. The ascetic
+temper, one of the most widely manifested in history, was beyond his
+comprehension.
+
+The fifth cause was the union and discipline of the Christian
+republic. For the last time the effect figures as the cause. Union and
+discipline we know are powerful, but we know also that they are the
+result of deep antecedent forces, and that prudence and policy alone
+never produced them.
+
+It can surprise no one that Gibbon has treated the early Church in a
+way which is highly unsatisfactory if judged by a modern standard. Not
+only is it a period which criticism has gone over again and again with
+a microscope, but the standpoint from which such periods are observed
+has materially changed since his day. That dim epoch of nascent faith,
+full of tender and subdued tints, with a high light on the brows of
+the Crucified, was not one in which he could see clearly, or properly
+see at all. He has as little insight into the religious condition of
+the pagan world, as of the Christian. It is singular how he passes
+over facts which were plain before him, which he knew quite well, as
+he knew nearly everything connected with his subject, but the real
+significance of which he missed. Thus he attributes to the scepticism
+of the pagan world the easy introduction of Christianity. Misled by
+the "eloquence of Cicero and the wit of Lucian," he supposes the
+second century to have been vacant of beliefs, in which a "fashion of
+incredulity" was widely diffused, and "many were almost disengaged
+from artificial prejudices." He was evidently unaware of the striking
+religious revival which uplifted paganism in the age of Hadrian, and
+grew with the sinking empire: the first stirrings of it may even be
+discerned in Tacitus, and go on increasing till we reach the theurgy
+of the Neoplatonists. A growing fear of the gods, a weariness of life
+and longing for death, a disposition to look for compensation for the
+miseries of this world to a brighter one beyond the grave--these
+traits are common in the literature of the second century, and show
+the change which had come over the minds of men. Gibbon is
+colour-blind to these shades of the religious spirit: he can only see
+the banter of Lucian.[13] In reference to these matters he was a true
+son of his age, and could hardly be expected to transcend it.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 13: On the religious revival of the second century, see
+Hausrath's _Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte_, vol. iii., especially
+the sections, "Hadrian's Mysticismus" and "Religioese Tendenzen in
+Kunst und Literatur," where this interesting subject is handled with a
+freshness and insight quite remarkable.]
+
+He cannot be cleared of this reproach. On the other hand, we must
+remember that Gibbon's hard and accurate criticism set a good example
+in one respect. The fertile fancy of the middle ages had run into wild
+exaggerations of the number of the primitive martyrs, and their
+legends had not always been submitted to impartial scrutiny even in
+the eighteenth century. We may admit that Gibbon was not without bias
+of another kind, and that his tone is often very offensive when he
+seeks to depreciate the evidence of the sufferings of the early
+confessors. His computation, which will allow of "an annual
+consumption of a hundred and fifty martyrs," is nothing short of
+cynical. Still he did good service in insisting on chapter and verse
+and fair historical proof of these frightful stories, before they were
+admitted. Dean Milman acknowledges so much, and defends him against
+the hot zeal of M. Guizot, justly adding that "truth must not be
+sacrificed even to well-grounded moral indignation," in which
+sentiment all now will no doubt be willing to concur.
+
+The difference between the Church in the Catacombs, and the Church in
+the Palaces at Constantinople or Ravenna, measures the difference
+between Gibbon's treatment of early Christian history and his
+treatment of ecclesiastical history. Just as the simple-hearted
+emotions of God-fearing men were a puzzle and an irritation to him, so
+he was completely at home in exposing the intrigues of courtly bishops
+and in the metaphysics of theological controversy. His mode of dealing
+with Church matters from this point onward is hardly ever unfair, and
+has given rise to few protestations. He has not succeeded in pleasing
+everybody. What Church historian ever does? But he is candid,
+impartial, and discerning. His account of the conversion of
+Constantine is remarkably just, and he is more generous to the first
+Christian Emperor than Niebuhr or Neander. He plunges into the Arian
+controversy with manifest delight, and has given in a few pages one of
+the clearest and most memorable _resumes_ of that great struggle. But
+it is when he comes to the hero of that struggle, to an historic
+character who can be seen with clearness, that he shows his wonted
+tact and insight. A great man hardly ever fails to awaken Gibbon into
+admiration and sympathy. The "Great Athanasius," as he often calls
+him, caught his eye at once, and the impulse to draw a fine character,
+promptly silenced any prejudices which might interfere with faithful
+portraiture. "Athanasius stands out more grandly in Gibbon, than in
+the pages of the orthodox ecclesiastical historians"--Dr. Newman has
+said,--a judge whose competence will not be questioned. And as if to
+show how much insight depends on sympathy, Gibbon is immediately more
+just and open to the merits of the Christian community, than he had
+been hitherto. He now sees "that the privileges of the Church had
+already revived a sense of order and freedom in the Roman government."
+His chapter on the rise of monasticism is more fair and discriminating
+than the average Protestant treatment of that subject. He distinctly
+acknowledges the debt we owe the monks for their attention to
+agriculture, the useful trades, and the preservation of ancient
+literature. The more disgusting forms of asceticism he touches with
+light irony, which is quite as effective as the vehement denunciations
+of non-Catholic writers. It must not be forgotten that his
+ecclesiastical history derives a great superiority of clearness and
+proportion by its interweaving with the general history of the times,
+and this fact of itself suffices to give Gibbon's picture a permanent
+value even beside the master works of German erudition which have been
+devoted exclusively to Church matters. If we lay down Gibbon and take
+up Neander, for instance, we are conscious that with all the greater
+fulness of detail, engaging candour, and sympathetic insight of the
+great Berlin Professor, the general impression of the times is less
+distinct and lasting. There is no specialism in Gibbon; his book is a
+broad sociological picture in which the whole age is portrayed.
+
+To sum up. In two memorable chapters Gibbon has allowed his prejudices
+to mar his work as an historian. But two chapters out of seventy-one
+constitute a small proportion. In the remainder of his work he is as
+free from bias and unfairness as human frailty can well allow. The
+annotated editions of Milman and Guizot are guarantees of this. Their
+critical animadversions become very few and far between after the
+first volume is passed. If he had been animated by a polemical object
+in writing; if he had used the past as an arsenal from which to draw
+weapons to attack the present, we may depend that a swift blight would
+have shrivelled his labours, as it did so many famous works of the
+eighteenth century, when the great day of reaction set in. His mild
+rebuke of the Abbe Raynal should not be forgotten. He admired the
+_History of the Indies_. It is one of the few books that he has
+honoured with mention and praise in the text of his own work. But he
+points out that the "zeal of the philosophic historian for the rights
+of mankind" had led him into a blunder. It was not only Gibbon's
+scholarly accuracy which saved him from such blunders. Perhaps he had
+less zeal for the rights of mankind than men like Raynal, whose
+general views he shared. But it is certain that he did not write with
+their settled _parti pris_ of making history a vehicle of controversy.
+His object was to be a faithful historian, and due regard being had to
+his limitations, he attained to it.
+
+If we now consider the defects of the _Decline and Fall_--which the
+progress of historic study, and still more the lapse of time, have
+gradually rendered visible, they will be found, as was to be expected,
+to consist in the author's limited conception of society, and of the
+multitudinous forces which mould and modify it. We are constantly
+reminded by the tone of remark that he sees chiefly the surface of
+events, and that the deeper causes which produce them have not been
+seen with the same clearness. In proportion as an age is remote, and
+therefore different from that in which a historian writes, does it
+behove him to remember that the social and general side of history is
+more important than the individual and particular. In reference to a
+period adjacent to our own the fortunes of individuals properly take a
+prominent place, the social conditions amid which they worked are
+familiar to us, and we understand them and their position without
+effort. But with regard to a remote age the case is different. Here
+our difficulty is to understand the social conditions, so unlike those
+with which we are acquainted, and as society is greater than man, so
+we feel that society, and not individual men, should occupy the chief
+place in the picture. Not that individuals are to be suppressed or
+neglected, but their subordination to the large historic background
+must be well maintained. The social, religious, and philosophic
+conditions amid which they played their parts should dominate the
+scene, and dwarf by their grandeur and importance the human actors who
+move across it. The higher historical style now demands what may be
+called compound narrative, that is narrative having reference to two
+sets of phenomena--one the obvious surface events, the other the
+larger and wider, but less obvious, sociological condition. A better
+example could hardly be given than Grote's account of the mutilation
+of the Hermae. The fact of the mutilation is told in the briefest way
+in a few lines, but the social condition which overarched it, and made
+the disfiguring of a number of half-statues "one of the most
+extraordinary events in Greek history," demands five pages of
+reflections and commentary to bring out its full significance. Grote
+insists on the duty "to take reasonable pains to realise in our minds
+the religious and political associations of the Athenians," and helps
+us to do it by a train of argument and illustration. The larger part
+of the strength of the modern historical school lies in this method,
+and in able hands it has produced great results.
+
+It would be unfair to compare Gibbon to these writers. They had a
+training in social studies which he had not. But it is not certain
+that he has always acquitted himself well, even if compared to his
+contemporaries and predecessors, Montesquieu, Mably, and Voltaire. In
+any case his narrative is generally wanting in historic perspective
+and suggestive background. It adheres closely to the obvious surface
+of events with little attempt to place behind them the deeper sky of
+social evolution. In many of his crowded chapters one cannot see the
+wood for the trees. The story is not lifted up and made lucid by
+general points of view, but drags or hurries along in the hollow of
+events, over which the author never seems to raise himself into a
+position of commanding survey. The thirty-sixth chapter is a marked
+instance of this defect. But the defect is general. The vigorous and
+skilful narrative, and a certain grandeur and weightiness of language,
+make us overlook it. It is only when we try to attain clear and
+succinct views, which condense into portable propositions the enormous
+mass of facts collected before us, that we feel that the writer has
+not often surveyed his subject from a height and distance sufficient
+to allow the great features of the epoch to be seen in bold outline.
+By the side of the history of concrete events, we miss the
+presentation of those others which are none the less events for being
+vague, irregular, and wide-reaching, and requiring centuries for their
+accomplishment. Gibbon's manner of dealing with the first is always
+good, and sometimes consummate, and equal to anything in historical
+literature. The thirty-first chapter, with its description of Rome,
+soon to fall a prey to the Goths and Alaric, is a masterpiece,
+artistic and spacious in the highest degree; though it is unnecessary
+to cite particular instances, as nearly every chapter contains
+passages of admirable historic power. But the noble flood of narrative
+never stops in meditative pause to review the situation, and point out
+with pregnant brevity what is happening in the sum total, abstraction
+made of all confusing details. Besides the facts of the time, we seek
+to have the tendencies of the age brought before us in their flow and
+expansion, the filiation of events over long periods deduced in clear
+sequence, a synoptical view which is to the mind what a picture is to
+the eye. In this respect Gibbon's method leaves not a little to be
+desired.
+
+Take for instance two of the most important aspects of the subject
+that he treated: the barbarian invasions, and the causes of the
+decline and fall of the Roman empire. To the concrete side of both he
+has done ample justice. The rational and abstract side of neither has
+received the attention from him which it deserved. On the interesting
+question of the introduction of the barbarians into the frontier
+provinces, and their incorporation into the legions, he never seems to
+have quite made up his mind. In the twelfth chapter he calls it a
+"great and beneficial plan." Subsequently he calls it a disgraceful
+and fatal expedient. He recurs frequently to the subject in isolated
+passages, but never collects the facts, into a focus, with a view of
+deducing their real meaning. Yet the point is second to none in
+importance. Its elucidation throws more light on the fall of Rome than
+any other considerations whatever. The question is, Whether Rome was
+conquered by the barbarians in the ordinary sense of the word,
+conquered. We know that it was not, and Gibbon knew that it was not.
+Yet perhaps most people rise from reading his book with an impression
+that the empire succumbed to the invasion of the barbarians, as
+Carthage, Gaul, and Greece had succumbed to the invasion of the
+Romans; that the struggle lay between classic Rome and outside
+uncivilised foes; and that after two centuries of hard fighting the
+latter were victorious. The fact that the struggle lay between
+barbarians, who were within and friendly to the empire, and barbarians
+who were without it, and hostile rather to their more fortunate
+brethren, than to the empire which employed them, is implicitly
+involved in Gibbon's narrative, but it is not explicitly brought out.
+Romanised Goths, Vandals, and Franks were the defenders, nearly the
+only defenders, of the empire against other tribes and nations who
+were not Romanised, and nothing can be more plain than that Gibbon saw
+this as well as any one since, but he has not set it forth with
+prominence and clearness. With his complete mastery of the subject he
+would have done it admirably, if he had assumed the necessary point of
+view.
