EDWARD, one of the most celebrated historians of any age or country, was also his own historian. He has left us one of the most piquant autobiographies ever written. In the following sketch the chief incidents of his life will be condensed from that authentic source; for more than facts, even for the setting of these, it would be unwise to trust to any man's autobiography—though Gibbon's is as frank as most. There are points on which vanity will say too much, and perhaps others on which modesty will say too little.

Gibbon was descended, he tells us, from a Kentish family, ancient, though not illustrious. His grandfather was a man of ability, an enterprising merchant of London; one of the commissioners of customs in the latter years of Queen Anne; and, in the judgment of Lord Bolingbroke, as deeply versed in the "finance and commerce of England" as any man of his time. He was not always wise, however, either for himself or his country; for he became deeply involved in the South Sea scheme, and lost the ample wealth he had amassed, at the explosion of that tremendous bubble (1720). As a director of the company, he was suspected of fraudulent complicity, was taken into custody, and heavily fined; but L10,000 were allowed him out of the wreck of his L60,000, and with this his skill and enterprise soon constructed a second fortune. He died at Putney in 1736, leaving the bulk of his property to his two daughters—nearly disinheriting his only son, the father of the historian, for having married against his wishes. This son (by name Edward) was educated at Westminster and Cambridge, but never took a degree; travelled; became member of parliament, first for Petersfield, then for Southampton; joined the party against Sir Robert Walpole, and (as his son confesses, not much to his father's honour) was animated in so doing by "private revenge" against the supposed "oppressor" of his family in the South Sea affair. If so, revenge, as usual, was blind; for Walpole sought rather to moderate than to inflame public feeling against the projectors.

His celebrated son was born at Putney, Surrey, 27th of April 1737. His mother was the daughter of a London merchant. Gibbon was the eldest of a family of six sons and a daughter, yet was the only one who survived childhood; and his own life in youth hung by so mere a thread as to be a thousand times despaired of. His mother, between domestic cares and constant infirmities (which, however, did not prevent an occasional plunge into fashionable dissipation in compliance with her husband's wishes), did but little for him. His true mother, if the expression may be permitted, was his maiden aunt—Catherine Porten by name—who tenderly nursed his infancy, and, whenever his feeble health allowed, took care that his mind should not be neglected. "Many anxious and solitary days," says Gibbon, "did she consume with patient trial of every mode of relief and amusement. Many wakeful nights did she sit by my bedside in trembling expectation that each hour would be my last." At seven he was committed for eighteen months to the care of a private tutor, John Kirkby by name, and the author, among other things, of a "philosophical fiction" entitled the Life of Automaties. The illustrious pupil speaks gratefully of his tutor, and doubtless truly, so far as he could trust the impressions of his childhood. Of the "philosophical fiction" he says, "The author is not entitled to the merit of invention, since he has blended the English story of Robinson Crusoe with the Arabian romance of Hai Ebn Yohbdan, which he might have read in the Latin version of Pococke. In the Automaties I cannot praise either the depth of thought or elegance of style; but the book is not devoid of entertainment or instruction."

At nine (1746), during a "lucid interval of health," he was sent to a school at Kingston-on-Thames; but the usual breaks of sickness intervened, and his progress, by his own confession, was slow and unsatisfactory. "My timid reserve was astonished by the crowd and tumult of the school; the want of strength and activity disqualified me for the sports of the play-field. By the common methods of discipline, at the expense of many tears and some blood, I purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax; and not long since I was possessed of the dirty volumes of Phaedrus and Cornelius Nepos which I painfully construed and darkly understood."

In 1747 his mother died, and he was taken home. After

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1 No less than three of the family intermarried with the Actons of Shropshire. "I am thus connected," says Gibbon, "by a triple alliance with that ancient and loyal family of Shropshire baronets. It consisted about that time of seven brothers, all of gigantic stature; one of whom, a pigmy of six feet two inches, confessed himself the last and least of the seven; adding, in the true spirit of party, that such men were not born since the Revolution."—Memoirs, vol. i., p. 10.

2 Ib., p. 19.

3 Ib., p. 21, 22.

4 Ib., p. 22. Gibbon, a short time his father removed from Putney to the "rustic solitude" of Buriton, and young Gibbon accompanied him. There probably his health was benefited, and his mind certainly received its first decided stimulus. In these early years, under the care of his devoted aunt, he first acquired, he tells us, that passionate love of reading "which he would not exchange for all the treasures of India." He read at will; and there are minds to which it is the best possible schooling. To be turned loose to graze in the free mountain pasture, to "browse" at pleasure—as Charles Lamb expresses it—in a library of wholesome literature, tends more than anything else, if not to discipline, to stimulate their powers; and often not only tinctures, but determines their whole future. It was so with Gibbon. After detailing the circumstances which "unlocked" for him the door of his grandfather's "tolerable library," he says, "I turned over many English pages of poetry and romance, of history and travels. Where a title attracted my eye, without fear or awe I snatched the volume from the shelf." In 1749, in his twelfth year, he was sent to Westminster, still residing, however, with his aunt, who, unwilling to live a life of dependence, had opened a boarding-house for Westminster School. "In the space of two years (1749-50), interrupted by danger and debility, I painfully climbed into the third form; and my riper age was left to acquire the beauties of the Latin and the rudiments of the Greek tongue." The continual attacks of sickness which had retarded his progress induced his aunt, by medical advice, to take him to Bath; but the mineral waters had no effect. He then resided for a time in the house of a physician at Winchester; the physician did as little as the mineral waters; and, after a further trial of Bath, he once more returned to Putney, and made a last futile attempt to study at Westminster. Finally, it was resolved that he would never be able to encounter the discipline of a school; and casual instructors, at various times and places, were provided for him. The snatches of his youth that could be given to mental effort were doubtless pretty well filled up by himself; and, for the reasons already assigned, perhaps not unpropitiously, in relation to the peculiar character of his intellect and the requirements of his subsequent career.

Towards his sixteenth year he tells us that all his infirmities suddenly vanished. "Nature," as he frigidly expresses it, "displayed in my favour her mysterious energies." His education was now resumed under the roof of Francis, the translator of Horace; of whose negligence as a tutor the historian speaks most strongly. "The translator of Horace," says he, "might have taught me to relish the Latin poets had not my friends discovered in a few weeks that he preferred the pleasures of London to the instruction of his pupils."

Gibbon was then sent to finish his education (before it had been properly begun) at Oxford, where he matriculated as gentleman commoner of Magdalen College, April 1752. His description of his intellectual condition at that time is curious enough:—"I arrived there with a stock of erudition which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy might have been ashamed." It was natural. He had read extensively, though at random; and, his memory being tenacious, he had amassed much knowledge, though of a very miscellaneous character. It seems, however, that during the three previous years his youthful mind had received a determinate direction, either from its own secret tendencies, or from the class of works on which he accidentally lighted, or more probably from both causes. His taste was already fixed where it never afterwards wavered—on history.

His list of the books which, during the previous three years of self-prompted and wandering study, he had more or less devoured, is amazingly miscellaneous; but we have no space to give it. The reader may find it in the Memoirs. Many of them, both for their extent and dryness, would have been repulsive enough to most lads of his age. Most of the classical historians accessible in translations, not forgetting a "ragged Procopius" which chanced to fall in his way, and "many crude lumps," as he oddly expresses it, of the most voluminous modern historians, as Davila, Rapin, Father Paul, Machiavel, were hastily gulped—giving in those days, doubtless, but little trouble in the digestion. "I devoured them," he says, "like so many novels; and I swallowed with the same voracious appetite the descriptions of India and China, of Mexico and Peru." At the same period his fancy kindled with the first glimpses into oriental history, the wild "barbaric" charm of which he never ceased to feel. India, China, Arabia, and especially the career of Mohammed, successively attracted his attention. Ockley's book on the Saracens "first opened his eyes" to this last subject; and with his characteristic ardour of literary research, he forthwith plunged into the French of D'Herbelot, and the Latin of Pococke's version of Abulfaragius—sometimes "guessing," and sometimes understanding—now swimming, now wading up to his chin, and now plunging out of his depth altogether. His first introduction to the historic scenes which afterwards formed the passion of his life took place at the same period. In 1751 he notes his "discovery" of a "common book"—Echard's Roman History. "To me," he says, "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."

He seems even then to have adopted the plan of study he followed in after-life and recommended in his Essai sur l'Etude; that is, of letting his subject rather than his author determine his course; of suspending the perusal of a book to reflect, and to compare the statements with those of other authors; so that he often read portions of fifty volumes while mastering one. Where the mind has vigour and perseverance to adopt this course, it is, without doubt, the most profitable of all modes of reading. A man rarely forgets what he has taken so much trouble to acquire. The chase itself; too, and the variety of forms in which knowledge is presented, afford a thousand links by which association aids memory.

