Born, at Putney, 27 April, 1737. To school in Putney; afterwards at school at Kingston-on-Thames, Jan. 1746 to 1748 (?). At Westminster School, Jan. 1748 to 1750. To Bath for health 1750. To school at Esher, Jan. 1752. At Magdalen Coll., Oxford, 3 April, 1752 to June 1753. To Lausanne, as pupil of M. Pavillard, June 1753. Returned to England, Aug. 1758. Held commission in Hampshire militia, 12 June 1759 to 1770. In Paris, 28 Jan. to 9 May 1763; at Lausanne, May 1763 to April 1764; in Italy, April, 1764 to May, 1765. Returned to England; lived with father at Buriton. After father’s death settled in London, 1772. Prof. of Ancient History at Royal Academy, 1774. M.P. for Liskeard, 11 Oct. 1774 to Sept. 1780. Lord Commissioner of Trade and Plantations, 1779. M.P. for Lymington, June 1781 to March 1784. Settled at Lausanne, Sept. 1783. Visit to England, 1788 and 1793. Died, in London, 16 Jan. 1794. Buried at Fletching, Sussex. Works: “Essai sur l’étude de la Littérature” (in French), 1761 (Eng. trans., 1764); “Mémoires Littéraires de la Grande-Bretagne” (with Deyverdun), 2 vols., 1767–68; “Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Æneid” (anon.), 1770; “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (6 vols.), 1776–88 (2nd and 3rd edns. in same period). Posthumous: “An Historical View of Christianity” (with Bolingbroke, Voltaire, and others), 1806; “Antiquities of the House;” Brunswick,” ed. by Lord Sheffield, 1814; “Memoirs,” ed. by Lord Sheffield, 1827; “Life” (autobiog.), ed. by H. H. Milman, 1839; “The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon,” ed. J. Murray, 1896; “Private Letters,” ed. by R. E. Prothero, 1896. Collected Works: “Miscellaneous Works,” in 2 vols., 1796; in 5 vols. 1814.

Personal

  They have had great doings here at the christening of Mr. Gibbon’s son…. Our landlady says that his lady had no fortune, but was a young lady of good family and reputation, and that old Mr. Gibbon led her to church and back again.

  Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary club to me.

  Fat and ill-constructed, Mr. Gibbon has cheeks of such prodigious chubbiness, that they envelope his nose so completely, as to render it, in profile, absolutely invisible. His look and manner are placidly mild, but rather effeminate; his voice,—for he was speaking to Sir Joshua at a little distance,—is gentle, but of studied precision of accent. Yet, with these Brobdignatious cheeks, his neat little feet are of a miniature description; and with these, as soon as I turned around, he hastily described a quaint sort of circle, with small quick steps, and a dapper gait, as if to mark the alacrity of his approach, and then, stopping short when full face to me, he made so singularly profound a bow, that—though hardly able to keep my gravity—I felt myself blush deeply at its undue, but palpably intended obsequiousness.

  Mr. Gibbon, the historian, is so exceedingly indolent that he never even pares his nails. His servant, while Gibbon is reading, takes up one of his hands, and when he has performed the operation lays it down and then manages the other—the patient in the meanwhile scarcely knowing what is going on, and quietly pursuing his studies. The picture of him painted by Sir. J. Reynolds, and the prints made from it, are as like the original as it is possible to be. When he was introduced to a blind French lady, the servant happening to stretch out her mistress’s hand to lay hold of the historian’s cheek, she thought, upon feeling its rounded contour, that some trick was being played upon her with the sitting part of a child, and exclaimed, “Fidonc!”

  The publication of Gibbon’s “Memoirs” conveyed to the world a faithful picture of the most fervid industry; it is in youth, the foundations of such a sublime edifice as his history must be laid. The world can now trace how this Colossus of erudition, day by day, and year by year, prepared himself for some vast work…. Of all our popular writers the most experienced reader was Gibbon.

  Went to the library of Mr. Gibbon; it still remains here, though bought seven years ago by Mr. Beckford, of Fonthill, for 950l. It consists of nearly 10,000 volumes, and, as far as I could judge by a cursory and (from its present situation) a very inconvenient examination of it, it is, of all the libraries I ever saw, that of which I should most covet the possession—that which seems exactly everything that any gentleman or gentlewoman fond of letters could wish. Although it is in no particular walk of literature a perfect collection, in the classical part perhaps less than any other, and in the Greek less than in the Latin classics, still there are good editions of all the best authors in both languages. The books, though neither magnificent in their editions nor in their bindings, are all in good condition, all clean, all such as one wishes to read, and could have no scruple in using. They are under the care of Mr. Scott, a physician of this place, who made the bargain for Mr. Beckford with Gibbon’s heirs in England, and are placed in two small and inconvenient rooms hired for the purpose, and filled with rows of shelves so near as scarcely to admit of looking at the books on the back side of them. Mr. Beckford, when last here in 179–, packed up about 2,500 vols. of what he considered as the choicest of them, in two cases, which he then proposed sending to England directly, but which still remain in their cases with the others.