+
+Similarly, with regard to the causes of the fall of the empire. It is
+quite evident that he was not at all unconscious of the deep economic
+and social vices which undermined the great fabric. Depopulation,
+decay of agriculture, fiscal oppression, the general prostration
+begotten of despotism--all these sources of the great collapse may be
+traced in his text, or his wonderful notes, hinted very often with a
+flashing insight which anticipates the most recent inquiries into the
+subject. But these considerations are not brought together to a
+luminous point, nor made to yield clear and tangible results. They lie
+scattered, isolated, and barren over three volumes, and are easily
+overlooked. One may say that generalised and synthetic views are
+conspicuous by their absence in Gibbon.
+
+But what of that? These reflections, even if they be well founded,
+hardly dim the majesty of the _Decline and Fall_. The book is such a
+marvel of knowledge at once wide and minute, that even now, after
+numbers of labourers have gone over the same ground, with only special
+objects in view, small segments of the great circle which Gibbon fills
+alone, his word is still one of the weightiest that can be quoted.
+Modern research has unquestionably opened out points of view to which
+he did not attain. But when it comes to close investigation of any
+particular question, we rarely fail to find that he has seen it,
+dropped some pregnant hint about it, more valuable than the
+dissertations of other men. As Mr. Freeman says, "Whatever else is
+read, Gibbon must be read too."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE LAST TEN YEARS OF HIS LIFE IN LAUSANNE.
+
+
+After the preliminary troubles which met him on his arrival at
+Lausanne, Gibbon had four years of unbroken calm and steady work, of
+which there is nothing to record beyond the fact that they were filled
+with peaceful industry. "One day," he wrote, "glides by another in
+tranquil uniformity." During the whole period he never stirred ten
+miles out of Lausanne. He had nearly completed the fourth volume
+before he left England. Then came an interruption of a year--consumed
+in the break-up of his London establishment, his journey, the
+transport of his library, the delay in getting settled at Lausanne.
+Then he sat down in grim earnest to finish his task, and certainly the
+speed he used, considering the quality of the work, left nothing to be
+desired. He achieved the fifth volume in twenty-one months, and the
+sixth in little more than a year. He had hoped to finish sooner, but
+it is no wonder that he found his work grow under his hands when he
+passed from design to execution. "A long while ago, when I
+contemplated the distant prospect of my work," he writes to Lord
+Sheffield, "I gave you and myself some hopes of landing in England
+last autumn; but alas! when autumn grew near, hills began to rise on
+hills, Alps on Alps, and I found my journey far more tedious and
+toilsome than I had imagined. When I look back on the length of the
+undertaking and the variety of materials, I cannot accuse or suffer
+myself to be accused of idleness; yet it appeared that unless I
+doubled my diligence, another year, and perhaps more, would elapse
+before I could embark with my complete manuscript. Under these
+circumstances I took, and am still executing, a bold and meritorious
+resolution. The mornings in winter, and in a country of early dinners,
+are very concise. To them, my usual period of study, I now frequently
+add the evenings, renounce cards and society, refuse the most
+agreeable evenings, or perhaps make my appearance at a late supper. By
+this extraordinary industry, which I never practised before, and to
+which I hope never to be again reduced, I see the last part of my
+history growing apace under my hands." He was indeed, as he said, now
+straining for the goal which was at last reached "on the day, or
+rather the night, of the 27th of June, 1787. Between the hours of
+eleven and twelve 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 berceau, 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 emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and
+perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled,
+and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had
+taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and
+that whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, the life of
+the historian must be short and precarious."
+
+A faint streak of poetry occasionally shoots across Gibbon's prose.
+But both prose and poetry had now to yield to stern business. The
+printing of three quarto volumes in those days of handpresses was a
+formidable undertaking, and unless expedition were used the publishing
+season of the ensuing year would be lost. A month had barely elapsed
+before Gibbon with his precious cargo started for England. He went
+straight to his printers. The printing of the fourth volume occupied
+three months, and both author and publisher were warned that their
+common interest required a quicker pace. Then Mr. Strahan "fulfilled
+his engagement, which few printers could sustain, of delivering every
+week three thousand copies of nine sheets." On the 8th of May, 1788,
+the three concluding volumes were published, and Gibbon had discharged
+his debt for the entertainment that he had had in this world.
+
+He returned as speedily as he could to Lausanne, to rest from his
+labours. But he had a painful greeting in the sadly altered look of
+his friend Deyverdun. Soon an apoplectic seizure confirmed his
+forebodings, and within a twelvemonth the friend of his youth, whom he
+had loved for thirty-three years, was taken away by death (July 4,
+1789).[14]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 14: The letter in which Gibbon communicated the sad news to
+Lord Sheffield was written on the 14th July, 1789, the day of the
+taking of the Bastille. So "that evening sun of July" sent its beams
+on Gibbon mourning the dead friend, as well as on "reapers amid
+peaceful woods and fields, on old women spinning in cottages, on ships
+far out on the silent main, on balls at the Orangerie of Versailles,
+where high-rouged dames of the palace are even now dancing with
+double-jacketed Hussar officers."]
+
+Gibbon never got over this loss. His staid and solid nature was not
+given to transports of joy or grief. But his constant references to
+"poor Deyverdun," and the vacancy caused by his loss, show the depth
+of the wound. "I want to change the scene," he writes, "and, beautiful
+as the garden and prospect must appear to every eye, I feel that the
+state of my mind casts a gloom over them: every spot, every walk,
+every bench recalls the memory of those hours, those conversations,
+which will return no more.... I almost hesitate whether I shall run
+over to England to consult with you on the spot, and to fly from poor
+Deyverdun's shade, which meets me at every turn." Not that he lacked
+attached friends, and of mere society and acquaintance he had more
+than abundance. He occupied at Lausanne a position of almost
+patriarchal dignity, "and may be said," writes Lord Sheffield, "to
+have almost given the law to a set of as willing subjects as any man
+ever presided over." Soon the troubles in France sent wave after wave
+of emigrants over the frontiers, and Lausanne had its full share of
+the exiles. After a brief approval of the reforms in France he passed
+rapidly to doubt, disgust, and horror at the "new birth of time"
+there. "You will allow me to be a tolerable historian," he wrote to
+his step-mother, "yet on a fair review of ancient and modern times I
+can find none that bear any affinity to the present." The last social
+evolution was beyond his power of classification. The mingled
+bewilderment and anger with which he looks out from Lausanne on the
+revolutionary welter, form an almost amusing contrast to his usual
+apathy on political matters. He is full of alarm lest England should
+catch the revolutionary fever. He is delighted with Burke's
+_Reflections_. "I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I
+adore his chivalry, and I can forgive even his superstition." His
+wrath waxes hotter at every post. "Poor France! The state is
+dissolved! the nation is mad." At last nothing but vituperation can
+express his feelings, and he roundly calls the members of the
+Convention "devils," and discovers that "democratical principles lead
+by a path of flowers into the abyss of hell."
+
+In 1790 his friends the Neckers had fled to Switzerland, and on every
+ground of duty and inclination he was called upon to show them the
+warmest welcome, and he did so in a way that excited their liveliest
+gratitude. Necker was cast down in utter despair, not only for the
+loss of place and power, but on account of the strong animosity which
+was shown to him by the exiled French, none of whom would set their
+foot in his house. The Neckers were now Gibbon's chief intimates till
+the end of his sojourn in Switzerland. They lived at Coppet, and
+constant visits were exchanged there and at Lausanne. Madame Necker
+wrote to him frequent letters, which prove that if she had ever had
+any grievance to complain of in the past, it was not only forgiven,
+but entirely forgotten. The letters, indeed, testify a warmth of
+sentiment on her part which, coming from a lady of less spotless
+propriety, would almost imply a revival of youthful affection for her
+early lover. "You have always been dear to me," she writes, "but the
+friendship you have shown to M. Necker adds to that which you inspire
+me with on so many grounds, and I love you at present with a double
+affection."--"Come to us when you are restored to health and to
+yourself; that moment should always belong to your first and your
+last friend (_amie_), and I do not know which of those titles is the
+sweetest and dearest to my heart."--"Near you, the recollections you
+recalled were pleasant to me, and you connected them easily with
+present impressions; the chain of years seemed to link all times
+together with electrical rapidity; you were at once twenty and fifty
+years old for me. Away from you the different places, which I have
+inhabited are only the milestones of my life telling me of the
+distance I have come." With much more in the same strain. Of Madame de
+Stael Gibbon does not speak in very warm praise. Her mother, who was
+far from being contented with her, may perhaps have prejudiced him
+against her. In one letter to him she complains of her daughter's
+conduct in no measured terms. Yet Gibbon owns that Madame de Stael was
+a "pleasant little woman;" and in another place says that she was
+"wild, vain, but good-natured, with a much larger provision of wit
+than of beauty." One wonders if he ever knew of her childish scheme of
+marrying him in order that her parents might always have the pleasure
+of his company and conversation.
+
+These closing years of Gibbon's life were not happy, through no fault
+of his. No man was less inclined by disposition to look at the dark
+side of things. But heavy blows fell on him in quick succession. His
+health was seriously impaired, and he was often laid up for months
+with the gout. His neglect of exercise had produced its effect, and he
+had become a prodigy of unwieldy corpulency. Unfortunately his
+digestion seems to have continued only too good, and neither his own
+observation nor the medical science of that day sufficed to warn him
+against certain errors of regimen which were really fatal. All this
+time, while the gout was constantly torturing him, he drank Madeira
+freely. There is frequent question of a pipe of that sweet wine in his
+correspondence with Lord Sheffield. He cannot bear the thought of
+being without a sufficient supply, as "good Madeira is now become
+essential to his health and reputation." The last three years of his
+residence at Lausanne were agitated by perpetual anxiety and dread of
+an invasion of French democratic principles, or even of French troops.
+Reluctance to quit "his paradise" keeps him still, but he is always
+wondering how soon he will have to fly, and often regrets that he has
+not done so already. "For my part," he writes, "till Geneva falls, I
+do not think of a retreat; but at all events I am provided with two
+strong horses and a hundred louis in gold." Fate was hard on the
+kindly epicurean, who after his long toil had made his bed in the sun,
+on which he was preparing to lie down in genial content till the end
+came. But he feels he must not think of rest; and that, heavy as he
+is, and irksome to him as it is to move, he must before long be a
+rover again. Still he is never peevish upon his fortune; he puts the
+best face on things as long as they will bear it.
+
+He was not so philosophical under the bereavements that he now
+suffered. His aunt, Mrs. Porten, had died in 1786. He deplored her as
+he was bound to do, and feelingly regrets and blames himself for not
+having written to her as often as he might have done since their last
+parting. Then came the irreparable loss of Deyverdun. Shortly, an old
+Lausanne friend, M. de Severy, to whom he was much attached, died
+after a long illness. Lastly and suddenly, came the death of Lady
+Sheffield, the wife of his friend Holroyd, with whom he had long lived
+on such intimate terms that he was in the habit of calling her his
+sister. The Sheffields, father and mother and two daughters, had spent
+the summer of 1791 with him at Lausanne. The visit was evidently an
+occasion of real happiness and _epanchement de coeur_ to the two old
+friends, and supplied Gibbon for nearly two years with tender regrets
+and recollections. Then, without any warning, he heard of Lady
+Sheffield's death. In a moment his mind was made up: he would go at
+once to console his friend. All the fatigue and irksomeness of the
+journey to one so ailing and feeble, all the dangers of the road lined
+and perhaps barred by hostile armies, vanished on the spot. Within
+twelve days he had made his preparations and started on his journey.
+He was forced to travel through Germany, and in his ignorance of the
+language he required an interpreter; young de Severy, the son of his
+deceased friend, joyfully, and out of mere affection for him,
+undertook the office of courier. "His attachment to me," wrote Gibbon,
+"is the sole motive which prompts him to undertake this troublesome
+journey." It is clear that he had the art of making himself loved. He
+travelled through Frankfort, Cologne, Brussels, Ostend, and was by his
+friend's side in little more than a month after he had received the
+fatal tidings. Well might Lord Sheffield say, "I must ever regard it
+as the most enduring proof of his sensibility, and of his possessing
+the true spirit of friendship, that, after having relinquished the
+thought of his intended visit, he hastened to England, in spite of
+increasing impediments, to soothe me by the most generous sympathy,
+and to alleviate my domestic affliction; neither his great corpulency
+nor his extraordinary bodily infirmities, nor any other consideration,
+could prevent him a moment from resolving on an undertaking that might
+have deterred the most active young man. He almost immediately, with
+an alertness by no means natural to him, undertook a great circuitous
+journey along the frontier of an enemy worse than savage, within the
+sound of their cannon, within the range of the light troops of the
+different armies, and through roads ruined by the enormous machinery
+of war."