But Gibbon's huge wallet of scraps stood him in little stead at the trim banquets to which he was invited at Oxford; and the wandering habits by which he had filled it absolutely unfitted him to be a guest. He was not well grounded in any of the elementary branches which are essential to university studies, and to all success in their prosecution. It was natural, therefore, that he should dislike the university, and as natural that the university should dislike him. Many of his complaints of the system were certainly just; but it may be doubted whether any university system would have been profitable to him, considering his antecedents. He complains of his tutors, too, and in one case with abundant reason; but, by his own confession, they had equal reason to complain of him, for he indulged in gay society, and kept late hours. His observations, however, on the defects of our university system in general, are acute and well worth pondering; however little relevant to his own case. Many of these defects, in the case of our own universities, have been removed since his time, and some very recently. He remained at Magdalen about fourteen months. "To the University of Oxford," he says, "I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; But little as he did as a student, he already meditated authorship. In the first long vacation—"during which," he says, (whimsically enough,) "his taste for books began to revive"—he resolved to write a treatise on The Age of Sextus; in which (and it was characteristic) his chief object was to investigate the probable epoch of that semi-mythical monarch's reign. "Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book." He long afterwards (Nov. 1772), but wisely, no doubt, "committed the sheets to the flames."

Literary ambition almost uniformly displays its early energy in some such crude project, and Gibbon was no exception to the rule.

This period of his life was also signalized by another premature attempt to solve difficulties beyond the age of sixteen. He read Middleton's Free Inquiry; and this, strange to say, repelled him from Protestantism, and gave him a bias towards Rome; he read Bossuet's Variations of Protestantism, and Exposition of Catholic Doctrine, and these completed his conversion; "and surely," he adds, "I fell by a noble hand." In this notable victory, however, of the Bishop of Meaux over a youth of sixteen, there is nothing wonderful; nor was Bossuet the only champion of Rome who helped to lay him low, for he attributes not a little to the perusal of the works of Parsons, the Jesuit. But the inexperience, perhaps waywardness, of youth, and impatience to have doubts hushed and quelled, if not removed, had probably more to do with this transient conquest than all the above controvertists put together.

No sooner converted, than he confessed. He certainly practised none of the reserve of the Jesuit to whom he had been so much indebted. On June 8th, 1753, he records that he "privately abjured the heresies" of his childhood before a Catholic priest in London, and announced the same to his father in a somewhat grandiloquent effusion which his spiritual adviser much approved, and in which it is probable he had some share. "Gibbon," says Lord Sheffield, "described the letter to his father, announcing his conversion, as written with all the pomp, the dignity, and self-satisfaction of a martyr."

His father heard with indignant surprise of this act of juvenile apostacy; and indiscreetly giving vent to his wrath, the authorities at Oxford dismissed the neophyte. It is curious to read Gibbon's rather complacent estimate in after-life of this "sacrifice of self-interest to conscience." It is expressed in terms which might almost tempt one to think that he scarcely contemplated his subsequent changes with equal satisfaction. Yet he also seems to have felt that the infirmities of reason which this escapade implied needed some apology, and that the applause of conscience hardly compensated for the reflections on his logic. He therefore justifies his apostacy by the parallel vacillations of Chillingworth and Bayle. "He could not blush," he says, "that his tender mind was entangled in the sophistry which had seduced the acute and manly understandings of a Chillingworth or a Bayle" of whom he takes care to inform us that the latter was twenty-two, and the former of the "ripe age" of twenty-eight years, when caught in the meshes of Romanism.

In short, he attaches rather too much importance to the fluctuations of sixteen. As a fact in the history of his own mind, however, it is of interest; in any other light, of no importance whatever. "To my present feelings," he tells us in his Memoirs, "it seems incredible that I should ever believe that I believed in transubstantiation;" that is, if he were interpreted rigorously, "he could not believe that he could ever believe that he believed in transubstantiation." If that were his meaning, he had certainly cured himself of all superfluous facility of belief.

It was now high time that his education, so nearly finished in name, should be begun in earnest. But as one chief object of his father was to secure in the course of it his reconversion to Protestantism, he was consigned (1753) to the care of a Calvinist minister at Lausanne—a M. Pavillard, of whom Gibbon speaks in strong terms of affection and esteem, and who appears to have deserved them. There was one slight obstacle, to be sure, to the intercourse of tutor and pupil; M. Pavillard appears to have known little of English, and young Gibbon knew nothing of French. But this difficulty was soon removed by the pupil's diligence; the very exigencies of his situation were of service to him, and he studied the language with such success, that at the close of his five years' exile he declares that he "spontaneously thought" in French rather than in English, and that it had become more familiar to "ear, pen, and tongue." It is well known that in after years he had doubts whether he should not compose his great work in French; and it is certain that his familiarity with that language, in spite of considerable efforts to counteract its effects, tinged his style to the last.

Under the judicious regulations of his new tutor a systematic course of study was marked out, and was most ardently prosecuted; the pupil's progress was proportionably rapid. With the systematic study of the Latin and Greek classics he conjoined that of French literature, which he read largely though somewhat indiscriminately.

Nor was the object his father primarily had at heart less effectually attained.

To his large reading of the classics he added a diligent study of logic in the prolix system of Crousaz, and further invigorated his reasoning powers, as well as enlarged his knowledge of metaphysics and jurisprudence, by the perusal of Locke, Grotius, and Montesquieu. He also read about this time Pascal's Provincial Letters, and at sixty he declares he had reperused them almost every year with new pleasure. It is one of the "three books" which, by his own confession, probably contributed, in a "special sense, to form the historian of the Roman Empire." From Pascal, he flatters himself he "learned to manage the weapon of grave and temperate irony, even on subjects of ecclesiastical solemnity:" a grand mistake as regards both the adroitness with which he used and the subjects on which he employed the weapon. There is as much difference between the light grace of Pascal's irony and the heavy, laboured movement of Gibbon's, as between an Arab courser and a Flanders war-horse.—He also studied mathematics to some extent, though purely in compliance with his father's wishes. He advanced as far as the conic sections in the treatise of L'Hôpital. He assures us that his tutor did not complain of any inaptitude on the pupil's part, and that the pupil was as happily unconscious of any on his own; but here he broke off. He adds, what is not quite clear from one who so frankly acknowledges his limited acquaintance with the science, that he had reason to congratulate himself that he knew no more. "As soon," he says, "as I understood the principles, I relinquished for ever the pursuit of the mathematics; nor can I lament that I desisted before my mind was hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration, so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence, which must, however, determine the actions and opinions of our lives."

There is no doubt that the sort of evidence with which the future historian was called to deal has to do with probabilities and not "rigid demonstration;" but whether he would not have sometimes computed its elements with Gibbon, more impartiality and precision if he had had a little further training in the exact sciences, may be a question.

Under the new influences which were brought to bear on him, he resumed in less than a twelvemonth his Protestantism. "He is willing," he says, to allow M. Pavillard a "handsome share in his reconversion," though he stoutly avows that it was principally due "to his own solitary reflections." He particularly congratulated himself on having discovered a "philosophical argument" against "transubstantiation." It was, "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." It is possible that the unconscious influence of the threats of disinheritance, and the exchange of his "handsome apartments at Magdalen" for the meanness and discomforts of his Swiss home, may have been quite as efficacious as this curious enthymeme. Thus was he converted to Romanism in his sixteenth year, and recanted his recantation in his seventeenth. The changes were doubtless important to him, and it was natural that he should give them some prominence in his "autobiography;" but relatively to the great questions they involve, the oscillations of such a youthful mind, however intelligent, are of as little moment as the transfer of a cypher from one side of an equation to the other.

Two circumstances specially signalized his residence at Lausanne—he saw Voltaire, and he fell in love. "Virgiliun vidi tantum," says he; but his admiration of Voltaire's writings was great, and exerted a rather equivocal influence on his poetic tastes. It led to an excessive estimate of the French drama, and abated, he scruples not to declare, his "idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespear." Voltaire's writings also probably gave him a false bias in matters of infinitely more importance than those of literature.

His love affair—his first and only one—was transient enough. The young lady, in the bloom of sixteen, the daughter of a Swiss pastor, was Mademoiselle Curchod, afterwards the wife of the celebrated M. Necker. She was, as Gibbon declares (and we know it on better testimony than a lover's eyes), beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished. Her charms, however, do not seem to have made any indelible impression on our young student, whose sensibility, to say the truth, was never very profound. On his father's expressing his disapprobation, he surrendered the object of his affection with as little resistance as he had surrendered his Romanism. "I sighed," he says, "as a lover, but obeyed as a son." It would be inviidos to institute comparisons as to the merit of "faithful love" and filial devotion; but, if the one be unrewarded by fortune, and the other stimulated by menaces, it is a difficult choice, no doubt, for any but a hero; and Gibbon neither then nor afterwards was a hero. "Without my father's consent," he plaintively says, "I was destitute and helpless."