  I enclose you a sprig of Gibbon’s acacia and some rose-leaves from his garden, which, with part of his house, I have just seen. You will find honourable mention, in his Life, made of this acacia, when he walked out on the night of concluding his history. The garden and summer-house, where he composed, are neglected, and the last utterly decayed; but they still show it as his “cabinet,” and seem perfectly aware of his memory.

  I invited the four military gentlemen, our committee, and six other persons the best qualified I could meet with, among whom were my father, Lord Carmarthen, and Mr. Gibbon, the historian, who was then at the zenith of his fame, and who certainly was not at all backward in availing himself of the deference universally shown to him, by taking both the lead, and a very ample share of the conversation, in whatever company he might honour with his presence. His conversation was not, indeed, what Dr. Johnson would have called talk. There was no interchange of ideas, for no one had a chance of replying, so fugitive, so variable, was his mode of discoursing, which consisted of points, anecdotes, and epigrammatic thrusts, all more or less to the purpose, and all pleasantly said with a French air and manner which gave them great piquancy, but which were withal so desultory and unconnected that, though each separately were extremely amusing, the attention of his auditors sometimes flagged before his own resources were exhausted.

  On the day I first sat down with Johnson, in his rusty brown, and his black worsteads, Gibbon was placed opposite to me in a suit of flower’d velvet, with a bag and sword…. The costume was not extraordinary at this time (a little overcharged, perhaps, if his person be considered), when almost every gentleman came to dinner in full dress…. Each had his measured phraseology; and Johnson’s famous parallel, between Dryden and Pope, might be loosely parodied, in reference to himself and Gibbon. Johnson’s style was grand, and Gibbon’s elegant; the stateliness of the former was sometimes pedantick, and the polish of the latter was occasionally finical. Johnson march’d to kettle-drums and trumpets; Gibbon moved to flutes and hautboys; Johnson hew’d passages through the Alps, while Gibbon levell’d walks through parks and gardens. Maul’d as I had been by Johnson, Gibbon pour’d balm upon my bruises, by condescending, once or twice, in the course of the evening, to talk with me; the great historian was light and playful, suiting his matter to the capacity of the boy;—but it was done more suâ (sic); still his mannerism prevail’d;—still he tapp’d his snuff-box,—still he smirk’d, and smiled; and rounded his periods with the same air of good-breeding, as if he were conversing with men.—His mouth, mellifluous as Plato’s, was a round hole, nearly in the centre of his visage.

  The author of the great and superb “History of the Roman Empire” was scarcely four feet seven to eight inches in height; the huge trunk of his body, with a belly like Silenus, was set upon the kind of slender legs called drumsticks; his feet, so much turned in that the point of the right one could often touch the point of the left, were long and broad enough to serve as a pedestal to a statue of five feet six inches. In the middle of his face, not larger than one’s fist, the root of his nose receded into the skull more deeply than the nose of a Calmuck, and his very bright but very small eyes were lost in the same depths. His voice, which had only sharp notes, could only reach the heart by splitting the ears. If Jean-Jacques Rousseau had met Gibbon in the Province of Vaud, it is probable that he would have made of him a companion portrait to his funny one of the Chief Justice. M. Suard, who cared little to look at, and still less to produce, caricatures, often drew Gibbon, and always as Madam Brown.

  Gibbon has remarked, that his history is much the better for his having been an officer in the militia and a member of the House of Commons. The remark is most just. We have not the smallest doubt that his campaign, though he never saw an enemy, and his parliamentary attendance, though he never made a speech, were of far more use to him than years of retirement and study would have been. If the time that he spent on parade and at mess in Hampshire, or on the Treasury-bench and at Brookes’s during the storms which overthrew Lord North and Lord Shelburne had been passed in the Bodleian Library, he might have avoided some inaccuracies; he might have enriched his notes with a greater number of references; but he never would have produced so lively a picture of the court, the camp, and the senate-house.

  Southey, like Gibbon, was a miscellaneous scholar; he, like Gibbon, of vast historical research; he, like Gibbon, signally industrious, and patient, and elaborate in collecting the materials for his historical works. Like Gibbon, he had dedicated a life of competent ease, in a pecuniary sense, to literature; like Gibbon he had gathered to the shores of a beautiful lake, remote from great capitals, a large, or, at least sufficient library (in each case I believe, the library ranged, as to numerical amount, between seven and ten thousand); and, like Gibbon, he was the most accomplished littérateur amongst the erudite scholars of his time, and the most of an erudite scholar amongst the accomplished littérateurs. After all these points of agreement known, it remains as a pure advantage on the side of Southey—a mere lucro ponatur—that he was a poet; and by all men’s confession, a respectable poet, brilliant in his descriptive powers, and fascinating in his narration, however much he might want of

“The vision and the faculty divine.”

It is remarkable amongst the series of parallelisms that have been or might be pursued between two men, that both had the honour of retreating from a parliamentary life.