+
+In this public and private gloom he bade for ever farewell to
+Lausanne. He was himself rapidly approaching
+
+     "The dark portal,
+      Goal of all mortal,"
+
+but of this he knew not as yet. While he is in the house of mourning,
+beside his bereaved friend, we will return for a short space to
+consider the conclusion of his great work.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE LAST THREE VOLUMES OF THE DECLINE AND FALL.
+
+
+The thousand years between the fifth and the fifteenth century
+comprise the middle age, a period which only recently, through utterly
+inadequate conceptions of social growth, was wont to be called the
+dark ages. That long epoch of travail and growth, during which the old
+field of civilisation was broken up and sown afresh with new and
+various seed unknown to antiquity, receives now on all hands due
+recognition, as being one of the most rich, fertile, and interesting
+in the history of man. The all-embracing despotism of Rome was
+replaced by the endless local divisions and subdivisions of feudal
+tenure. The multiform rites and beliefs of polytheism were replaced by
+the single faith and paramount authority of the Catholic Church. The
+philosophies of Greece were dethroned, and the scholastic theology
+reigned in their stead. The classic tongues crumbled away, and out of
+their _debris_ arose the modern idioms of France, Italy, and Spain, to
+which were added in Northern Europe the new forms of Teutonic speech.
+The fine and useful arts took a new departure; slavery was mitigated
+into serfdom; industry and commerce became powers in the world as they
+had never been before; the narrow municipal polity of the old world
+was in time succeeded by the broader national institutions based on
+various forms of representation. Gunpowder, America, and the art of
+printing were discovered, and the most civilised portion of mankind
+passed insensibly into the modern era.
+
+Such was the wide expanse which spread out before Gibbon when he
+resolved to continue his work from the fall of the Western Empire to
+the capture of Constantinople. Indeed his glance took in a still wider
+field, as he was concerned as much with the decay of Eastern as of
+Western Rome, and the long-retarded fall of the former demanded large
+attention to the Oriental populations who assaulted the city and
+remaining empire of Constantine. So bold an historic enterprise was
+never conceived as when, standing on the limit of antiquity in the
+fifth century, he determined to pursue in rapid but not hasty survey
+the great lines of events for a thousand years, to follow in detail
+the really great transactions while discarding the less important,
+thereby giving prominence and clearness to what is memorable, and
+reproducing on a small scale the flow of time through the ages. It is
+to this portion of Gibbon's work that the happy comparison has been
+made, that it resembles a magnificent Roman aqueduct spanning over the
+chasm which separates the ancient from the modern world. In these
+latter volumes he frees himself from the trammels of regular
+annalistic narrative, deals with events in broad masses according to
+their importance, expanding or contracting his story as occasion
+requires; now painting in large panoramic view the events of a few
+years, now compressing centuries into brief outline. Many of his
+massive chapters afford materials for volumes, and are well worthy of
+a fuller treatment than he could give without deranging his plan. But
+works of greater detail and narrower compass can never compete with
+Gibbon's history, any more than a county map can compete with a map of
+England or of Europe.
+
+The variety of the contents of these last three volumes is amazing,
+especially when the thoroughness and perfection of the workmanship are
+considered. Prolix compilations or sketchy outlines of universal
+history have their use and place, but they are removed by many degrees
+from the _Decline and Fall_, or rather they belong to another species
+of authorship. It is not only that Gibbon combines width and depth,
+that the extent of his learning is as wonderful as its accuracy,
+though in this respect he has hardly a full rival in literature. The
+quality which places him not only in the first rank of historians, but
+in a class by himself, and makes him greater than the greatest, lies
+in his supreme power of moulding into lucid and coherent unity, the
+manifold and rebellious mass of his multitudinous materials, of
+coercing his divergent topics into such order that they seem
+spontaneously to grow like branches out of one stem, clear and visible
+to the mind. There is something truly epic in these latter volumes.
+Tribes, nations, and empires are the characters; one after another
+they come forth like Homeric heroes, and do their mighty deeds before
+the assembled armies. The grand and lofty chapters on Justinian; on
+the Arabs; on the Crusades, have a rounded completeness, coupled with
+such artistic subordination to the main action, that they read more
+like cantos of a great prose poem than the ordinary staple of
+historical composition. It may well be questioned whether there is
+another instance of such high literary form and finish, coupled with
+such vast erudition. And two considerations have to be borne in mind,
+which heighten Gibbon's merit in this respect. (1.) Almost the whole
+of his subject had been as yet untouched by any preceding writer of
+eminence, and he had no stimulus or example from his precursors. He
+united thus in himself the two characters of pioneer and artist. (2.)
+The barbarous and imperfect nature of the materials with which he
+chiefly had to work,--dull inferior writers, whose debased style was
+their least defect. A historian who has for his authorities masters of
+reason and language such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus
+is borne up by their genius; apt quotation and translation alone
+suffice to produce considerable effects; or in the case of subjects
+taken from modern times, weighty state papers, eloquent debates, or
+finished memoirs supply ample materials for graphic narrative. But
+Gibbon had little but dross to deal with. Yet he has smelted and cast
+it into the grand shapes we see.
+
+The fourth volume is nearly confined to the reign, or rather epoch, of
+Justinian,--a magnificent subject, which he has painted in his
+loftiest style of gorgeous narrative. The campaigns of Belisarius and
+Narses are related with a clearness and vigour that make us feel that
+Gibbon's merits as a military historian have not been quite
+sufficiently recognised. He had from the time of his service in the
+militia taken continued interest in tactics and all that was connected
+with the military art. It was no idle boast when he said that the
+captain of the Hampshire grenadiers had not been useless to the
+historian of the Roman empire. Military matters perhaps occupy a
+somewhat excessive space in his pages. Still, if the operations of
+war are to be related, it is highly important that they should be
+treated with intelligence, and knowledge how masses of men are moved,
+and by a writer to whom the various incidents of the camp, the march,
+and the bivouac, are not matters of mere hearsay, but of personal
+experience. The campaign of Belisarius in Africa may be quoted as an
+example.
+
+     "In the seventh year of the reign of Justinian, and about
+     the time of the summer solstice, the whole fleet of six
+     hundred ships was ranged in martial pomp before the gardens
+     of the palace. The patriarch pronounced his benediction, the
+     emperor signified his last commands, the general's trumpet
+     gave the signal of departure, and every heart, according to
+     its fears or wishes, explored with anxious curiosity the
+     omens of misfortune or success. The first halt was made at
+     Perintheus, or Heraclea, where Belisarius waited five days
+     to receive some Thracian horses, a military gift of his
+     sovereign. From thence the fleet pursued their course
+     through the midst of the Propontis; but as they struggled to
+     pass the straits of the Hellespont, an unfavourable wind
+     detained them four days at Abydos, where the general
+     exhibited a remarkable lesson of firmness and severity. Two
+     of the Huns who, in a drunken quarrel, had slain one of
+     their fellow-soldiers, were instantly shown to the army
+     suspended on a lofty gibbet. The national dignity was
+     resented by their countrymen, who disclaimed the servile
+     laws of the empire and asserted the free privileges of
+     Scythia, where a small fine was allowed to expiate the
+     sallies of intemperance and anger. Their complaints were
+     specious, their clamours were loud, and the Romans were not
+     averse to the example of disorder and impunity. But the
+     rising sedition was appeased by the authority and eloquence
+     of the general, and he represented to the assembled troops
+     the obligation of justice, the importance of discipline, the
+     rewards of piety and virtue, and the unpardonable guilt of
+     murder, which, in his apprehension, was aggravated rather
+     than excused by the vice of intoxication. In the navigation
+     from the Hellespont to the Peloponnesus, which the Greeks
+     after the siege of Troy had performed in four days, the
+     fleet of Belisarius was guided in their course by his
+     master-galley, conspicuous in the day by the redness of the
+     sails, and in the night by torches blazing from the
+     masthead. It was the duty of the pilots as they steered
+     between the islands and turned the capes of Malea and
+     Taenarium to preserve the just order and regular intervals of
+     such a multitude. As the wind was fair and moderate, their
+     labours were not unsuccessful, and the troops were safely
+     disembarked at Methone, on the Messenian coast, to repose
+     themselves for a while after the fatigues of the sea....
+     From the port of Methone the pilots steered along the
+     western coast of Peloponnesus, as far as the island of
+     Zacynthus, or Zante, before they undertook the voyage (in
+     their eyes a most arduous voyage) of one hundred leagues
+     over the Ionian sea. As the fleet was surprised by a calm,
+     sixteen days were consumed in the slow navigation.... At
+     length the harbour of Caucana, on the southern side of
+     Sicily, afforded a secure and hospitable shelter....
+     Belisarius determined to hasten his operations, and his wise
+     impatience was seconded by the winds. The fleet lost sight
+     of Sicily, passed before the island of Malta, discovered the
+     capes of Africa, ran along the coast with a strong gale from
+     the north-east, and finally cast anchor at the promontory of
+     Caput Vada, about five days journey to the south of
+     Carthage....
+
+     "Three months after their departure from Constantinople, the
+     men and the horses, the arms and the military stores were
+     safely disembarked, and five soldiers were left as a guard
+     on each of the ships, which were disposed in the form of a
+     semicircle. The remainder of the troops occupied a camp on
+     the seashore, which they fortified, according to ancient
+     discipline, with a ditch and rampart, and the discovery of a
+     source of fresh water, while it allayed the thirst, excited
+     the superstitious confidence of the Romans.... The small
+     town of Sullecte, one day's journey from the camp, had the
+     honour of being foremost to open her gates and resume her
+     ancient allegiance; the larger cities of Leptis and
+     Adrumetum imitated the example of loyalty as soon as
+     Belisarius appeared, and he advanced without opposition as
+     far as Grasse, a palace of the Vandal kings, at the distance
+     of fifty miles from Carthage. The weary Romans indulged
+     themselves in the refreshment of shady groves, cool
+     fountains, and delicious fruits.... In three generations
+     prosperity and a warm climate had dissolved the hardy virtue
+     of the Vandals, who insensibly became the most luxurious of
+     mankind. In their villas and gardens, which might deserve
+     the Persian name of Paradise, they enjoyed a cool and
+     elegant repose, and after the daily use of the bath, the
+     barbarians were seated at a table profusely spread with the
+     delicacies of the land and sea. Their silken robes, loosely
+     flowing after the fashion of the Medes, were embroidered
+     with gold, love and hunting were the labours of their life,
+     and their vacant hours were amused by pantomimes,
+     chariot-races, and the music and dances of the theatre.
+
+     "In a march of twelve days the vigilance of Belisarius was
+     constantly awake and active against his unseen enemies, by
+     whom in every place and at every hour he might be suddenly
+     attacked. An officer of confidence and merit, John the
+     Armenian, led the vanguard of three hundred horse. Six
+     hundred Massagetae covered at a certain distance the left
+     flank, and the whole fleet, steering along the coast, seldom
+     lost sight of the army, which moved each day about twelve
+     miles, and lodged in the evening in strong camps or in
+     friendly towns. The near approach of the Romans to Carthage
+     filled the mind of Gelimer with anxiety and terror....
+
+     "Yet the authority and promises of Gelimer collected a
+     formidable army, and his plans were concerted with some
+     degree of military skill. An order was despatched to his
+     brother Ammatas to collect all the forces of Carthage, and
+     to encounter the van of the Roman army at the distance of
+     ten miles from the city: his nephew Gibamund with two
+     thousand horse was destined to attack their left, when the
+     monarch himself, who silently followed, should charge their
+     rear in a situation which excluded them from the aid and
+     even the view of their fleet. But the rashness of Ammatas
+     was fatal to himself and his country. He anticipated the
+     hour of attack, outstripped his tardy followers, and was
+     pierced with a mortal wound, after he had slain with his own
+     hand twelve of his boldest antagonists. His Vandals fled to
+     Carthage: the highway, almost ten miles, was strewed with
+     dead bodies, and it seemed incredible that such multitudes
+     could be slaughtered by the swords of three hundred Romans.
+     The nephew of Gelimer was defeated after a slight combat by
+     the six hundred Massagetae; they did not equal the third part
+     of his numbers, but each Scythian was fired by the example
+     of his chief, who gloriously exercised the privilege of his
+     family by riding foremost and alone to shoot the first arrow
+     against the enemy. In the meantime Gelimer himself, ignorant
+     of the event, and misguided by the windings of the hills,
+     inadvertently passed the Roman army and reached the scene of
+     action where Ammatas had fallen. He wept the fate of his
+     brother and of Carthage, charged with irresistible fury the
+     advancing squadrons, and might have pursued and perhaps
+     decided the victory, if he had not wasted those inestimable
+     moments in the discharge of a vain though pious duty to the
+     dead. While his spirit was broken by this mournful office,
+     he heard the trumpet of Belisarius, who, leaving Antonina
+     and his infantry in the camp, pressed forward with his
+     guards and the remainder of the cavalry to rally his flying
+     troops, and to restore the fortune of the day. Much room
+     could not be found in this disorderly battle for the talents
+     of a general; but the king fled before the hero, and the
+     Vandals, accustomed only to a Moorish enemy, were incapable
+     of withstanding the arms and the discipline of the
+     Romans....