Unwearied application to study was the best "remedium amoris," if indeed he stood in need of any remedy. In any case, his diligence was most commendable, and no one can read the account of the three last years he spent at Lausanne, and especially the all but incredible toils of the last eight months, without perceiving that the foundations of that vast erudition which the Decline and Fall demanded, were effectually laid; or hesitate to give our student a worthy place with the Scaligers, Huets, and Leibnizes, of the preceding century. Though there may be a little unconscious exaggeration in his statement of the achievements of these miraculous eight months, we are tempted to give it in a note for the encouragement or despair of other youthful students.

In 1758 he returned to England, and was kindly received at home. But he found a stepmother there; and this apparition on his father's hearth at first rather appalled him. The cordial and gentle manners of Mrs Gibbon, however, and her unremitting study of his happiness, won him from his first prejudices, and gave her a permanent place both in his esteem and affection. He seems to have been much indulged, and led a very pleasant life of it; he pleased himself in moderate excursions, frequented the theatre, mingled, though not very often, in society; was sometimes a little extravagant, and sometimes a little dissipated, but never lost the benefits of his Lausanne exile; and with the exception of a few transient youthful irregularities, settled into a sober, discreet, calculating epicurean philosopher, who sought the summa bonum of man in temperate, regulated, and elevated pleasure. The two years after his return to England he spent principally at his father's country seat at Buriton, in Hampshire, only nine months being given to the metropolis. He has left an amusing account of his employments in the country, where his love of study was at once inflamed by a library rich enough to make him contrast its treasures with the poverty of Lausanne, and checked by the necessary interruptions of his otherwise happy domestic life. After breakfast—"he was expected," he says, "to spend an hour with Mrs Gibbon—read the paper to his father in the afternoon—was often called down to entertain idle visitors—and, worst of all, was periodically compelled to return the visits of their more distant neighbours." He says he dreaded the "recurrence of the full moon," which was the period generally selected for the more convenient accomplishment of such formidable excursions.

His father's library, though large in comparison with that he commanded at Lausanne, contained, he says, "much trash," which he gradually weeded out, and transformed it at length into that "numerous and select" library which was "the foundation of his works, and the best comfort of his life both at home and abroad." No sooner had he returned home than he began the work of accumulation, and records that, on the receipt of his first quarter's allowance, a large share was appropriated to his literary wants. "He could never forget," he declares, "the joy with which he exchanged a bank note of twenty pounds for the twenty volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions." It may not be unprofitable here to remark that the principles on which he selected his admirable library are worthy of every student's attention. "I am not conscious," says he, "of having ever bought a book from a motive of ostentation; every volume before it was deposited on the shelf was either read or sufficiently examined." The account he gives of his mode of study is also deeply instructive, but there is not space for it here.

In London he seems to have seen but little select society—partly because his father's habits opened to him but little that he cared for—partly from his own reserve and timidity, increased by his foreign education. This had

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1 Memorias, vol. i., p. 58. 2 He says in his Journal, December 4, 1755.—"In finishing this year, I must remark how favourable it was to my studies. In the space of eight months, from the beginning of April, I learned the principles of drawing; made myself complete master of the French and Latin languages, with which I was very superficially acquainted before, and wrote and translated a great deal in both; read Cicero's Epistles Ad Familiares, his Brutus, all his Orations, his Dialogues De Amicitia, De Senectute, Terence, twice; and Pliny's Epistles. In French, Giannone's History of Naples, and l'Abbe Bannier's Mythologie, and M. De Bochat's Memoires sur la Suisse, and wrote a very ample relation of my tour. Likewise began to study Greek, and went through the grammar. I began to make very large collections of what I read. But what I esteem most of all, from the perusal and meditation of De Crousaz's Logic, I not only understood the principles of that science, but formed my mind to a habit of thinking and reasoning I had no idea of before."—Memoirs, p. 61. made English habits unfamiliar and the very language in some degree strange. And thus it was that he draws that interesting picture of the literary recluse among the crowds of London: "While coaches were rattling through Bond Street, I have passed many a solitary evening in my lodging with my books. My studies were sometimes interrupted with a sigh, which I breathed towards Lausanne; and on the approach of spring I withdrew without reluctance from the noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure." He became acquainted, however, with Mallet—by courtesy called the "poet"—and through him gained access to Lady Hervey's circle, where a congenial admiration, not to say affectation, of French manners and literature, made him a welcome guest. In one respect Mallet gave him good counsel. He advised him to addict himself to an assiduous study of the more idiomatic English writers—Swift and Addison, for example—with a view to unlearn his foreign idiom, and recover his half-forgotten vernacular—a task, which he never perfectly accomplished. Much as he admired these writers, Hume and Robertson were still greater favourites, as well from their subject as for their style. Of his admiration of Hume's style—of its nameless grace of simple elegance—he has left us a strong expression, when he tells us that it often compelled him to close the historian's volumes with a feeling of despair.

In 1761 Gibbon, after many delays, and with many flutterings of hope and fear, gave to the world, in French, his maiden publication, composed two years before. It was partly in compliance with his father's wishes, who thought that the proof of some literary talent might introduce him favourably to public notice, and "secure the recommendation of his friends." But in yielding to paternal authority, Gibbon frankly owns that he complied, "like a pious son,—with the wish of his own heart."

The subject of the Essai sur l'Etude de la Litterature was suggested, its author says, by a refinement of vanity—"the desire of justifying and praising the object of a favourite pursuit." Partly owing to its being written in French, partly to its character, the essay excited more attention abroad than at home. Gibbon has criticised it with the utmost frankness, not to say severity; but after every abatement, it is unquestionably a surprising effort for a mind so young, and contains many thoughts which would not have disgraced a thinker or a scholar of much maturer age. The account of its first reception and subsequent history in England, deserves to be cited as amongst the curiosities of literature. "In England," he says, "it was received with cold indifference, little read, and speedily forgotten: A small impression was slowly dispersed; the bookseller murmured, and the author (had his feelings been more exquisite) might have wept over the blunders and baldness of the English translation. The publication of my history fifteen years afterwards revived the memory of my first performance, and the essay was eagerly sought in the shops. But I refused the permission which Becket solicited of reprinting it; the public curiosity was imperfectly satisfied by a pirated copy of the booksellers of Dublin; and when a copy of the original edition has been discovered in a sale, the primitive value of half-a-crown has risen to the fanciful price of a guinea or thirty shillings."

Just before the publication of the essay, Gibbon entered a new, and, one might suppose, a very uncongenial scene of life. He became a captain in the Hampshire militia; and for more than two years led a life of march and counter-march in the southern counties of England. Hampshire, Kent, Wiltshire, and Devonshire, formed the successive theatres of what he calls his "bloodless and inglorious campaigns." He, nevertheless, justly describes it as a life of "military servitude," as the term of service was prolonged far beyond the period he had contemplated, and the mode of life utterly alien from all his pursuits as a scholar and a student. "In the act," says he, "of offering our names and receiving our commissions, as major and captain in the Hampshire regiment (June 12th, 1759), we had not supposed that we should be dragged away, my father from his farm, myself from my books, and condemned during two years and a half (May 10, 1760 to December 23, 1762), to a wandering life of military servitude." He has left us an amusing account of the busy idleness in which his time was spent; but, considering the circumstances, so adverse to study, one is rather surprised that our military student should have done so much, than that he did so little; and never probably before were so many hours of literary study spent in a tent. In estimating the comparative advantages and disadvantages of this wearisome period of his life, he has summed up with the sagacity of a man of the world, and the impartiality of a philosopher. Irksome as were his employments, grievous as was the waste of time, uncongenial as were his companions, solid benefits were to be set off against these things; his health became robust, his knowledge of the world was enlarged, he wore off some of his foreign idiom, got rid of much of his reserve; he adds,—and perhaps in his estimate it was the benefit to be most prized of all,—"the discipline and evolutions 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." In 1762, while the new militia was forming, he "enjoyed two or three months of literary repose," and flew to his books with an appetite sharpened by his long fast. In pursuing a plan of study at this period, he hesitated between the prosecution of mathematics and Greek; it was but for a moment. As might be anticipated, Homer carried the day against Newton and Leibnitz.

