GIBBON’S “Essay on the Study of Literature” was the first of his published works. It appeared in 1761, fifteen years before the appearance of the first volume of his “History of the Roman Empire.” Originally written in French and published in that language during his residence at Lausanne, it attracted more attention on the Continent than it did in England. Villemain says that while it is not strikingly original, it “shows a great literary passion,—the love of learned research and of the beautiful in language.” Gibbon himself writes that the publication of his “History” revived interest in the Essay, and that it was eagerly sought after in the shops, where, “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.” The Essay now appears in Gibbon’s “Miscellaneous Works,” but as a separate work it is still rare.

  Gibbon was born at Putney, in Surrey, England, April 27th, 1737. Like many of the most eminent English men of letters, he was virtually self-educated. The University of Oxford, where he spent fourteen months, expelled him when he was converted to Roman Catholicism,—a change of religion which, though it won him this martyrdom, had no other permanent effect on him than that of rescuing him from “the port and prejudice” of orthodox English education. On this he always congratulated himself. “To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation,” he says; “she will as cheerfully renounce me as a son as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College. They proved fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.” After leaving Magdalen College, he was sent by his father to Lausanne to study in the family of M. Pavilliard, a Calvinist minister of that city, from whom he learned French, Latin, and Greek. Under M. Pavilliard’s teachings Gibbon’s faith in the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church “disappeared like a dream,” but it does not appear that he was really converted again to Protestantism or any other ecclesiastical form of Christianity. He met Voltaire in 1757, and was greatly influenced by him. In the same year he fell in love with Susanne Curchod, from whom he was separated by the positive refusal of his father to consent to their marriage. The young woman was afterwards celebrated as Madame Necker, mother of the even more celebrated Madame de Staël. Returning to England in 1758, he continued to educate himself, on the theory of the elder Pliny that “no book is so bad as to be good for nothing.” At Rome, which he visited in 1764, the first conception of his “History” came to him. “It was at Rome,” he says, “on the eighteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst 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.” After he had conceived it thus, his habits of research made it possible for him to elaborate it into one of the greatest monuments of varied learning among modern histories. The first volume appeared in 1776, the last in 1788. In 1783, Gibbon returned to Lausanne, and made it his home during the remainder of his life. He died at London, January 16th, 1794. With Dr. Johnson, he ranks at the head of the eighteenth-century masters of Latin style. Ciceronian syntax had never been made completely at home in England until Gibbon wrote.