+
+     "As soon as the tumult had subsided, the several parts of
+     the army informed each other of the accidents of the day,
+     and Belisarius pitched his camp on the field of victory, to
+     which the tenth milestone from Carthage had applied the
+     Latin appellation of _Decimus_. From a wise suspicion of the
+     stratagems and resources of the Vandals, he marched the next
+     day in the order of battle; halted in the evening before the
+     gates of Carthage, and allowed a night of repose, that he
+     might not, in darkness and disorder, expose the city to the
+     licence of the soldiers, or the soldiers themselves to the
+     secret ambush of the city. But as the fears of Belisarius
+     were the result of calm and intrepid reason, he was soon
+     satisfied that he might confide without danger in the
+     peaceful and friendly aspect of the capital. Carthage blazed
+     with innumerable torches, the signal of the public joy; the
+     chain was removed that guarded the entrance of the port, the
+     gates were thrown open, and the people with acclamations of
+     gratitude hailed and invited their Roman deliverers. The
+     defeat of the Vandals and the freedom of Africa were
+     announced to the city on the eve of St. Cyprian, when the
+     churches were already adorned and illuminated for the
+     festival of the martyr whom three centuries of superstition
+     had almost raised to a local deity.... One awful hour
+     reversed the fortunes of the contending parties. The
+     suppliant Vandals, who had so lately indulged the vices of
+     conquerors, sought an humble refuge in the sanctuary of the
+     church; while the merchants of the east were delivered from
+     the deepest dungeon of the palace by their affrighted
+     keeper, who implored the protection of his captives, and
+     showed them through an aperture in the wall the sails of the
+     Roman fleet. After their separation from the army, the naval
+     commanders had proceeded with slow caution along the coast,
+     till they reached the Hermaean promontory, and obtained the
+     first intelligence of the victory of Belisarius. Faithful to
+     his instructions, they would have cast anchor about twenty
+     miles from Carthage, if the more skilful had not represented
+     the perils of the shore and the signs of an impending
+     tempest. Still ignorant of the revolution, they declined
+     however the rash attempt of forcing the chain of the port,
+     and the adjacent harbour and suburb of Mandracium were
+     insulted only by the rapine of a private officer, who
+     disobeyed and deserted his leaders. But the imperial fleet,
+     advancing with a fair wind, steered through the narrow
+     entrance of the Goletta and occupied the deep and capacious
+     lake of Tunis, a secure station about five miles from the
+     capital. No sooner was Belisarius informed of the arrival
+     than he despatched orders that the greatest part of the
+     mariners should be immediately landed to join the triumph
+     and to swell the apparent numbers of the Romans. Before he
+     allowed them to enter the gates of Carthage he exhorted
+     them, in a discourse worthy of himself and the occasion, not
+     to disgrace the glory of their arms, and to remember that
+     the Vandals had been the tyrants, but that _they_ were the
+     deliverers of the Africans, who must now be respected as the
+     voluntary and affectionate subjects of their common
+     sovereign. The Romans marched through the street in close
+     ranks, prepared for battle if an enemy had appeared; the
+     strict order maintained by their general imprinted on their
+     minds the duty of obedience; and in an age in which custom
+     and impunity almost sanctified the abuse of conquest, the
+     genius of one man repressed the passions of a victorious
+     army. The voice of menace and complaint was silent, the
+     trade of Carthage was not interrupted; while Africa changed
+     her master and her government, the shops continued open and
+     busy; and the soldiers, after sufficient guards had been
+     posted, modestly departed to the houses which had been
+     allotted for their reception. Belisarius fixed his residence
+     in the palace, seated himself on the throne of Genseric,
+     accepted and distributed the barbaric spoil, granted their
+     lives to the suppliant Vandals, and laboured to restore the
+     damage which the suburb of Mandracium had sustained in the
+     preceding night. At supper he entertained his principal
+     officers with the form and magnificence of a royal banquet.
+     The victor was respectfully served by the captive officers
+     of the household, and in the moments of festivity, when the
+     impartial spectators applauded the fortune and merit of
+     Belisarius, his envious flatterers secretly shed their venom
+     on every word and gesture which might alarm the suspicions
+     of a jealous monarch. One day was given to these pompous
+     scenes, which may not be despised as useless if they
+     attracted the popular veneration; but the active mind of
+     Belisarius, which in the pride of victory could suppose
+     defeat, had already resolved that the Roman empire in Africa
+     should not depend on the chance of arms or the favour of the
+     people. The fortifications of Carthage had alone been
+     excepted from the general proscription; but in the reign of
+     ninety-five years they were suffered to decay by the
+     thoughtless and indolent Vandals. A wiser conqueror restored
+     with incredible despatch the walls and ditches of the city.
+     His liberality encouraged the workmen; the soldiers, the
+     mariners, and the citizens vied with each other in the
+     salutary labour; and Gelimer, who had feared to trust his
+     person in an open town, beheld with astonishment and
+     despair the rising strength of an impregnable fortress."
+
+But we have hardly finished admiring the brilliant picture of the
+conquest of Africa and Italy, before Gibbon gives us further proofs of
+his many-sided culture and catholicity of mind. His famous chapter on
+the Roman law has been accepted by the most fastidious experts of an
+esoteric science as a masterpiece of knowledge, condensation, and
+lucidity. It has actually been received as a textbook in some of the
+continental universities, published separately with notes and
+illustrations. When we consider the neglect of Roman jurisprudence in
+England till quite recent times, and its severe study on the
+Continent, we shall better appreciate the mental grasp and vigour
+which enabled an unprofessional Englishman in the last century to
+produce such a dissertation. A little further on (chapter forty-seven)
+the history of the doctrine of the Incarnation, and the controversies
+that sprang up around it, are discussed with a subtlety worthy of a
+scientific theologian. It is perhaps the first attempt towards a
+philosophical history of dogma, less patient and minute than the works
+of the specialists of modern Germany on the same subject, but for
+spirit, clearness, and breadth it is superior to those profound but
+somewhat barbarous writers. The flexibility of intellect which can do
+justice in quick succession to such diverse subjects is very
+extraordinary, and assuredly implies great width of sympathy and large
+receptivity of nature.
+
+Having terminated the period of Justinian, Gibbon makes a halt, and
+surveys the varied and immense scene through which he will presently
+pass in many directions. He rapidly discovers _ten_ main lines, along
+which he will advance in succession to his final goal, the conquest
+of Constantinople. The two pages at the commencement of the
+forty-eighth chapter, in which he sketches out the remainder of his
+plan and indicates the topics which he means to treat, are admirable
+as a luminous _precis_, and for the powerful grasp which they show of
+his immense subject. It lay spread out all before him, visible in
+every part to his penetrating eye, and he seems to rejoice in his
+conscious strength and ability to undertake the historical conquest on
+which he is about to set out. "Nor will this scope of narrative," he
+says, "the riches and variety of these materials, be incompatible with
+the unity of design and composition. As in his daily prayers the
+Mussulman of Fez or Delhi still turns his face towards the temple of
+Mecca, the historian's eye will always be fixed on the city of
+Constantinople." Then follows the catalogue of nations and empires
+whose fortunes he means to sing. A grander vision, a more majestic
+procession, never swept before the mind's eye of poet or historian.
+
+And the practical execution is worthy of the initial inspiration.
+After a rapid and condensed narrative of Byzantine history till the
+end of the twelfth century, he takes up the brilliant theme of Mahomet
+and his successors. A few pages on the climate and physical features
+of Arabia fittingly introduce the subject. And it may be noted in
+passing that Gibbon's attention to geography, and his skill and taste
+for geographical description, are remarkable among his many gifts. He
+was as diligent a student of maps and travels as of historical
+records, and seems to have had a rare faculty of realising in
+imagination scenes and countries of which he had only read. In three
+chapters, glowing with oriental colour and rapid as a charge of Arab
+horse, he tells the story of the prophet and the Saracen empire. Then
+the Bulgarians, Hungarians, and Russians appear on the scene, to be
+soon followed by the Normans, and their short but brilliant dominion
+in Southern Italy. But now the Seljukian Turks are emerging from the
+depths of Asia, taking the place of the degenerate Saracens, invading
+the Eastern empire and conquering Jerusalem. The two waves of hostile
+fanaticism soon meet in the Crusades. The piratical seizure of
+Constantinople by the Latins brings in view the French and Venetians,
+the family of Courtenay and its pleasant digression. Then comes the
+slow agony of the restored Greek empire. Threatened by the Moguls, it
+is invaded and dismembered by the Ottoman Turks. Constantinople seems
+ready to fall into their hands. But the timely diversion of Tamerlane
+produces a respite of half a century. Nothing can be more artistic
+than Gibbon's management of his subject as he approaches its
+termination. He, who is such a master of swift narrative, at this
+point introduces artful pauses, _suspensions_ of the final
+catastrophe, which heighten our interest in the fate which is hanging
+over the city of Constantine. In 1425 the victorious Turks have
+conquered all the Greek empire save the capital. Amurath II. besieged
+it for two months, and was only prevented from taking it by a domestic
+revolt in Asia Minor. At the end of his sixty-fifth chapter Gibbon
+leaves Constantinople hanging on the brink of destruction, and paints
+in glowing colours the military virtues of its deadly enemies, the
+Ottomans. Then he interposes one of his most finished chapters, of
+miscellaneous contents, but terminating in the grand and impressive
+pages on the revival of learning in Italy. There we read of the
+"curiosity and emulation of the Latins," of the zeal of Petrarch and
+the success of Boccace in Greek studies, of Leontius, Pilatus,
+Bessarion, and Lascaris. A glow of sober enthusiasm warms the great
+scholar as he paints the early light of that happy dawn. He admits
+that the "arms of the Turks pressed the flight of the Muses" from
+Greece to Italy. But he "trembles at the thought that Greece might
+have been overwhelmed with her schools and libraries, before Europe
+had emerged from the deluge of barbarism, and that the seeds of
+science might have been scattered on the winds, before the Italian
+soil was prepared for their cultivation." In one of the most perfect
+sentences to be found in English prose he thus describes the Greek
+tongue: "In their lowest depths of servitude and depression, the
+subjects of the Byzantine throne were still possessed of a golden key
+that could unlock the treasures of antiquity, of a musical and
+prolific language that gives a soul to the objects of sense and a body
+to the abstractions of philosophy." Meanwhile we are made to feel that
+the subjects of the Byzantine throne, with their musical speech, that
+Constantinople with her libraries and schools, will all soon fall a
+prey to the ravening and barbarous Turk. This brightening light of the
+Western sky contending with the baleful gloom which is settling down
+over the East, is one of the most happy contrasts in historical
+literature. Then comes the end, the preparations and skill of the
+savage invader, the futile but heroic defence, the overwhelming ruin
+which struck down the Cross and erected the Crescent over the city of
+Constantine the Great.
+
+It is one of the many proofs of Gibbon's artistic instinct that he did
+not end with this great catastrophe. On the contrary, he adds three
+more chapters. His fine tact warned him that the tumult and thunder of
+the final ruin must not be the last sounds to strike the ear. A
+resolution of the discord was needed; a soft chorale should follow the
+din and lead to a mellow _adagio_ close. And this he does with supreme
+skill. With ill-suppressed disgust, he turns from New to Old Home.
+"Constantinople no longer appertains to the Roman historian--nor shall
+I enumerate the civil and religious edifices that were profaned or
+erected by its Turkish masters." Amid the decayed temples and
+mutilated beauty of the Eternal City, he moves down to a melodious and
+pathetic conclusion--piously visits the remaining fragments of ancient
+splendour and art, deplores and describes the ravages wrought by time,
+and still more by man, and recurring once again to the scene of his
+first inspiration, bids farewell to the Roman empire among the ruins
+of the Capitol.