Nothing can better illustrate the intensity of Gibbon's literary ambition—his only strong passion—than the number of literary projects with which his mind was teeming even in camp. He enumerates amongst others a history of the expedition of Charles VIII. of France; the crusade of Richard the Lion-hearted; the wars of the barons; and lives of the Black Prince, Sir Phillip Sydney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Montrose. These are only a portion of the subjects he revolved with the same view. They show by their number how strong was the impulse to literature, and by their character, how determined the bent of his mind in the direction of history.

The militia was disbanded in 1763, and he joyfully shook off his bonds; but his literary projects were still to be postponed. Following his own wishes, though with his father's consent, he had projected a continental tour as the completion "of an English gentleman's education." This had been interrupted by the episode of the militia. He now resumed his purpose and left England in 1763. Two years were "loosely defined as the term of his absence," which he exceeded by half a year—returning June 1765. He first visited Paris, where he saw a good deal of D'Alembert, Diderot, Barthélemy, Raynal, Helvetius, Baron

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1 Memoirs, vol. I., p. 81. 2 Ib., p. 90. 3 Ib., p. 95. 4 The notes of his Journal at this period are worth reading, as curiously illustrative of his indomitable literary industry. "My example," he says, "might prove that in the life most adverse to study some hours may be stolen, some minutes may be snatched. Amidst the tumult of Winchester camp I sometimes thought and read in my tent; in the more settled quarters of the Devizes, Blandford, and Southampton, I always secured a separate lodging, and the necessary books."—Ib., p. 104. Gibbon, d'Holbach, and others of the same set; and was often a welcome guest in the saloons of Mesdames Geoffrin and Du Deffand. Voltaire was at Geneva, Rousseau at Montmorency, and Buffon he neglected to visit; but the above names are enough to justify the suspicion that the hostility he afterwards evinced towards Christianity may in part be attributed to the influence of such society. How well he liked Paris is evident from his own statement: "Fourteen weeks insensibly stole away; but had I been rich and independent, I should have prolonged and perhaps have fixed my residence at Paris."

From France he proceeded to Switzerland, and revisited his friends at Lausanne; thence to Italy in 1764. The account of his feelings on approaching Rome—how like in intensity to those of Luther on a similar occasion, and yet of how different a character!—is deeply interesting. His emotions, he says, were not "enthusiastic," and yet became, he confesses, almost "uncontrollable." While here, his long yearning for some great theme worthy of his historic genius was gratified. The first conception of the Decline and Fall arose as he lingered one evening amidst the vestiges of ancient glory; but his precise words cannot be omitted in any sketch of Gibbon, however brief:—"I was at Rome," says he, "on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed 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." M. Saard fancifully attributes to the combination of circumstances under which the conception of the work arose, some of that inveterate hatred of Christianity which pervades it. "Struck with a first impression," he says, "Gibbon, in writing the Decline and Fall of the Empire, saw in Christianity only an institution which had placed vespers, bare-footed friars, and processions, in the room of the magnificent ceremonies of Jupiter, and the triumphs of the Capitol."

Others attributed it in part to the conservative quality of his politics, which led him to regard Christianity as a "daring innovation." It seems probable that his tendencies and habits of mind, which were eminently favourable to scepticism, and the society in which he had early moved (and especially of late in the saloons of Paris), had much more to do with the result than either of these causes.

About five years after his return home his father died (1770). This is the period of his life which he says he passed with the least enjoyment, and remembered with the least satisfaction. He attended "every spring the meetings of the militia at Southampton,—and rose successively to the rank of major and lieutenant-colonel;" but was each year "more disgusted with the inn, the wine, the company, and the tiresome repetition of annual attendance and daily exercise." From his own account, however, it appears that other and deeper causes produced his ennui. Sincerely attached to his home, he yet felt the anomaly of his position. At thirty, still a dependent, without a settled occupation, without a definite social status, he often regretted that he had not embraced some profession: "From the emoluments of a profession," he says, "I might have derived an ample fortune, or a competent income, instead of being stinted to the same narrow allowance, to be increased only by an event which I sincerely deprecate." Doubtless the secret fire of a consuming, but as yet ungratified, literary ambition also troubled his repose.

He still "contemplated at awful distance" The Decline and Fall; and, meantime, revolved other subjects. Hesitating between the revolutions of Florence and Switzerland, he consulted M. Deyverdun, a young Swiss with whom he had become intimate during his first residence at Lausanne, and decided in favour of the land which was his "friend's by birth" and "his own by adoption." He executed the first book in French; it was read as an anonymous production before a literary society of foreigners in London, and condemned. Gibbon sat and listened to their strictures. It never got beyond that rehearsal; and though Hume encouraged him to proceed, Gibbon declared the sentence just, and declined.

In 1767, he joined with M. Deyverdun in starting the Mémoires Littéraires de la Grande Bretagne. But its circulation was limited, and only two volumes had appeared when Deyverdun went abroad. The materials already collected for a third volume were suppressed. It may be interesting to the reader to know that in the first volume is a review by Gibbon of Lord Lyttleton's History of Henry II.

The next appearance of the historian made a deeper impression. It was the first distinct print of the lion's foot. "Ex ungue leonem" might have been justly said, for he attacked, and attacked successfully, the redoubtable Warburton. Of the many paradoxes in the Divine Legation, none is more extravagant than the theory that Virgil in the sixth book of his Æneid intended to allegorize, in the visit of his hero and the sybil to the shades, the initiation of Æneas, as a lawgiver, into the Eleusinian mysteries. This theory Gibbon completely exploded in his Critical Observations (1770); no very difficult task, indeed, but achieved in a style, and with a profusion of learning, which showed that its author was capable of far greater things. Warburton never replied, and few will believe that he would not, if he had not thought silence more discreet. Gibbon, however, regrets that the style of his pamphlet was too acrimonious; and this regret, considering his antagonist's slight claims to forbearance, is creditable to him. "I cannot forgive myself the contemptuous treatment of a man who, with all his faults, was entitled to my esteem."

At length, after fifteen years from the date of his maiden Essai, and five from his father's death—an event which left him the free use of his time—appeared the first volume of the history which has immortalized his name. His preparations for this great work were vast. The classics, "as low as Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Juvenal," had been long familiar. He now "plunged into the ocean of the Augustan history," and "with pen almost always in hand," pored over all the remains, Greek and Latin, between Trajan and the last 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, whose inimitable accuracy almost assumes the character of genius, to fix and arrange within my reach the loose and scattered atoms of historical information." The Theodosian Code, with Godefroy's Commentary; the Christian Apologists, with the testimonies of Lardner; The Annals and Antiquities of Muratori, collated with "the parallel or transverse lines" of Sigonius and Maffei, Pagl and Baronius, were all critically studied. Such was a portion of the formidable apparatus employed by this great historical genius. His maxim as a student had always been multum legere potius quam multa. The reader will probably think, even from this imperfect enumeration of his studies, that he read both multum and multa; but the general accuracy of his in-

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1 This lady, though blind—"l'aveugle clairvoyante," as Voltaire happily calls her—recognised with exquisite tact the self-betraying solicitude of Gibbon to catch the exact tone of French manners and society. She thus speaks in a letter to Walpole, "He sets too much value on our talents for society (nos agréments), shows too much desire of acquiring them; it is constantly on the tip of my tongue to say to him, 'Do not put yourself to so much trouble; you deserve the honour of being a Frenchman.'"

2 Memoirs, p. 117.

3 Ib., p. 132.

4 Ib., p. 139.

5 Ib., p. 140. vestigations was commensurate with their variety. It appears from his own confession that he long brooded over the chaos of materials before light dawned upon it. At the commencement, he says, "all was dark and doubtful;" the limits, divisions, even the title of his work were undetermined; the first chapter was composed three times, and the second and third twice, before he was satisfied with his efforts. But this prolonged meditation on his design and its execution was well repaid by the result; so methodical did his ideas become, and so readily did his materials shape themselves, that (with the above exceptions) the original MS. of the entire six quarto was sent uncopied to the printers. He also says that not a sheet had been seen by any other eyes than those of author and printer. This last statement must be taken with a small deduction; or rather we must suppose that a few chapters had been submitted, if not to the "eyes" to the "ears" of others; for he elsewhere tells us that he was "soon disgusted with the modest practice of reading the manuscript to his friends."

Such, however, were his preliminary difficulties, that he confesses he was often "tempted to cast away the labour of seven years." He persevered, and in February 1776 the first volume was published. The success was instant, and, for a quarto, probably unprecedented. The entire impression was exhausted in a few days. The author might almost have said, as Lord Byron after the publication of Childe Harold, that "he awoke one morning and found himself famous." In addition to public applause, he was gratified by the more select praises of Robertson and Hume, and declares that the complimentary letter of the last "overpaid the labours of ten years." Hume applauds, as may be supposed, the "prudent temperament" of the historian in the treatment of the delicate subjects of the "celebrated chapters." Nevertheless, he predicted "clamour," and formed a much more correct notion of the effects on the public mind than Gibbon had done. He admits the nation's reverence for Christianity, though he calls it "superstition;" Gibbon believed, or affected to believe, that England sympathized with the indifferentism of France.

Two years before the publication of this first volume (1774) Gibbon was elected member of parliament for Liskeard. His political duties did not suspend his prosecution of his history, except on one occasion, and for a little while. In the year 1779 he undertook a task on behalf of the ministry, which, if well performed, was, it must be confessed, well rewarded. The French government had issued a manifesto preparatory to a declaration of war, and Gibbon was solicited by Chancellor Thurlow, and Lord Weymouth, Secretary of State, to answer it. This produced his able Memoire Justificatif, composed in French, and delivered to the courts of Europe. He was rewarded with a seat at the Board of Trade and Plantations,—little more than a sinecure in itself, but with a very substantial salary of nearly L800 per annum. His acceptance displeased his political associates, and he was accused of "deserting a party in which," he declares, "he had never enlisted." A note of Fox, however, on the margin of a copy of Gibbon's history, records a very distinct remembrance of the historian's previous vituperation of the ministry; and this could not but make his political services look venal. He is said to have said that "there would be no hope for England except by taking off the heads of six of the cabinet, and exposing them as an example in parliament." Yet in a fortnight he accepted place. Lord Sheffield says his friend never intended the words to be taken literally! No doubt, but it sufficiently shows what he thought of the deserts of the ministry he yet consented to serve. But who can read the life and works of Gibbon and imagine him a martyr, whether for love, politics, or religion?

At the general election in 1780, he lost his seat for Liskeard, but was subsequently elected for Lymington. The ministry of Lord North, however, was tottering, and soon after fell; the Board of Trade was abolished, and Gibbon's salary vanished with it;—no trifle, for his expenditure had been for three years on a scale somewhat disproportionate to his private fortune. He did not like to depend on statesmen's promises, which are proverbially uncertain of fulfilment; he as little liked to retrench; and he was wearied of parliament, where he had never given any but silent votes. Urged by such considerations, he once more turned his eyes to the scene of his early exile, where he might live on his decent patrimony in a style which was impossible in England, and pursue unembarrassed his literary studies. He therefore resolved to fix himself at Lausanne.

A word only is necessary on his parliamentary career. Neither nature nor acquired habits qualified him to be an orator; his late entrance on public life, his natural timidity, his feeble voice, his limited command of idiomatic English, and even, as he candidly confesses, his literary fame, were all obstacles to success. "After a fleeting, illusive hope, prudence condemned me to acquiesce in the humble station of a mute. . . . I was not armed by nature and education with the intrepid energy of mind and voice—Vincentem strepitus et natum rebus agendis." Timidity was justified by pride, and even the success of my pen discouraged the trial of my voice." His repugnance to public life is strongly expressed in a letter to his father of a very early date. He prays that the money which a seat in parliament would cost may be expended in a mode more agreeable to him. Gibbon was eight-and-thirty when he entered parliament; and the obstacles which even at an earlier period he would have had to encounter were hardly likely to be vanquished then.

Nor had he much political sagacity. He was better skilled in investigating the past than in divining the future. While Burke and Fox, and so many great statesmen, proclaimed the consequences of the collision with America, Gibbon saw nothing but colonies in rebellion, and a paternal government justly incensed. His silent votes were all given on that hypothesis. In a similar manner, while he abhorred the French revolution, he seemed to have had no apprehension, like Chesterfield, Burke, or even Horace Walpole, of its approach, or that it had had anything to do with the philosophic coteries in which he had taken such delight.

In 1781 he published two more quartos of his history. They excited less controversy, and were therefore less talked about. This seems to have extorted from him a half murmur "about prejudice and neglect." The fact is, there was less room for discussion and complaint; the volumes, however, were read with silent avidity, and deserved it. Though less exciting than the first, they were written with a deeper judgment, and were more free from the taint of infidelity.

Having sold all his property except his library—to him equally a necessary and a luxury—Gibbon repaired to Lausanne in Sept. 1783, and took up his abode with his early friend Deyverdun, now a resident there. Perfectly free from every engagement but those which his own tastes imposed, easy in his circumstances, commanding just as much society, and that as select, as he pleased, with the noblest scenery spread out at his feet, no situation can be imagined more favourable for the prosecution of his literary enterprise;—a hermit in his study as long as he chose, and the most delightful recreation always ready for him at the threshold. "In London," says he, "I was lost in the crowd; I ranked with the first families in Lausanne, and my style of prudent expense enabled me to maintain a fair balance of reciprocal civilities. . . . Instead of a small house between a street and a stable-yard, I began to occupy a spacious and convenient mansion, connected on the north side with the city, and open on the south to a beau- Gibbon. tiful and boundless horizon. A garden of four acres had been laid out by the taste of M. Deyverdun; from the garden a rich scenery of meadows and vineyards descends to the Leman Lake, and the prospect far beyond the lake is crowned by the stupendous mountains of Savoy." In this enviable retreat, it is no wonder that a year should have been suffered to roll round before he vigorously resumed his great work,—and with many men it would never have been resumed in such a paradise. We may remark en passant that the retreat was often enlivened, or invaded, by friendly tourists from England, whose "frequent incursions" into Switzerland our recluse seems half to lament as an evil. What would he said fifty years later? Among others, Mr Fox gave him two "welcome days of free and private society" in 1788. Differing as they did in politics, Gibbon's testimony to the genius and character of the great statesman is highly honourable to both: "Perhaps no human being," he says, "was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood."

When once fairly rescued at his task he proceeded in this delightful retreat leisurely, yet rapidly, to its completion. The fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes were all in manuscript before he thought of printing. On the 27th of June 1787, he was "free"—it freedom can be predicated of that condition, so profoundly natural, which Gibbon has as naturally delineated. "I have presumed," says he, "to mark the moment of conception: I shall now commemorate the hour of my final deliverance. It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a bercereau 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 date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious." Sad that the Consolations of Philosophy should have offered nothing better than this!

Taking the manuscript of the last three volumes with him, Gibbon, after an absence of four years, once more visited London. The arrangements for publishing volumes so heralded by their predecessors, were soon effected, and the printing proceeded apace; but after it was completed, a little trait of characteristic egotism for a while delayed the publication. The great event was to synchronize with the author's fifty-first birthday, and the two great events were celebrated by Mr Cadell, the publisher, by a third great event—no less than a literary dinner in the author's honour;—where, says Gibbon, "I seemed to blush while they read an elegant compliment from Mr Hayley." Assuredly it ought to have been no seeming blush with which the historian listened to the fulsome hyperboles of the verses with which this mediocre Pindar regaled him; and if he did not blush for himself, he ought to have done so for the Muse.

The last volumes of the work were eagerly read, but much criticised; and while the same religious objections were taken, and justly, the author was found more fault with for the indecency of his notes. Gibbon professes that he never could understand this charge; and it is very likely (though very lamentable) that he spoke the simple truth.

In his defence, he says he had wrapped up the offensive matter in the learned languages; but then, to how many thousands of those who read his book were those languages familiar! The question is as to the necessity of such citations and comments as those in which he has indulged, and few will contend for it, in the majority of cases, to any legitimate purpose of history. He also says that he had been equally free, though less censured, in the earlier volumes. This would be nothing to the purpose even if true; but it is hardly true; for it would be easy to point out in the later volumes more than one instance in which Gibbon has gone completely out of his way to introduce impurities which none but a mind too accustomed to revolve such ideas would wish to suggest to the minds of others; and one instance, at least, in which he has chosen to improvise a ludicrous varia lecto of a passage for the very purpose of conveying a most gross obscenity. As a writer in the Quarterly Review has very justly remarked, "the critical scrupulousness with which he investigates the most nauseous details, sitting them with the pertinacity and relish of a duck filtering the filthiest mud for its meal," "his sly innuendos, his luxurious amplifications," disclose a gross and prurient mind. Many other men, equally sceptical, would have shrunk from this kind of pollution; he plunges into the filth with all the gout and relish of a congenial sensuality.

He returned to Switzerland in July 1788; but the death of his friend Deyverdun, and the ennui resulting from the loss of his great occupation, which had been as a daily companion for so many years, had divested his retreat of its chief charms; while the premonitory mutterings of the great thunderstorm of the French revolution, which reverberated in hollow echoes even through the quiet valleys of Switzerland, further troubled his repose. At length public events, seconded by motives of friendship, drove the historian to his island home. He arrived in England 1793. He appears to have amused himself during the latter part of his stay at Lausanne with his Memoirs, which, with his correspondence and miscellaneous pieces, it was reserved for his friend Lord Sheffield to give to the public.