+
+We have hitherto spoken in terms of warm, though perhaps not excessive
+eulogy of this great work. But praise would lack the force of
+moderation and equipoise, if allusion were not made to some of its
+defects. The pervading defect of it all has been already referred to
+in a preceding chapter--an inadequate conception of society as an
+organism, living and growing, like other organisms, according to
+special laws of its own. In these brilliant volumes on the Middle
+Ages, the special problems which that period suggests are not stated,
+far less solved; they are not even suspected. The feudal polity, the
+Catholic Church, the theocratic supremacy of the Popes, considered as
+institutions which the historian is called upon to estimate and judge;
+the gradual dissolution of both feudalism and Catholicism, brought
+about by the spread of industry in the temporal order and of science
+in the spiritual order, are not even referred to. Many more topics
+might be added to this list of weighty omissions. It would be needless
+to say that no blame attaches to Gibbon for neglecting views of
+history which had not emerged in his time, if there were not persons
+who, forgetting the slow progress of knowledge, are apt to ascribe the
+defects of a book to incompetence in its author. If Gibbon's
+conception of the Middle Ages seems to us inadequate now, it is
+because since his time our conceptions of society in that and in all
+periods have been much enlarged. We may be quite certain that if
+Gibbon had had our experience, no one would have seen the
+imperfections of particular sides of his work as we now have it more
+clearly than he.
+
+Laying aside, therefore, reflexions of this kind as irrelevant and
+unjust, we may ask whether there are any other faults which may fairly
+be found with him. One must admit that there are. After all, they are
+not very important.
+
+(1.) Striking as is his account of Justinian's reign, it has two
+blemishes. First, the offensive details about the vices of Theodora.
+Granting them to be well authenticated, which they are not, it was
+quite unworthy of the author and his subject to soil his pages with
+such a _chronique scandaleuse_. The defence which he sets up in his
+Memoirs, that he is "justified in painting the manners of the times,
+and that the vices of Theodora form an essential feature in the reign
+and character of Justinian," cannot be admitted. First, we are not
+sure that the vices existed, and were not the impure inventions of a
+malignant calumniator. Secondly, Gibbon is far from painting the
+manners of the time as a moralist or an historian; he paints them with
+a zest for pruriency worthy of Bayle or Brantome. It was an occasion
+for a wise scepticism to register grave doubts as to the infamous
+stories of Procopius. A rehabilitation of Theodora is not a theme
+calculated to provoke enthusiasm, and is impossible besides from the
+entire want of adequate evidence. But a thoughtful writer would not
+have lost his time, if he referred to the subject at all, in pointing
+out the moral improbability of the current accounts. He might have
+dwelt on the _unsupported_ testimony of the only witness, the
+unscrupulous Procopius, whom Gibbon himself convicts on another
+subject of flagrant mendacity. But he would have been especially slow
+to believe that a woman who had led the life of incredible profligacy
+he has described, would, in consequence of "some vision either of
+sleep or fancy," in which future exaltation was promised to her,
+assume "like a skilful actress, a more decent character, relieve her
+poverty by the laudable industry of spinning wool, and affect a life
+of chastity and solitude in a small house, which she afterwards
+changed into a magnificent temple." Magdalens have been converted, no
+doubt, from immoral living, but not by considerations of astute
+prudence suggested by day-dreams of imperial greatness. Gibbon might
+have thought of the case of Madame de Maintenon, and how her
+reputation fared in the hands of the vindictive courtiers of
+Versailles; how a woman, cold as ice and pure as snow, was freely
+charged with the most abhorrent vices without an atom of foundation.
+But the truth probably is that he never thought of the subject
+seriously at all, and that, yielding to a regrettable inclination, he
+copied his licentious Greek notes with little reluctance.
+
+(2.) The character of Belisarius, enigmatical enough in itself, is
+made by him more enigmatical still. He concludes the forty-first
+chapter, in which the great deeds of the conqueror of Italy and
+Africa, and the ingratitude with which Justinian rewarded his
+services, are set forth in strong contrast, with the inept remark that
+"Belisarius appears to be either below or above the character of a
+MAN." The grounds of the apparent meekness with which Belisarius
+supported his repeated disgraces cannot now be ascertained: but the
+motives of Justinian's conduct are not so difficult to find. As Finlay
+points out in his thoughtful history of Greece, Belisarius must have
+been a peculator on a large and dangerous scale. "Though he refused
+the Gothic throne and the empire of the West, he did not despise nor
+neglect wealth: he accumulated riches which could not have been
+acquired by any commander-in-chief amidst the wars and famines of the
+period, without rendering the military and civil administration
+subservient to his pecuniary profit. On his return from Italy he lived
+at Constantinople in almost regal splendour, and maintained a body of
+7,000 cavalry attached to his household. In an empire where
+confiscation was an ordinary financial resource, and under a sovereign
+whose situation rendered jealousy only common prudence, it is not
+surprising that the wealth of Belisarius excited the imperial
+cupidity, and induced Justinian to seize great part of it" (_Greece
+under the Romans_, chap. 3). There is shrewd insight in this, and
+though we may regret that we cannot attain to more, it is better than
+leaving the subject with an unmeaning paradox.
+
+It may be said generally that Gibbon has not done justice to the
+services rendered to Europe by the Byzantine empire. In his crowded
+forty-eighth chapter, which is devoted to the subject, he passes over
+events and characters with such speed that his history in this part
+becomes little more than a chronicle, vivid indeed, but barren of
+thoughtful political views. His account of the Isaurian period may be
+instanced among others as an example of defective treatment. If we
+turn to the judicious Finlay, we see what an immense but generally
+unacknowledged debt Europe owes to the Greek empire. The saving of
+Christendom from Mohammedan conquest is too easily attributed to the
+genius of Charles Martel and his brave Franks. The victory at Tours
+was important no doubt, but almost a century previously the followers
+of the prophet had been checked by Heraclius; and their memorable
+repulse before Constantinople under the Isaurian Leo was the real
+barrier opposed to their conquest of the West. It requires but little
+reflection to see that without this brave resistance to the Moslem
+invasion, the course of mediaeval history would have been completely
+changed. Next in time, but hardly second in value to the services of
+the Greeks at Marathon and Salamis, must be reckoned the services of
+the Byzantine emperors in repelling the barbarians. Such an important
+consideration as this should hardly have escaped Gibbon.
+
+Gibbon's account of Charlemagne is strangely inadequate. It is perhaps
+the only instance in his work where he has failed to appreciate a
+truly great man, and the failure is the more deplorable as it concerns
+one of the greatest men who have ever lived. He did not realise the
+greatness of the man, of his age, or of his work. Properly
+considered, the eighth century is the most important and memorable
+which Europe has ever seen. During its course the geographical limits,
+the ecclesiastical polity, and the feudal system within and under
+which our western group of nations was destined to live for five or
+six centuries, were provisionally settled and determined. The
+wonderful house of the Carolings, which produced no less than five
+successive rulers of genius (of whom two had extraordinary genius,
+Charles Martel and Charlemagne), were the human instruments of this
+great work. The Frankish Monarchy was hastening to ruin when they
+saved it. Saxons in the East and Saracens in the South were on the
+point of extinguishing the few surviving embers of civilisation which
+still existed. The Bishop of Rome was ready to fall a prey to the
+Lombards, and the progressive papacy of Hildebrand and Innocent ran
+imminent risk of being extirpated at its root. Charles and his
+ancestors prevented these evils. Of course it is open to any one to
+say that there were no evils threatening, that Mohammedanism is as
+good as Christianity, that the Papacy was a monstrous calamity, that
+to have allowed Eastern Germany to remain pagan and barbarous would
+have done no harm. The question cannot be discussed here. But every
+law of historic equity compels us to admit that whether the result was
+good or bad, the genius of men who could leave such lasting
+impressions on the world as the Carolings did, must have been
+exceptionally great. And this is what Gibbon has not seen; he has not
+seen that, whether their work was good or bad in the issue, it was
+colossal. His tone in reference to Charlemagne is unworthy to a
+degree. "Without injustice to his fame, I may discern some blemishes
+in the sanctity and greatness of the restorer of the Western Empire.
+Of his moral virtues, chastity was not the most conspicuous." This
+from the pen of Gibbon seems hardly serious. Again: "I touch with
+reverence the laws of Charlemagne, so highly applauded by a
+respectable judge. They compose not a system, but a series of
+occasional and minute edicts, for the correction of abuses, the
+reformation of manners, the economy of his farms, the care of his
+poultry, and even the sale of his eggs." And yet Gibbon had read the
+Capitularies. The struggle and care of the hero to master in some
+degree the wide welter of barbarism surging around him, he never
+recognised. It is a spot on Gibbon's fame.
+
+Dean Milman considers that Gibbon's account of the Crusades is the
+least accurate and satisfactory chapter in his history, and "that he
+has here failed in that lucid arrangement which in general gives
+perspicuity to his most condensed and crowded narratives." This blame
+seems to be fully merited, if restricted to the second of the two
+chapters which Gibbon has devoted to the Crusades. The fifty-eighth
+chapter, in which he treats of the First Crusade, leaves nothing to be
+desired. It is not one of his best chapters, though it is quite up to
+his usually high level. But the fifty-ninth chapter, it must be owned,
+is not only weak, but what is unexampled elsewhere in him, confused
+and badly written. It is not, as in the case of Charlemagne, a
+question of imperfect appreciation of a great man or epoch; it is a
+matter of careless and slovenly presentation of a period which he had
+evidently mastered with his habitual thoroughness, but, owing to the
+rapidity with which he composed his last volume, he did not do full
+justice to it. He says significantly in his Memoirs, that "he wished
+that a pause, an interval, had been allowed for a serious revisal" of
+the last three volumes, and there can be little doubt that this
+chapter was one of the sources of his regrets. It is in fact a mere
+tangle. The Second and the Third Crusades are so jumbled together,
+that it is only a reader who knows the subject very well who can find
+his way through the labyrinth. Gibbon seems at this point, a thing
+very unusual with him, to have become impatient with his subject, and
+to have wished to hurry over it. "A brief parallel," he says, "may
+save the repetition of a tedious narrative." The result of this
+expeditious method has been far from happy. It is the only occasion
+where Gibbon has failed in his usual high finish and admirable
+literary form.
+
+Gibbon's style was at one period somewhat of a party question. Good
+Christians felt a scruple in discerning any merits in the style of a
+writer who had treated the martyrs of the early Church with so little
+ceremony and generosity. On the other hand, those whose opinions
+approached more or less to his, expatiated on the splendour and
+majesty of his diction. Archbishop Whately went out of his way in a
+note to his _Logic_ to make a keen thrust at an author whom it was
+well to depreciate whenever occasion served. "His way of writing," he
+says, "reminds one of those persons who never dare look you full in
+the face." Such criticisms are out of date now. The faults of Gibbon's
+style are obvious enough, and its compensatory merits are not far to
+seek. No one can overlook its frequent tumidity and constant want of
+terseness. It lacks suppleness, ease, variety. It is not often
+distinguished by happy selection of epithet, and seems to ignore all
+delicacy of _nuance_. A prevailing grandiloquence, which easily slides
+into pomposity, is its greatest blemish. The acute Porson saw this and
+expressed it admirably. In the preface to his letters to Archdeacon
+Travis, he says of Gibbon, "Though his style is in general correct and
+elegant, he sometimes 'draws out the thread of his verbosity finer
+than the staple of his argument.' In endeavouring to avoid vulgar
+terms he too frequently dignifies trifles, and clothes common thoughts
+in a splendid dress that would be rich enough for the noblest ideas.
+In short we are too often reminded of that great man, Mr. Prig, the
+auctioneer, whose manner was so inimitably fine that he had as much to
+say on a ribbon as on a Raphael." It seems as if Gibbon had taken the
+stilted tone of the old French tragedy for his model, rather than the
+crisp and nervous prose of the best French writers. We are constantly
+offended by a superfine diction lavished on barbarous chiefs and rough
+soldiers of the Lower Empire, which almost reproduces the high-flown
+rhetoric in which Corneille's and Racine's characters address each
+other. Such phrases as the "majesty of the throne," "the dignity of
+the purple," the "wisdom of the senate," recur with a rather jarring
+monotony, especially when the rest of the narrative is designed to
+show that there was no majesty nor dignity nor wisdom involved in the
+matter. We feel that the writer was thinking more of his sonorous
+sentence than of the real fact. On the other hand, nothing but a want
+of candour or taste can lead any one to overlook the rare and great
+excellences of Gibbon's style. First of all, it is singularly correct:
+a rather common merit now, but not common in his day. But its
+sustained vigour and loftiness will always be uncommon; above all its
+rapidity and masculine length of stride are quite admirable. When he
+takes up his pen to describe a campaign, or any great historic scene,
+we feel that we shall have something worthy of the occasion, that we
+shall be carried swiftly and grandly through it all, without the
+suspicion of a breakdown of any kind being possible. An indefinable
+stamp of weightiness is impressed on Gibbon's writing; he has a
+baritone manliness which banishes everything small, trivial, or weak.
+When he is eloquent (and it should be remembered to his credit that he
+never affects eloquence, though he occasionally affects dignity), he
+rises without effort into real grandeur. On the whole we may say that
+his manner, with certain manifest faults, is not unworthy of his
+matter, and the praise is great.
+
+It is not quite easy to give expression to another feeling which is
+often excited in reading Gibbon. It is somewhat of this kind, that it
+is more fitted to inspire admiration than love or sympathy. Its merits
+are so great, the mass of information it contains is so stupendous,
+that all competent judges of such work feel bound to praise it.
+Whether they like it in the same degree, may be questioned. Among
+reading men and educated persons it is not common--such is my
+experience--to meet with people who know their Gibbon well. Superior
+women do not seem to take to him kindly, even when there is no
+impediment on religious grounds. Madame du Deffand, writing to
+Walpole, says, "I whisper it to you, but I am not pleased with Mr.
+Gibbon's work. It is declamatory, oratorical.... I lay it aside
+without regret, and it requires an effort to take it up again."
+Another of Walpole's correspondents, the Countess of Ossory, seems to
+have made similar strictures. If we admit that women are less capable
+than masculine scholars of doing justice to the strong side of Gibbon,
+we may also acknowledge that they are better fitted than men to
+appreciate and to be shocked by his defective side, which is a
+prevailing want of moral elevation and nobility of sentiment. His
+cheek rarely flushes in enthusiasm for a good cause. The tragedy of
+human life never seems to touch him, no glimpse of the infinite ever
+calms and raises the reader of his pages. Like nearly all the men of
+his day, he was of the earth earthy, and it is impossible to get over
+the fact.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+LAST ILLNESS.--DEATH.--CONCLUSION.
+
+
+Gibbon had now only about six months to live. He did not seem to have
+suffered by his rapid journey from Lausanne to London. During the
+summer which he spent with his friend Lord Sheffield, he was much as
+usual; only his friend noticed that his habitual dislike to motion
+appeared to increase, and he was so incapable of exercise that he was
+confined to the library and dining-room. "Then he joined Mr. F. North
+in pleasant arguments against exercise in general. He ridiculed the
+unsettled and restless disposition that summer, the most uncomfortable
+of all seasons, as he said, generally gives to those who have the use
+of their limbs." The true disciples of Epicurus are not always the
+least stout and stoical in the presence of irreparable evils.
+
+After spending three or four months at Sheffield Place, he went to
+Bath to visit his step-mother, Mrs. Gibbon. His conduct to her through
+life was highly honourable to him. It should be remembered that her
+jointure, paid out of his father's decayed estate, was a great tax on
+his small income. In his efforts to improve his position by selling
+his landed property, Mrs. Gibbon seems to have been at times somewhat
+difficult to satisfy as regards the security of her interests. It was
+only prudent on her part. But it is easy to see what a source of
+alienation and quarrel was here ready prepared, if both parties had
+not risen superior to sordid motives. There never seems to have been
+the smallest cloud between them. When one of his properties was sold
+he writes: "Mrs. Gibbon's jointure is secured on the Buriton estate,
+and her legal consent is requisite for the sale. Again and again I
+must repeat my hope that she is perfectly satisfied, and that the
+close of her life may not be embittered by suspicion, fear, or
+discontent. What new security does she prefer--the funds, a mortgage,
+or your land? At all events, she must be made easy." So Gibbon left
+town and lay at Reading on his road to Bath: here he passed about ten
+days with his step-mother, who was now nearly eighty years of age. "In
+mind and conversation she is just the same as twenty years ago," he
+writes to Lord Sheffield; "she has spirits, appetite, legs, and eyes,
+and talks of living till ninety. I can say from my heart, Amen." And
+in another letter, a few days later, he says: "A _tete-a-tete_ of
+eight or nine hours every day is rather difficult to support; yet I do
+assure you that our conversation flows with more ease and spirit when
+we are alone, than when any auxiliaries are summoned to our aid. She
+is indeed a wonderful woman, and I think all her faculties of the mind
+stronger and more active than I have ever known them.... I shall
+therefore depart next Friday, but I may possibly reckon without my
+host, as I have not yet apprised Mrs. G. of the term of my visit, and
+will certainly not quarrel with her for a short delay." He then went
+to Althorpe, and it is the last evidence of his touching a
+book--"exhausted the morning (of the 5th November) among the first
+editions of Cicero." Then he came to London, and in a few days was
+seized with the illness which in a little more than two months put an
+end to his life.
+
+His malady was dropsy, complicated with other disorders. He had most
+strangely neglected a very dangerous symptom for upwards of thirty
+years, not only having failed to take medical advice about it, but
+even avoiding all allusion to it to bosom friends like Lord Sheffield.
+But longer concealment was now impossible. He sent for the eminent
+surgeon Farquhar (the same who afterwards attended William Pitt), and
+he, together with Cline, at once recognised the case as one of the
+utmost gravity, though they did not say as much to the patient. On
+Thursday, the 14th of November, he was tapped and greatly relieved. He
+said he was not appalled by the operation, and during its progress he
+did not lay aside his usual good-humoured pleasantry. He was soon out
+again, but only for a few days, and a fortnight after another tapping
+was necessary. Again he went out to dinners and parties, which must
+have been most imprudent at his age and in his state. But he does not
+seem to have acted contrary to medical advice. He was very anxious to
+meet the prime minister, William Pitt, with whom he was not
+acquainted, though he must have seen him in old days in the House. He
+saw him twice; once at Eden Farm for a whole day, and was much
+gratified, we are told. At last he got to what he called his home--the
+house of his true and devoted friend, Lord Sheffield. "But," says the
+latter, whose narrative of his friend's last illness is marked by a
+deep and reserved tenderness that does him much honour, "this last
+visit to Sheffield Place became far different from any he had ever
+made before. That ready, cheerful, various and illuminating
+conversation which we had before admired in him, was not always to be
+found in the library or the drawing-room. He moved with difficulty,
+and retired from company sooner than he had been used to do. On the
+23rd of December his appetite began to fail him. He observed to me
+that it was a very bad sign _with him_ when he could not eat his
+breakfast, which he had done at all times very heartily; and this
+seems to have been the strongest expression of apprehension that he
+was ever observed to utter." He soon became too ill to remain beyond
+the reach of the highest medical advice. On the 7th of January, 1794,
+he left a houseful of company and friends for his lodgings in St.
+James's Street. On arriving he sent the following note to Lord
+Sheffield, the last lines he ever wrote:--
+
+    "ST. JAMES'S, FOUR O'CLOCK, TUESDAY.
+
+    "This date says everything. I was almost killed between
+    Sheffield Place and East Grinstead by hard, frozen, long, and
+    cross ruts, that would disgrace the approach of an Indian
+    wigwam. The rest was somewhat less painful, and I reached
+    this place half dead, but not seriously feverish or ill. I
+    found a dinner invitation from Lord Lucan; but what are
+    dinners to me? I wish they did not know of my departure. I
+    catch the flying post. What an effort! Adieu till Thursday or
+    Friday."
+
+The end was not far off. On the 13th of January he underwent another
+operation, and, as usual, experienced much relief. "His spirits
+continued good. He talked of passing his time at houses which he had
+often frequented with great pleasure--the Duke of Devonshire's, Mr.
+Craufurd's, Lord Spencer's, Lord Lucan's, Sir Ralph Payne's, Mr.
+Batt's." On the 14th of January "he saw some company--Lady Lucan and
+Lady Spencer--and thought himself well enough to omit the opium
+draught which he had been used to take for some time. He slept very
+indifferently; before nine the next morning he rose, but could not eat
+his breakfast. However, he appeared tolerably well, yet complained at
+times of a pain in his stomach. At one o'clock he received a visit of
+an hour from Madame de Sylva; and at three, his friend, Mr. Craufurd,
+of Auchinames (whom he always mentioned with particular regard),
+called, and stayed with him till past five o'clock. They talked, as
+usual, on various subjects; and twenty hours before his death Mr.
+Gibbon happened to fall into a conversation not uncommon with him, on
+the probable duration of his life. He said that he thought himself a
+good life for ten, twelve, or perhaps twenty years. About six he ate
+the wing of a chicken and drank three glasses of Madeira. After dinner
+he became very uneasy and impatient, complained a good deal, and
+appeared so weak that his servant was alarmed.
+
+"During the evening he complained much of his stomach, and of a
+feeling of nausea. Soon after nine, he took his opium draught and went
+to bed. About ten he complained of much pain, and desired that warm
+napkins might be applied to his stomach. He almost incessantly
+expressed a sense of pain till about four o'clock in the morning, when
+he said he found his stomach much easier. About seven the servant
+asked whether he should send for Mr. Farquhar. He answered, No; that
+he was as well as the day before. At about half-past eight he got out
+of bed, and said he was 'plus adroit' than he had been for three
+months past, and got into bed again without assistance, better than
+usual. About nine he said he would rise. The servant, however,
+persuaded him to remain in bed till Mr. Farquhar, who was expected at
+eleven, should come. Till about that hour he spoke with great
+facility. Mr. Farquhar came at the time appointed, and he was then
+visibly dying. When the _valet-de-chambre_ returned, after attending
+Mr. Farquhar out of the room, Mr. Gibbon said, 'Pourquoi est ce que
+vous me quittez?' This was about half-past eleven. At twelve he drank
+some brandy and water from a teapot, and desired his favourite servant
+to stay with him. These were the last words he pronounced
+articulately. To the last he preserved his senses; and when he could
+no longer speak, his servant having asked a question, he made a sign
+to show that he understood him. He was quite tranquil, and did not
+stir, his eyes half shut. About a quarter before one he ceased to
+breathe." He wanted just eighty-three days of fifty-seven years of
+age.
+
+Thus, in consequence of his own strange self-neglect and imprudence,
+was extinguished one of the most richly-stored minds that ever lived.
+Occurring when it did, so near the last summons, Gibbon's prospective
+hope of continued life "for ten, twelve, or twenty years" is harshly
+pathetic, and full of that irony which mocks the vain cares of men.
+But, truly, his forecast was not irrational if he had not neglected
+ordinary precautions. In spite of his ailments he felt full, and was
+full, of life, when he was cut off. We cannot be sure if lengthened
+days would have added much to his work already achieved. There is
+hardly a parallel case in literature of the great powers of a whole
+life being so concentrated on one supreme and magnificent effort. Yet,
+if he had lived to 1804, or as an extreme limit, to 1814, we should
+have been all gainers. In the first place, he certainly would have
+finished his admirable autobiography. We cannot imagine what he would
+have made of it, judging from the fragment which exists. And yet that
+fragment is almost a masterpiece. But his fertile mind had other
+schemes in prospect; and what such a diligent worker would have done
+with a decade or two more of years it is impossible to say, except
+that it is certain they would not have been wasted. The extinction of
+a real mind is ever an irreparable loss.
+
+As it was, he went to his rest after one of the greatest victories
+ever achieved in his own field of humane letters, and lived long
+enough to taste the fruits of his toil. He was never puffed up, but
+soberly and without arrogance received his laurels. His unselfish zeal
+and haste to console his bereaved friend showed him warm and loving to
+the last; and we may say that his last serious effort was consecrated
+to the genius of pious friendship.
+
+In 1796, two years after Gibbon's death, Lord Sheffield published two
+quarto volumes of the historian's miscellaneous works. They have been
+republished in one thick octavo, and many persons suppose that it
+contains the whole of the posthumous works; not unnaturally, as a
+fraudulent statement on the title-page, "complete in one volume," is
+well calculated to produce that impression. But in 1814 Lord Sheffield
+issued a second edition in five volumes octavo, containing much
+additional matter, which additional matter was again published in a
+quarto form, no doubt for the convenience of the purchasers of the
+original quarto edition.