His life was now drawing to a close. He had fondly anticipated, from the "laws of probability, so true in general," but alas! "so fallacious in particular," fifteen years of life. They proved in his case to be "fallacious in particular," for he survived for scarcely a fourth of the hoped-for period. He died January 16th, 1794, about nine months after his return to England. Singularly enough, he had been for years afflicted by the disease which at last proved fatal, but had been insensible to its importance, and had declined, from false delicacy, to seek medical aid. It was an element of the "probabilities" which he had not calculated.

Just before his death he was in full possession of his senses, and is said to have died with much composure; but he was evidently unconscious of the stealthy step of the Destroyer till the curtain was suddenly drawn, and the blow struck.

The character of Gibbon presents much that is personally and socially estimable. Of a frigid temperament,—he had not in his composition one particle of the qualities which constitute moral greatness in any one of its many forms; but it would be unjust to deny that he was amiable and good tempered, and capable of feeling and inspiring a firm, though not very enthusiastic, friendship. It must be added that his friendships were such as did not involve any severe strain on patience, self-denial, or generosity, or on his characteristic equanimity. That equanimity, it must be allowed, was very little tried in any way; he practised his philosophy cheaply. Born to competency, and at length possessed of fortune—always fully sensible of the advantages which fortune brings in her train—

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1 Memoirs, p. 166. 2 Ib., p. 170. provided with pleasures and occupations he intensely loved—successful in the great object of his literary ambition, which was his only strong passion, and the gratification of which, as his Memoirs show, afforded him intense delight—he seems, if we but suppose this world to be all, to have whiled away his time here as pleasantly as any wise epicurean could, and to have computed the sum of his enjoyments at the close with a sufficiently complacent, but not erroneous, arithmetic. "M. d'Alembert relates," says he, "that as he was walking in the gardens of Sans Souci with the King of Prussia, Frederick said to him, 'Do you see that old woman, a poor weeder, asleep on that sunny bank? She is probably a more happy being than either of us.' The king and the philosopher may speak for themselves; for my part I do not envy the old woman."

But with good nature and social amenity the praise of his personal character almost ends. No traits, so far as we can find, of self-denial, generosity, magnanimity, nobility of mind, mark his history. M. Vaillant even charges him with "insensibility to all lofty and generous sentiments." This is too strong; at least, if the expression of "lofty" sentiments (a cheap way, it must be admitted, of manifesting the more arduous virtues) may be taken as a key to character where we cannot appeal to the better test of action. Of such sentiments of sympathy with magnanimous virtue, there is no lack in his Decline and Fall,—if we except two subjects. "His reflections," says Porson, "are just and profound; he pleads eloquently for the rights of mankind and the duty of toleration, nor does his humanity ever slumber—unless when women are ravished, and Christians persecuted." The exceptions, it must be confessed, cut deep, and may remind us a little of the indignant virtue of the Irishwoman who challenged her accusers to say, barring theft, lust, and drunkenness, what they could have to allege against her. Vanity he had in abundance, as appears in his Memoirs; indeed, without it, would any man ever write his autobiography? Yet it is accompanied in Gibbon with much candour. Less indulgence can be given to the contemptuous arrogance with which he treats opponents.

His conversation though, as might be expected, full of information, seems to have been, if not tinged with pedantry, yet too formal. He talked much as he wrote, and this prevented his attaining the ease and grace of the best colloquial style. "His conversation," says M. Suard, "never carried one away. Its fault was an artificiality which never permitted him to say anything unless well,"—that is, well in his estimate; and so, in books, and notes, and conversation, his diction was apt to be recherché, and his sentences a mosaic.

Gibbon's genius was singularly adapted to the task he undertook. He ironically observes, in his Memoirs, that since "philosophy has exploded all innate ideas and natural propensities," fortuitous causes in early life must be alleged to account for the invincible bent of his mind to history. But he distinctly intimates his convictions to the contrary in another part of his Memoirs: "After his oracle Dr. Johnson, my friend Sir Joshua Reynolds denies all original genius, any natural propensity of the mind to one art or science rather than another. Without engaging in a metaphysical or rather verbal dispute, I know by experience that from my early youth I aspired to the character of an historian." No just philosophy is likely to explode "innate" aptitudes or fundamental peculiarities of mind, whether generic or individual; and to these, at least as strongly as to education or accident, must we attribute each special bias of genius. Not that these last have little to do with the character of intellect, which is finally the result of two variables—certain original tendencies of mind, and the discipline to which the mind has been subjected. It is a departure perhaps from ordinary language to speak of some one distinct endowment of mind, or conglomeries of Gibbon's endowments, and call it an historic genius, in the same way we speak of a philosophical or poetical genius; but if the phrase be ever allowable, it is assuredly in the case of Gibbon. It may be more proper to say, however, that he had in large measure all those separate endowments which, in conjunction, best fit a man for this department of composition; some of them hardly compatible at all, and scarcely ever seen united. In him all were possessed in a harmony and perfection seldom equalled, perhaps never surpassed; a most retentive memory, the most active powers of acquisition, indomitable industry; a mind capable equally of ascending to the most comprehensive, and of descending to the most minute surveys; of appreciating the beautiful and sublime in classic literature, and yet of delighting in the verbal criticisms, the tedious collations, and dry antiquarian research by which the text is established or illustrated; of celebrating the more imposing events of history with congenial pomp of description, and of investigating with the dullest plodder's patience and perseverance the origin of nations, the emigrations of obscure tribes, and the repulsive yet instructive problems which ethnology presents. Accordingly, the widest deductions of historic philosophy alternate in his pages with attempts to fix the true reading of an obscure passage or a minute point of chronology or geography. It may even be said that in these last investigations he took almost as much delight as in depicting the grander scenes of history, and surrendered himself as absolutely for the time to the migrations of the Goths and Scythians as to the campaigns of Belisarius or the conquests of the Saracens. It must be added that never has any historian evinced greater logical sagacity in making comparatively obscure details yield important inferences, or held with a firmer hand the balance in the case of conflicting probabilities; none who has exhibited sounder judgment or self-control (always excepting Christianity) in cases where it is so easy for learned enthusiasm to run into fanciful hypotheses. To these qualities must be added a singular skill in marshalling for effect the diversified and multitudinous matters of his history, and often much richness of imagination and great graphic art in investing their more picturesque features with the brilliant tints and colours, the due light and shade, which belong to historic painting.

Of the many high qualities which characterize his history, perhaps none is more marked than the manner in which he has managed to manoeuvre, so to speak, the vast array of facts which crowd its pages. It is the ampest historic canvas ever spread, the largest historic painting ever executed, by a single hand. The history of Rome is, for the many centuries which Gibbon treats, the history of the world; and it is astonishing that he should have been able to work with so much ease such vast and incongruous materials into so much unity of design; that he should have been able (so to speak) to exhibit the many-coloured nations of all varieties of costume, habits, languages, and religions in one tolerably consistent tableau. This history is a sort of moving panorama of the nations; and as tribe after tribe, nation after nation, Celt, Goth, Saracen, and Sarmatian, appear on the scene from the obscurity of their original seats, they blend with grace in the picturesque narrative. His history is like the Indus or the Mississippi, swelling and still swelling by a thousand tributary floods, which augment its volume, and tinge its waters, but without destroying the identity or the pervading character of the stream.

The style of Gibbon has great merits, mixed with some not trivial defects. The "luminous Gibbon" was a phrase of Sheridan in his speech on Hastings' trial, with which

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1 Memoirs, pp. 182-4. 2 Ib., p. 183. 3 Ib., p. 106. Gibbon was much delighted; but which the malicious wit afterwards playfully denied, and said he must have meant the "ruminous Gibbon." Yet the epithet may well stand. The diction is precise, energetic, massive; splendid, where the pictorial demands of the narrative require it, as that of Livy; and sometimes, where profound reflections are to be concisely expressed, as sententious and graphic as that of Tacitus. Less can be said for the sources of his diction; it is not sufficiently idiomatic English, and bears everywhere the traces of his early addictedness to French. The Gallicisms are in many places amusingly perverse. Thus, for example, his constant use of "prevents" in the old sense of "anticipate," sometimes leads to ludicrous apparent contradiction, as when he tells us that "The prefect had signalized his fidelity to Maximin by the alacrity with which he had obeyed, and even prevented, the cruel mandates of the tyrant;" or, again, that "the fortunate soil assisted and even prevented the hand of cultivation."

The structure of his style is open to still greater objections than his diction. Harmonious as it often is, it is too frequently set and formal; deficient in flexibility. It is apt to pall on the ear by the too frequent recurrence of the same cadence at equal intervals, and the too unsparing use of antithesis. It is not veined marble, but an exquisite tessellation; not the fluent naturally-winding stream, but a stately aqueduct, faced with stone, adorned with wooded embankments, or flowing over noble arches, but an aqueduct still. It is a just criticism of Sir James Mackintosh that probably no writer ever derived less benefit from his professed models. Pascal, Voltaire, Hume, were his delight, and he acknowledges (as so unsuccessful a pupil well might) that he often closed the pages of the last with a feeling of despair. Addison and Swift he read for the very purpose of improving his acquaintance with idiomatic English, yet, as the above critic remarks, "with so little success, that in the very act of characterizing these writers, he has deviated not a little from that beautiful simplicity which is their peculiar distinction."

The irony of Gibbon, on which he evidently plumed himself, is in him no pleasant feature, not merely because in history it can seldom be in place if much indulged, but because it is especially distasteful to the great majority of his readers when applied to those deeply serious themes on which he usually exercises it. He flattered himself, as already seen, that Pascal's Provincial Letters had taught him to use this weapon gracefully; as little, it may be retorted, as Addison and Swift had taught him the use of idiomatic English. The difference between an innocent smile and a sardonic grin is scarcely greater than that between the irony of Pascal and the irony of Gibbon; the one speaks with a sweet riant air, as with the consciousness that what is ridiculed is ridiculous; the other with a cautious, stealthy, Guy Faux look, as if conscious of a sinister purpose. Gibbon's irony almost always wears a sneer, and seldom provokes the smile of the reader, even where the subject does not repel it. Not only so; it is so elaborate as to lose much of its grace even where innocent; in other cases it is often so masked as to leave the reader (Pascal is never thus chargeable) in doubt whether the author meant what he seemed to mean, or whether he is not meditating, by the very form of expression, a pusillanimous escape from the inferences that may be legitimately founded on it.

We have expressed ungrudging admiration of the great merits of this astonishing work. It has, nevertheless, one pervading blemish, of which we shall speak with similar impartiality. That blemish is, of course, the treatment of Christianity.

If the Christian public had given itself time to reflect, it would have been seen that Gibbon's attack really afforded little cause for alarm. The purpose of the assassin-like stroke from behind the curtain of his irony is plain enough; but it is really a brutum fulmen. Gibbon himself has provided for his own defeat by his very mode of conducting the assault. If he meant, as he seemed to insinuate rather than affirm (or, to speak more accurately, insinuated while in words he expressly affirmed the contrary), that his "five secondary causes" gave a probable natural solution of the origin and early triumphs of Christianity,—then the whole thing was a ludicrous instance of ἀπόρεια ἀπόρεια, or, as our proverb has it, of "the cart before the horse." The story begins all too late; the "causes" require as much to be accounted for as the "effects;" or rather, they are among the very effects to be accounted for. According to this mode of explaining the origin of Christianity, causes are assigned which implied not only its existence, but its activity; in other words, the hypothesis assigns Christianity itself as a cause of itself; and its success as a ground of its success. Thus, for example, if he is to be supposed (as he evidently wishes the reader to infer) to be accounting for the purely human origin and triumphs of Christianity,—the most potent secondary causes he assigns are the zeal, morality, virtue, unity, and so forth, of the Christian church; meanwhile, the very thing that demands explanation is just the sudden apparition in the world of this singular phenomenon, the Christian church, with this bright retinue of virtues; how it was that a system from which the Jews have recoiled more than any other nation for the last eighteen hundred years should have sprung up in their bosom, in spite of all their national antipathies; how it was that a system which was scarcely less odious from its origin, its character, its doctrines (in a word, everything), to all other nations, should nevertheless have found its proselytes so rapidly in every part of the Roman empire; and in a few centuries, not only gained a sphere for the exercise of that marvellous "virtue" and "zeal" which it indeed might cause, but which could hardly cause it, but dethroned all the deities of Olympus, and became the established religion of the empire! That was the problem; and Gibbon takes it up long after Christianity had made good its footing, and assigns, if he means what he seems to mean, causes for its origin and success which already presuppose both origin and success! It is as though a man were seeking the source of the Nile, and ascending no higher than the cataracts, avows that he finds its fountain there. Such is the value of Gibbon's hypothesis, supposing he intended his secondary causes to account for the origin and triumphs of Christianity; but, as before said, he made a provision for his retreat, by nominally granting the "truth of the doctrine and the providence of God" to be the great cause of the success of Christianity. Seriously, one would imagine, (if we did not know his manner), that he meant all this; for in his Vindication, in reply to Davis, where he takes occasion briefly to mention Watson's Letters, and to excuse himself from reply, he appeals to this very concession as a reason for silence! He says—"The remarks of Dr Watson consist more properly of general argumentation than of particular criticism. He fairly owns that I have expressly allowed the full and irresistible weight of the first great cause of the success of Christianity; and

1 As to his third secondary cause, "miracles," the same may be said as of his ironically conceded primary cause. He either meant that miracles had been performed, or not; if he did, he of course concedes the main point; if he did not, then he is giving a nothing (by a new name) to account for the success of Christianity. If it be said that what he meant was the pretension to miracles, though miracles there were none, it is very likely; but then it is easy to reply that though such pretensions have been often of service when a religion has already become accredited, there is no example (unless he chooses to beg the question by assuming it of the Jewish and Christian religions) of a religion successfully founding itself on such hazardous assumptions, while there are many examples of failure in such attempts; that is, Gibbon's cause, as usual, comes too late. Gibbon: He is too candid to deny that the five secondary causes, which I had attempted to explain, operated with some degree of active energy towards the accomplishment of that great event. The only question which remains between us relates to the degree of the weight and effect of those secondary causes; and as I am persuaded that our philosophy is not of the dogmatic kind, we should soon acknowledge that this precise degree cannot be ascertained by reasoning, nor perhaps be expressed by words. This language, on the supposition that Gibbon was still really ironizing, greatly aggravates the disingenuousness of the "celebrated chapters." But either he meant what he said, or he did not; if he did, it of course formally surrenders the argument which infidelity has founded on the supposed sufficiency of his "secondary" causes; if he did not mean it, he of course evades the very question which his antagonist (and every other discreet antagonist) would contest with him, by ironically affecting agreement.

It may be further remarked, not only that the Christian feels that the "secondary causes" of Gibbon do not touch the principal problem,—but that infidelity has confessed, in the most significant way, a similar mistrust, by laboriously constructing other, and often reciprocally destructive hypotheses, to account for the intractable phenomena. That of Strauss is one, which, unlike that of Gibbon, professes to track the origin of Christianity to its cradle; but faithfully represents that of Gibbon and many more, in one respect, that it is ephemeral. It is even now fast losing its transient prestige. These shining exhalations from the bog of scepticism glimmer, flicker, and vanish. Fortuitous myth, deliberate fiction, deep fraud practising on simplicity, deep fanaticism practising on itself,—have all under various modifications been resorted to, as the contradictory bases of infidel theories, and have been successively abandoned. The problem of the origin of such a system as Christianity under such circumstances, and with such results, within a given century, still presents the ancient difficulty. Meanwhile, it may now be safely asserted, that the chief hypotheses have been exhausted; and we have reason to infer, therefore, that the vast majority who examine Christianity will be, as they have hitherto been, of Butler's opinion, that nothing but the truth of the gospel will harmonize the facts.

But still further, it is a special weakness in Gibbon's theory that so far from his "secondary causes" being sufficient to account for the origin, they do not—even count for the progress of the gospel; they are, when closely investigated, quite as often opposed to that progress; sometimes must have been far greater hindrances than helps. Nothing can be more infelicitous than some of his suppositions. For example, he imagines that the "intolerant zeal" of Christianity—which expressed the most open and derisive contempt of all the gods, consecrated by the classic mythologies—was a mysterious advantage to it! That the austere virtue—with which, be it recollected, it not only recoiled from the too welcome laxity of a jovial heathenism, but enlarged the circle of moral duties by adding the demands of the most diffusive and refined spiritual purity—would somehow attract votaries! That its visions of immortality—of a heaven so unalluring—of a hell so terrible—would be of magnetic force! Surely these are problematic auxiliaries. Similarly, some of the facts he assumes are purely imaginary; he attributes the zeal of proselytism manifested by the Christians to a Jewish origin, forgetting that the zeal of the Jews was just of the opposite kind; that Judaism was as exclusive as Christianity is catholic. There may be, no doubt, zeal for freedom and zeal for slavery; but because each is zeal, it would be odd to derive one from the other. Another cause to which he attributes much, was, alas! too often non-existent, and its effects were at least neutralized by opposite causes. It is the unity of the early church; its close compacted organization! Surely a singular topic of compliment, and even at a very early period a doubtful source of strength. The divisions, jealousies, and quarrels of Christians, were from the very first their weakness and their shame; and must have been at least as influential to retard, as ever their union was to advance, the progress of the gospel.