+
+Of the posthumous works, the Memoirs are by far the most important
+portion. Unfortunately, they were left in a most unfinished state, and
+what we now read is nothing else than a mosaic put together by Lord
+Sheffield from _six_ different sketches. Next to the Memoirs are the
+journals and diaries of his studies. As a picture of Gibbon's method,
+zeal, and thoroughness in the pursuit of knowledge, they are of the
+highest interest. But they refer to an early period of his studies,
+long previous to the concentration of his mind on his great work, and
+one would like to know whether they present the best selection that
+might have been made from these records. It is interesting to follow
+Gibbon in his perusal of Homer and Juvenal at five-and-twenty. But one
+would much like to be admitted to his study when he was a far riper
+scholar, and preparing for or writing the _Decline and Fall_. Lord
+Sheffield positively prohibited, by a clause in his will, any further
+publication of the Gibbon papers, and although Dean Milman was
+permitted to see them, it was with the express understanding that none
+of their contents should be divulged. After the Memoirs and the
+journals, the most interesting portion of the miscellaneous works are
+_The Antiquities of the House of Brunswick_, which in their present
+form are merely the preparatory sketch of a large work. It is too
+imperfect to allow us to judge of what Gibbon even designed to make of
+it. But it contains some masterly pages, and the style in many places
+seems more nervous and supple than that of the _Decline and Fall._
+
+For instance, this account of Albert Azo the Second:--
+
+     "Like one of his Tuscan ancestors Azo the Second was
+     distinguished among the princes of Italy by the epithet of
+     the _Rich_. The particulars of his rentroll cannot now be
+     ascertained. An occasional though authentic deed of
+     investiture enumerates eighty-three fiefs or manors which he
+     held of the empire in Lombardy and Tuscany, from the
+     Marquisate of Este to the county of Luni; but to these
+     possessions must be added the lands which he enjoyed as the
+     vassal of the Church, the ancient patrimony of Otbert (the
+     terra Obertenga) in the counties of Arezzo, Pisa, and Lucca,
+     and the marriage portion of his first wife, which, according
+     to the various readings of the manuscripts, may be computed
+     either at twenty or two hundred thousand English acres. If
+     such a mass of landed property were now accumulated on the
+     head of an Italian nobleman, the annual revenue might
+     satisfy the largest demands of private luxury or avarice,
+     and the fortunate owner would be rich in the improvement of
+     agriculture, the manufactures of industry, the refinement of
+     taste, and the extent of commerce. But the barbarism of the
+     eleventh century diminished the income and aggravated the
+     expense of the Marquis of Este. In a long series of war and
+     anarchy, man and the works of man had been swept away, and
+     the introduction of each ferocious and idle stranger had
+     been overbalanced by the loss of five or six perhaps of the
+     peaceful industrious natives. The mischievous growth of
+     vegetation, the frequent inundations of the rivers were no
+     longer checked by the vigilance of labour; the face of the
+     country was again covered with forests and morasses; of the
+     vast domains which acknowledged Azo for their lord, the far
+     greater part was abandoned to the beasts of the field, and a
+     much smaller portion was reduced to the state of constant
+     and productive husbandry. An adequate rent may be obtained
+     from the skill and substance of a free tenant who fertilizes
+     a grateful soil, and enjoys the security and benefit of a
+     long lease. But faint is the hope and scanty is the produce
+     of those harvests which are raised by the reluctant toil of
+     peasants and slaves condemned to a bare subsistance and
+     careless of the interests of a rapacious master. If his
+     granaries are full, his purse is empty, and the want of
+     cities or commerce, the difficulty of finding or reaching a
+     market, obliges him to consume on the spot a part of his
+     useless stock, which cannot be exchanged for merchandise or
+     money.... The entertainment of his vassals and soldiers,
+     their pay and rewards, their arms and horses, surpassed the
+     measure of the most oppressive tribute, and the destruction
+     which he inflicted on his neighbours was often retaliated on
+     his own lands. The costly elegance of palaces and gardens
+     was superseded by the laborious and expensive construction
+     of strong castles on the summits of the most inaccessible
+     rocks, and some of these, like the fortress of Canossa in
+     the Apennine, were built and provided to sustain a three
+     years' siege against a royal army. But his defence in this
+     world was less burdensome to a wealthy lord than his
+     salvation in the next; the demands of his chapel, his
+     priests, his alms, his offerings, his pilgrimages were
+     incessantly renewed; the monastery chosen for his sepulchre
+     was endowed with his fairest possessions, and the naked heir
+     might often complain that his father's sins had been
+     redeemed at too high a price. The Marquis Azo was not exempt
+     from the contagion of the times; his devotion was animated
+     and inflamed by the frequent miracles that were performed in
+     his presence; and the monks of Vangadizza, who yielded to
+     his request the arm of a dead saint, were not ignorant of
+     the value of that inestimable jewel. After satisfying the
+     demands of war and superstition he might appropriate the
+     rest of his revenue to use and pleasure. But the Italians of
+     the eleventh century were imperfectly skilled in the liberal
+     and mechanical arts; the objects of foreign luxury were
+     furnished at an exorbitant price by the merchants of Pisa
+     and Venice; and the superfluous wealth which could not
+     purchase the real comforts of life, were idly wasted on some
+     rare occasions of vanity and pomp. Such were the nuptials of
+     Boniface, Duke or Marquis of Tuscany, whose family was long
+     after united with that of Azo by the marriage of their
+     children. These nuptials were celebrated on the banks of the
+     Mincius, which the fancy of Virgil has decorated with a more
+     beautiful picture. The princes and people of Italy were
+     invited to the feasts, which continued three months; the
+     fertile meadows, which are intersected by the slow and
+     winding course of the river, were covered with innumerable
+     tents, and the bridegroom displayed and diversified the
+     scenes of his proud and tasteless magnificence. All the
+     utensils of the service were of silver, and his horses were
+     shod with plates of the same metal, loosely nailed and
+     carelessly dropped, to indicate his contempt of riches. An
+     image of plenty and profusion was expressed in the banquet;
+     the most delicious wines were drawn in buckets from the
+     well; and the spices of the East were ground in water-mills
+     like common flour. The dramatic and musical arts were in the
+     rudest state; but the Marquis had summoned the most popular
+     singers, harpers, and buffoons to exercise their talents in
+     this splendid theatre. After this festival I might remark a
+     singular gift of this same Boniface to the Emperor Henry
+     III., a chariot and oxen of solid silver, which were
+     designed only as a vehicle for a hogshead of vinegar. If
+     such an example should seem above the imitation of Azo
+     himself, the Marquis of Este was at least superior in wealth
+     and dignity to the vassals of his compeer. One of these
+     vassals, the Viscount of Mantua, presented the German
+     monarch with one hundred falcons and one hundred bay horses,
+     a grateful contribution to the pleasures of a royal
+     sportsman. In that age the proud distinction between the
+     nobles and princes of Italy was guarded with jealous
+     ceremony. The Viscount of Mantua had never been seated at
+     the table of his immediate lord; he yielded to the
+     invitation of the Emperor; and a stag's skin filled with
+     pieces of gold was graciously accepted by the Marquis of
+     Tuscany as the fine of his presumption.
+
+     "The temporal felicity of Azo was crowned by the long
+     possession of honour and riches; he died in the year 1097,
+     aged upwards of an hundred years; and the term of his mortal
+     existence was almost commensurate with the lapse of the
+     eleventh century. The character as well as the situation of
+     the Marquis of Este rendered him an actor in the revolutions
+     of that memorable period; but time has cast a veil over the
+     virtues and vices of the man, and I must be content to mark
+     some of the eras, the milestones of his which measure the
+     extent and intervals of the vacant way. Albert Azo the
+     Second was no more than seventeen when he first drew the
+     sword of rebellion and patriotism, when he was involved with
+     his grandfather, his father, and his three uncles in a
+     common proscription. In the vigour of his manhood, about his
+     fiftieth year, the Ligurian Marquis governed the cities of
+     Milan and Genoa as the minister of Imperial authority. He
+     was upwards of seventy when he passed the Alps to vindicate
+     the inheritance of Maine for the children of his second
+     marriage. He became the friend and servant of Gregory VII.,
+     and in one of his epistles that ambitious pontiff recommends
+     the Marquis Azo, as the most faithful and best beloved of
+     the Italian princes, as the proper channel through which a
+     king of Hungary might convey his petitions to the apostolic
+     throne. In the mighty contest between the crown and the
+     mitre, the Marquis Azo and the Countess Matilda led the
+     powers of Italy. And when the standard of St. Peter was
+     displayed, neither the age of the one nor the sex of the
+     other could detain them from the field. With these two
+     affectionate clients the Pope maintained his station in the
+     fortress of Canossa, while the Emperor, barefoot on the
+     frozen ground, fasted and prayed three days at the foot of
+     the rock; they were witnesses to the abject ceremony of the
+     penance and pardon of Henry IV.; and in the triumph of the
+     Church a patriot might foresee the deliverance of Italy from
+     the German yoke. At the time of this event the Marquis of
+     Este was above fourscore; but in the twenty following years
+     he was still alive and active amidst the revolutions of
+     peace and war. The last act which he subscribed is dated
+     above a century after his birth; and in that the venerable
+     chief possesses the command of his faculties, his family,
+     and his fortune. In this rare prerogative the longevity of
+     Albert Azo the Second stands alone. Nor can I remember in
+     the _authentic_ annals of mortality a single example of a
+     king or prince, of a statesman or general, of a philosopher
+     or poet, whose life has been extended beyond the period of a
+     hundred years.... Three approximations which will not
+     hastily be matched have distinguished the present century,
+     Aurungzebe, Cardinal Fleury, and Fontenelle. Had a fortnight
+     more been given to the philosopher, he might have celebrated
+     his secular festival; but the lives and labours of the Mogul
+     king and the French minister were terminated before they had
+     accomplished their ninetieth year."
+
+Then follow several striking and graceful pages on Lucrezia Borgia and
+Renee of France, Duchess of Ferrara. The following description of the
+University of Padua and the literary tastes of the house of Este is
+all that we can give here:--
+
+     "An university had been founded at Padua by the house of
+     Este, and the scholastic rust was polished away by the
+     revival of the literature of Greece and Rome. The studies of
+     Ferrara were directed by skilful and eloquent professors,
+     either natives or foreigners. The ducal library was filled
+     with a valuable collection of manuscripts and printed books,
+     and as soon as twelve new plays of Plautus had been found in
+     Germany, the Marquis Lionel of Este was impatient to obtain
+     a fair and faithful copy of that ancient poet. Nor were
+     these elegant pleasures confined to the learned world. Under
+     the reign of Hercules I. a wooden theatre at a moderate
+     cost of a thousand crowns was constructed in the largest
+     court of the palace, the scenery represented some houses, a
+     seaport and a ship, and the _Menechmi_ of Plautus, which had
+     been translated into Italian by the Duke himself, was acted
+     before a numerous and polite audience. In the same language
+     and with the same success the _Amphytrion_ of Plautus and
+     the _Eunuchus_ of Terence were successively exhibited. And
+     these classic models, which formed the taste of the
+     spectators, excited the emulation of the poets of the age.
+     For the use of the court and theatre of Ferrara, Ariosto
+     composed his comedies, which were often played with
+     applause, which are still read with pleasure. And such was
+     the enthusiasm of the new arts that one of the sons of
+     Alphonso the First did not disdain to speak a prologue on
+     the stage. In the legitimate forms of dramatic composition
+     the Italians have not excelled; but it was in the court of
+     Ferrara that they invented and refined the _pastoral
+     comedy_, a romantic Arcadia which violates the truth of
+     manners and the simplicity of nature, but which commands our
+     indulgence by the elaborate luxury of eloquence and wit. The
+     _Aminta_ of Tasso was written for the amusement and acted in
+     the presence of Alphonso the Second, and his sister Leonora
+     might apply to herself the language of a passion which
+     disordered the reason without clouding the genius of her
+     poetical lover. Of the numerous imitations, the _Pastor
+     Fido_ of Guarini, which alone can vie with the fame and
+     merit of the original, is the work of the Duke's secretary
+     of state. It was exhibited in a private house in Ferrara....
+     The father of the Tuscan muses, the sublime but unequal
+     Dante, had pronounced that Ferrara was never honoured with
+     the name of a poet; he would have been astonished to behold
+     the chorus of bards, of melodious swans (their own
+     allusion), which now peopled the banks of the Po. In the
+     court of Duke Borso and his successor, Boyardo Count
+     Scandiano, was respected as a noble, a soldier, and a
+     scholar: his vigorous fancy first celebrated the loves and
+     exploits of the paladin Orlando; and his fame has been
+     preserved and eclipsed by the brighter glories and
+     continuation of his work. Ferrara may boast that on classic
+     ground Ariosto and Tasso lived and sung; that the lines of
+     the _Orlando Furioso_, the _Gierusalemme Liberata_ were
+     inscribed in everlasting characters under the eye of the
+     First and Second Alphonso. In a period of near three
+     thousand years, five great epic poets have arisen in the
+     world, and it is a singular prerogative that two of the five
+     should be claimed as their own by a short age and a petty
+     state."
+
+It perhaps will be admitted that if the style of these passages is
+less elaborate than that of the _Decline and Fall_, the deficiency, if
+it is one, is compensated by greater ease and lightness of touch.
+
+It may be interesting to give a specimen of Gibbon's French style. His
+command of that language was not inferior to his command of his native
+idiom. One might even be inclined to say that his French prose is
+controlled by a purer taste than his English prose. The following
+excerpt, describing the Battle of Morgarten, will enable the reader to
+judge. It is taken from his early unfinished work on the History of
+the Swiss Republic, to which reference has already been made (p.