In conclusion, Christians may take some encouragement from Gibbon's failure. If ever man could hope to be the historic champion of infidelity with success, it was he. His work has such prodigious merits in nearly everything but its treatment of Christianity, as to have procured it almost universal perusal; it has now been published for the greater part of a century; and what, relatively to Christianity, have been its effects? Quite inappreciable. His management of this high argument is generally considered as the great blot of the work; as a sufficient, or even plausible account of the origin and early triumphs of Christianity, it is for the most part abandoned by infidels themselves.

The New Testament, somehow, still manages to impress the bulk of mankind who examine it, with an indelible conviction that it is the fruit of neither imposture, fiction, nor fanaticism, and that the facts connected with the propagation of the religion it embodies are historic verities. Since men have persisted in this belief, in spite of the efforts of such men as Bolingbroke, Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon, to disabuse them, it is not probable that the enterprise in which such champions have failed will be successfully achieved by other hands. Hence it may be inferred, that if Christianity be false, it will, nevertheless, not be exploded.

The manner in which Gibbon prosecutes his object affords, no doubt, great facilities for exciting prejudices against Christianity, and ample scope for his cherished sneer. Christianity does not enter on the scene till it had degenerated in some degree from its primitive purity, and had contracted many pollutions. The foibles and follies of its adherents, of course, afford a very easy triumph to the satirist.

The Christian religion, once originated, and having achieved an initial success, was left to struggle with all the corrupting influences of the world, and, as might be expected, did not come off uninjured. Brought into contagious contact with false philosophies and degrading superstitions, and gathering converts from those who were but partially reclaimed from either, no wonder that its purity was blemished. But all this, which is favourable to Gibbon's satire, is anything but favourable to his argument: for the characteristics of Christianity to which, one moment, he would fain assign such wonderful efficacy, are anon exhibited in a very different light; are alternately, as the exigencies of his argument or the gratification of his malignity may dictate, the objects of respect or contempt. Thus the zeal and the purity of manners which are now so potent a cause of success, are now transformed, the one into bigotry and fanaticism, the other into austerity and grimace. But relis et remis: if Christianity may but be discredited, the historian seems but little troubled by his own inconsistencies. Thus, to give other instances of this blind animosity: sometimes the Christians are, nearly all, poverty-stricken wretches, the very dregs of society; presently, they have plenty of riches among them, and the mere prodigality of their benevolence is no considerable bait for proselytism: at one time the early Christians, for a certain purpose, are too obscure to attract the attention of the Roman great; then, for another purpose, it is suddenly remarkable that illustrious men like Tacitus and Seneca could have been so insensible to its existence, or have regarded it with such apathy!

The historian, in short, has greatly diminished the pernicious effect of his attack, by the animus he everywhere be-

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1 *Miscellaneous Works*, vol. iii., p. 362. The italics are the author's own. It is that of inveterate prejudice, of resolute hostility. On this one topic he is never moved to generous or noble emotion. The excellence of the Christian ethics, indeed, is coldly conceded; but even Gibbon could hardly deny that.

The sixteenth chapter is in some respects worse than the fifteenth; for in his anxiety to depreciate the numbers and heroism of the Christian martyrs, he forgets what is due to his professed maxims of toleration, and becomes, if not the apologist, the palliator of the most odious persecution. But his conduct here has been rebuked by one whose eminently calm and judicial spirit, and exemption from all suspicion of religious fanaticism, render his testimony particularly impressive. "The sixteenth chapter," says Sir James Mackintosh, "I cannot help considering as a very ingenious and specious, but very disgraceful extenuation of the cruelties perpetrated by the Roman magistrates against the Christians. It is written in the most contemptibly factious spirit of prejudice against the sufferers."

Dr Robertson has been the subject of much blame for his zeal or supposed lenity towards the Spanish murderers and tyrants in America. That the sixteenth chapter of Mr Gibbon did not excite the same or greater disapprobation, is a proof of the unphilosophical and indeed fanatical animosity against Christianity which was so prevalent during the latter part of the seventeenth century."1

It is also well observed by M. Guizot, that there is scarcely anything in his history that does not move Gibbon more than Christianity and its fortunes. The achievements of a vigorous barbarism—the sanguinary conquests, even the odious cruelties of a Bajazet or a Tamerlane—are described with more animation than the moral conquests of Christianity. One would have imagined that at least the prodigious influence of Christianity, true or false, on the world's history and its civilization would have been a tempting theme for the philosophical historian's speculation. Yet, as the above writer has observed, it is a topic almost unappreciated by him. A single sentence from M. Guizot's article in the Biographie Universelle well expresses the above traits. "Après s'être efforcé de rehausser le courage héroïque des martyrs Chrétiens, il prend plaisir à célébrer les féroces exploits de Tamerlan et des Tartares: la grandeur matérielle, si on peut le dire, le frappe beaucoup plus que la grandeur morale; et les élans d'une vertu sublime ne pénètrent point jusqu'à son âme, tandis que les éclats d'une force barbare séduisent son imagination et égarent son jugement."

It is difficult, as several critics have remarked, to account for Gibbon's extreme injustice to Christianity. Some have fancied, and himself in his later days would fain countenance the fancy, that it was partly due to his "conservative politics;" because he regarded Christianity as he would a "modern innovation," and yearned, with desperate fidelity to antiquity, over the old heathenism it supplanted; because he felt much as he did at seeing the throne of France menaced by revolutionary fury! A remarkable passage to this effect occurs in one of his latest letters to Lord Sheffield, dated 1790. He says, "Burke's book is a most admirable medicine against the French disease, which has made too much progress even in this happy country. I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can forgive even his superstition. The primitive church, which I have treated with some freedom, was itself at that time an innovation, and I was attached to the old Pagan establishment."2 To most this has appeared an after thought, and justly. For was ever any argument more suicidal? When he wrote, Christianity, right or wrong, was in possession; and to attempt to destroy it was to do that very work of destruction which he professed to depreciate; yet he had the effrontery to say in his Memoir, on the breaking out of the French revolution—"I have sometimes thought of writing a dialogue of the dead, in which Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire, should mutually acknowledge the danger of exposing an old superstition to the contempt of the blind and fanatic multitude."3 Assuredly he should have made himself a fourth interlocutor in the dialogue, and confessed that he was the greatest culprit, in this kind, of his whole generation. Christianity, which, even if according to him a "superstition," could plead the hoary prescription of nearly two thousand years, he did his best to undermine, because so many centuries ago it had dethroned poor Jupiter! On the same principles, had he lived in the age of Augustus, he ought to have exemplified his zeal against innovation by being jealous of the upstart of Olympus, pleaded for the restoration of Saturn, or even gone back to the more "primitive tradition" of "Chaos and Old Night!"

It would have been well if the contemporaries of Gibbon had adopted that moderate estimate of his attack on Christianity which experience has now justified us in forming. As it was, the public took fright, and numberless hasty replies were published,—some of them insolent and abusive, most of them very inadequate in point of learning and logic, and none of them, if we except those of Watson and Lord Hailes, of much value. That of Watson alone touched the real points of the controversy, and showed that Gibbon's sophistry left the great problem as it was. It is a pity that Gibbon, instead of replying, evaded it by that disingenuous feint of agreement on the main point at issue, to which reference has been already made.

The only adversary whom he honoured with distinct refutation was Davis, whose unworthy attempt to depreciate the great historian's learning, and captions, cavilling, acrimonious charges of petty inaccuracies and discreditable falsification, gave Gibbon an easy triumph. It was, as he said, "a sufficient humiliation" to vanquish such an adversary. At the same time it must be confessed, that he selected his adversary discreetly.

The charges of inaccuracy against Gibbon in the citation of his authorities have often been repeated, but they are not, except to a very limited extent, substantiated in the estimate of the most recent and competent of his editors. In his treatment of Christianity, his inveterate and resolute prejudices may account for his partial evidence and perverted logic without accusing him, as Davis did, of ignorance, which cannot be suspected, or of deliberate suppression veri, which one would not suspect.

It is impossible to enumerate here the various editions of Gibbon's works, or to enter into the voluminous literature they have evoked. It may be well to mention, however, the beautiful edition of the Decline and Fall recently put forth in eight volumes 8vo, under the editorship of Dr W. Smith, and which embodies the notes of Professor Milman and M. Guizot.

He who would obtain a full insight into the character and genius of Gibbon, would do well to consult not only the Memoir, but the Letters and Journals; his life was emphatically that of a student and scholar, and these remains as vividly illustrate it as the Memoir itself.