+59):--
+
+     "Leopold etait parti de Zug vers le milieu de la nuit. Il se
+     flattait d'occuper sans resistance le defile de Morgarten
+     qui ne percait qu'avec difficulte entre le lac Aegre et le
+     pied d'une montagne escarpee. Il marchait a la tete de sa
+     gendarmerie. Une colonne profonde d'infanterie le suivait de
+     pres, et les uns et les autres se promettaient une victoire
+     facile si les paysans osaient se presenter a leur rencontre.
+     Ils etaient a peine entres dans un chemin rude et etroit, et
+     qui ne permettait qu'a trois ou quatre de marcher de front,
+     qu'ils se sentirent accables d'une grele de pierres et de
+     traits. Rodolphe de Reding, landamman de Schwitz et general
+     des Confederes, n'avait oublie aucun des avantages que lui
+     offrit la situation des lieux. Il avait fait couper des
+     rochers enormes, qui en s'ebranlant des qu'on retirait les
+     faibles appuis qui les retenaient encore, se detachaient du
+     sommet de la montaigne et se precipitaient avec un bruit
+     affreux sur les bataillons serres des Autrichiens. Deja les
+     chevaux s'effrayaient, les rangs se confondaient, et le
+     desordre egarait le courage et le rendait inutile, lorsque
+     les Suisses descendirent de la montagne en poussant de
+     grands cris. Accoutumes a poursuivre le chamois sur les
+     bords glissants des precipices, ils couraient d'un pas
+     assure au milieu des neiges. Ils etaient armes de grosses et
+     pesantes hallebardes, auxquelles le fer le mieux trempe ne
+     resistait point. Les soldats de Leopold chancelants et
+     decourages cederent bientot aux efforts desesperes d'une
+     troupe qui combattait pour tout ce qu'il y a de plus cher
+     aux hommes. L'Abbe d'Einsidlen, premier auteur de cette
+     guerre malheureuse, et le comte Henri de Montfort, donnerent
+     les premiers l'example de la fuite. Le desordre devint
+     general, le carnage fut affreux, et les Suisses se livraient
+     au plaisir de la vengeance. A neuf heures du matin la
+     bataille etait gagnee.... Un grand nombre d'Autrichiens se
+     precipitant les uns sur les autres, chercherent vainement
+     dans le lac un asyle contre la fureur de leurs ennemis. Ils
+     y perirent presque tous. Quinze cents hommes resterent sur
+     le champ de bataille. Ils etaient pour la plupart de la
+     gendarmerie, qu'une valeur malheureuse et une armure pesante
+     arretaient dans un lieu ou l'un et l'autre leur etaient
+     inutiles. Longtemps apres l'on s'apercevait dans toutes les
+     provinces voisines que l'elite de la noblesse avait peri
+     dans cette fatale journee. L'infanterie beaucoup moins
+     engagee dans le defile, vit en tremblant la defaite des
+     chevaliers qui passaient pour invincibles, et dont les
+     escadrons effrayes se renversaient sur elle. Elle s'arreta,
+     voulut se retirer, et dans l'instant cette retraite devint
+     une fuite honteuse. Sa perte fut assez peu considerable,
+     mais les historiens de la nation ont conserve la memoire de
+     cinquante braves Zuriquois dont on trouva les rangs couches
+     morts sur la place. Leopold lui-meme fut entraine par la
+     foule qui le portait du cote de Zug. On le vit entrer dans
+     sa ville de Winterthur. La frayeur, la honte et
+     l'indignation etaient encore peintes sur son front. Des que
+     la victoire se fut declaree en faveur des Suisses, ils
+     s'assemblerent sur le champ de bataille, s'embrasserent e
+     versant des larmes d'allegresse, et remercierent Dieu de la
+     grace qu'il venait de leur faire, et qui ne leur avait coute
+     que quatorze de leurs compagnons."
+
+His familiar letters and a number of essays, chiefly written in youth,
+form the remainder of the miscellaneous works. Of the letters, some
+have been quoted in this volume, and the reader can form his own
+judgment of them. Of the small essays we may say that they augment, if
+it is possible, one's notion of Gibbon's laborious diligence and
+thoroughness in the field of historic research, and confirm his title
+to the character of an intrepid student.
+
+The lives of scholars are proverbially dull, and that of Gibbon is
+hardly an exception to the rule. In the case of historians, the
+protracted silent labour of preparation, followed by the conscientious
+exposition of knowledge acquired, into which the intrusion of the
+writer's personality rarely appears to advantage, combine to give
+prominence to the work achieved, and to throw into the background the
+author who achieves it. If indeed the historian, forsaking his high
+function and austere reserve, succumbs to the temptations that beset
+his path, and turns history into political pamphlet, poetic rhapsody,
+moral epigram, or garish melodrama, he may become conspicuous to a
+fault at the expense of his work. Gibbon avoided these seductions. If
+the _Decline and Fall_ has no superior in historical literature, it is
+not solely in consequence of Gibbon's profound learning, wide survey,
+and masterly grasp of his subject. With wise discretion, he
+subordinated himself to his task. The life of Gibbon is the less
+interesting, but his work remains monumental and supreme.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.
+
+EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.
+
+
+_These Short Books are addressed to the general public with a view
+both to stirring and satisfying an interest in literature and its
+great topics in the minds of those who have to run as they read. An
+immense class is growing up, and must every year increase, whose
+education will have made them alive to the importance of the masters
+of our literature, and capable of intelligent curiosity as to their
+performances. The Series is intended to give the means of nourishing
+this curiosity, to an extent that shall be copious enough to be
+profitable for knowledge and life, and yet be brief enough to serve
+those whose leisure is scanty_.
+
+_The following are arranged for_:--
+
+_SPENSER_       _The Dean of St. Paul's._
+
+_HUME_          _Professor Huxley._          _In the Press._
+
+_BUNYAN_        _James Anthony Froude._
+
+_JOHNSON_       _Leslie Stephen._            [_Ready._
+
+_GOLDSMITH_     _William Black._             [_In the Press._
+
+_MILTON_        _Mark Pattison._
+
+_WORDSWORTH_    _Goldwin Smith._
+
+_SWIFT_         _John Morley._
+
+_BURNS_         _Principal Shairp._
+
+_SCOTT_         _Richard H. Hutton._         [_Ready._
+
+_SHELLEY_       _J. A. Symonds._             [_Ready._
+
+_GIBBON_        _J. C. Morison._             [_Ready._
+
+_BYRON_         _Professor Nichol._
+
+_DEFOE_         _W. Minto._
+
+_GRAY_          _John Morley._
+
+[_OTHERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED_]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
+
+     "The new series opens well with Mr. Leslie Stephen's sketch
+     of Dr. Johnson. It could hardly have been done better; and
+     it will convey to the readers for whom it is intended a
+     juster estimate of Johnson than either of the two essays of
+     Lord Macaulay."--_Pall Mall Gazette_.
+
+     "We have come across few writers who have had a clearer
+     insight into Johnson's character, or who have brought to the
+     study of it a better knowledge of the time in which Johnson
+     lived and the men whom he knew."--_Saturday Review_.
+
+     "It must be admitted that Mr. Stephen has succeeded
+     admirably in his task. No writer could be more competent to
+     supply what is wanted in Boswell, a comprehensive sketch of
+     his hero's position in the literature of the eighteenth
+     century, and he has also shown great judgment and dexterity
+     in his illustration of Johnson's personal oddities and his
+     power as a talker.... All the traits of the personality
+     which Boswell has immortalized are to be found here, as well
+     as luminous sketches of the literature of the period, and a
+     solid judgment of the work that Johnson did in the
+     world."--_Examiner_.
+
+     "We could not wish for a more suggestive introduction to
+     Scott and his poems and novels."--_Examiner_.
+
+     "The tone of the volume is excellent
+     throughout."--_Athenaeum_ Review of "Scott."
+
+     "As a clear, thoughtful, and attractive record of the life
+     and works of the greatest among the world's historians, it
+     deserves the highest praise."--_Examiner_ Review of
+     "Gibbon."
+
+
+
+
+MACMILLAN'S GLOBE LIBRARY.
+
+
+_Beautifully printed on toned paper and bound in cloth extra, gilt
+edges, price 4s. 6d. each; in cloth plain, 3s. 6d. Also kept in a
+variety of calf and morocco bindings, at moderate prices_.
+
+     _The_ SATURDAY REVIEW _says: "The Globe Editions are
+     admirable for their scholarly editing, their typographical
+     excellence, their compendious form, and their cheapness."
+     The_ BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW _says: "In compendiousness,
+     elegance, and scholarliness the Globe Editions of Messrs.
+     Macmillan surpass any popular series of our classics
+     hitherto given to the public. As near an approach to
+     miniature perfection as has ever been made_."
+
+Shakespeare's Complete Works. Edited by W. G. CLARK, M.A., and W.
+ALDIS WRIGHT, M.A., Editors of the "Cambridge Shakespeare." With
+Glossary, pp. 1075.
+
+     _The_ ATHENAEUM _says this edition is "a marvel of beauty,
+     cheapness, and compactness.... For the busy man, above all
+     for the working student, this is the best of all existing
+     Shakespeares._"
+
+Spenser's Complete Works. Edited from the Original Editions and
+Manuscripts, by R. MORRIS, with a Memoir by J. W. HALES, M.A. With
+Glossary. pp. lv., 736.
+
+     "_Worthy--and higher praise it needs not--of the beautiful
+     'Globe Series_'"--DAILY NEWS.
+
+Sir Walter Scott's Poetical Works. Edited, with a Biographical and
+Critical Memoir, by FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE, and Copious Notes. pp.
+xliii., 559.
+
+     "_We can almost sympathise with a middle-aged grumbler, who,
+     after reading Mr. Palgrave's Memoir and Introduction, should
+     exclaim, 'Why was there not such an edition of Scott when I
+     was a schoolboy_?'"--GUARDIAN.
+
+Complete Works of Robert Burns. Edited from the best Printed and
+Manuscript authorities, with Glossarial Index, Notes, and a
+Biographical Memoir by ALEXANDER SMITH, pp. lxii., 636.
+
+     "_Admirable in all respects_."--SPECTATOR.
+
+Robinson Crusoe. Edited after the Original Editions, with a
+Biographical Introduction by HENRY KINGSLEY. pp. xxxi., 607.
+
+     "_A most excellent and in every way desirable
+     edition_."--COURT CIRCULAR.
+
+Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Works. Edited with Biographical
+Introduction, by Professor MASSON. pp. lx., 695.
+
+     "_Such an admirable compendium of the facts of Goldsmith's
+     life, and so careful and minute a delineation of the mixed
+     traits of his peculiar character as to be a very model of a
+     literary biography in little_."--SCOTSMAN.
+
+Pope's Poetical Works. Edited, with Notes, and Introductory Memoir by
+A. W. WARD, M.A., Professor of History in Owens College Manchester,
+pp. lii., 508.
+
+     _The_ LITERARY CHURCHMAN _remarks: "The Editor's own notes
+     and introductory memoir are excellent, the memoir alone
+     would be cheap and well worth buying at the price of the
+     whole volume_."
+
+Dryden's Poetical Works. Edited, with a Memoir, Revised Text, and
+Notes, by W.D. CHRISTIE, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, pp.
+lxxxvii., 662.
+
+     "_An admirable edition, the result of great research and of
+     a careful revision of the text_."--PALL MALL GAZETTE.
+
+Cowper's Poetical Works. Edited, with Notes and Biographical
+Introduction, by WILLIAM BENHAM, Vicar of Margate, pp. lxxiii., 536.
+
+     "_Mr. Benham's edition of Cowper is one of permanent
+     value_."--SATURDAY REVIEW.
+
+Morte d'Arthur.--SIR THOMAS MALORY'S BOOK OF KING ARTHUR AND OF HIS
+NOBLE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE. The original Edition of CAXTON,
+revised for Modern Use. With an Introduction by Sir EDWARD STRACHEY,
+Bart. pp. xxxvii., 509.
+
+     "_It is with perfect confidence that we recommend this
+     edition of the old romance to every class of
+     readers_."--PALL MALL GAZETTE.
+
+The Works of Virgil. Rendered into English Prose, with Introductions,
+Notes, Running Analysis, and an Index. By JAMES LONSDALE, M.A., and
+SAMUEL LEE, M.A. pp. 228.
+
+     "_A more complete Edition of Virgil in English it is
+     scarcely possible to conceive than the scholarly work before
+     us_."--GLOBE.
+
+The Works of Horace. Rendered into English Prose, with Introductions,
+Running Analysis, Notes, and Index. By JOHN LONSDALE, M.A., and SAMUEL
+LEE, M.A.
+
+     _The_ STANDARD _says, "To classical and non-classical
+     readers it will be invaluable_."
+
+Milton's Poetical Works.--Edited, with Introductions, by Professor
+MASSON.
+
+     "_In every way an admirable book_."--PALL MALL GAZETTE.
+
+
+MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON.
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