  Thus converted firstly to the Romish communion at Oxford in June, 1753, at the age of sixteen years and two months, he renounced it at Lausanne in December 1754, at the age of seventeen years and eight months. This was precisely, within a few years, what Bayle had done in his youth. In Gibbon’s case everything was performed in his head and within the lists of dialectics; one argument had carried it off. He could say, for his own satisfaction, that he owed both the one change and the other to his reading and his solitary meditation alone. Later, when he flattered himself with being wholly impartial and indifferent concerning beliefs, it is allowable to suppose that, even without avowing it, he cherished a secret and cold spite against religious thought, as if it had been an adversary which had one day struck him in the absence of his armour and had wounded him.

  Respecting Dr. Franklin’s journey from Nantes to Paris, Cobbett has preserved from the old newspapers, an anecdote of some point, and not too improbable for belief. I know not whether there is any truth in it. The story is, that at one of the inns at which he slept on the road, he was informed that Gibbon (the first volume of whose History had been published in the spring of that year) was also stopping. “Franklin sent his compliments, requesting the pleasure of spending the evening with Mr. Gibbon. In answer he received a card, importing that, notwithstanding Mr. Gibbon’s regard for the character of Dr. Franklin, as a man and a philosopher, he could not reconcile it with his duty to his king, to have any conversation with a revolted subject! Franklin in reply wrote a note, declaring, that ‘though Mr. Gibbon’s principles had compelled him to withhold the pleasure of his conversation, Dr. Franklin had still such a respect for the character of Mr. Gibbon, as a gentleman and a historian, that when, in the course of his writing the history of the decline and fall of empires, the decline and fall of the British Empire should come to be his subject, as he expects it soon would, Dr. Franklin would be happy to furnish him with ample materials which were in his possession.’”

  Gibbon’s political career is the side of his history from which a friendly biographer would most readily turn away. Not that it was exceptionally ignoble or self-seeking if tried by the standard of the time, but it was altogether commonplace and unworthy of him. The fact that he never even once opened his mouth in the House is not in itself blameworthy, though disappointing in a man of his power. It was indeed laudable enough if he had nothing to say. But why had he nothing to say? His excuse is timidity and want of readiness. We may reasonably assume that the cause lay deeper. With his mental vigour he would soon have overcome such obstacles if he had really wished and tried to overcome them. The fact is that he never tried because he never wished. It is a singular thing to say of such a man, but nevertheless true, that he had no taste or capacity whatever for politics.

  The face and figure of Gibbon are familiar to us from the profile usually found at the beginning of his collected works. The testimony of foreigners as well as of Englishmen, both sufficiently prove its accuracy. To corroborate it farther, there is the well-known story of the blind French old lady, and Charles Fox’s coarse lines, neither of which testimonies could be well produced here. This great man was a lover—a lover when he was old as well as when he was young. The style of his letters was rather pedantic and like a page of his history, and the result proved that he was not what is called a successful lover.

  To an Englishman at Lausanne, Gibbon is still the prime subject of local interest…. We were favoured with a sight of the portraits: one of the usual Kit-cat in pastels—Lausanne then containing sundry famous pastellistes—a cameo-bust on wedgewood (much idealized), and an aquarelle of “The Historian” (hideous exceedingly), sitting before the façade of his house at Lausanne, afterwards removed to make way for the Hôtel Gibbon. This, by the way, is a fraud, boasting that its garden contains the identical chestnut tree under which the last lines of a twenty-years’ work were written. Unfortunately, the oft-quoted passage describing that event assigns it to “a summer-house in my garden,” near a berceau, or covered walk of acacias; all of which have long disappeared to make way for the Rue du Midi. Upon the strength of this being “Gibbon Castle,” we are somewhat overcharged and underfed.

  One of the relics which will attract most public attention, lent us by General Meredith Read, is Gibbon’s Bible, which is said always to have lain in his bedroom at Lausanne. Undoubtedly his attitude to Christianity is the feature in his great work which has done most to diminish its influence, and all educated men, to whatever school they belong, would now admit with his masterly biographer, Mr. Cotter Morison, that this is a most serious blemish. It is, however, only fair to remember that Christianity, as it presented itself to Gibbon’s mind, was something very different from what we are accustomed to associate with the name.

  During these hundred years the reputation of the historian has been continually growing larger and more firm; his limitations and his errors have been so amply acknowledged that they have ceased to arouse the controversy and the odium which they naturally invited in former generations; and the civilised world, making full allowance for differences of party and of creed, has agreed to honour the historian for his grand success, and no longer to censure that wherein he failed. But hardly any Englishman, with a world-wide fame, has received so little of public honour, or has fallen so completely out of the eye of the world as a personality. Our National Portrait Gallery contains not a single likeness of any kind; there is no record of him in any public institution, no tablet, inscription, bust, or monument; his name figures in no public place; and the house which he inhabited in London bears no mark of its most illustrious inmate. Though masses of his original manuscripts exist, our British Museum contains nothing of them but a single letter; his memoirs, his diaries, his notes, his letters, in his own beautiful writing, are extant in perfect condition. But they are all in private hands, and for some generations they have never been examined or collated by any student or scholar…. Much less will any one claim for Edward Gibbon the character of a hero, the name of a great man, the spirit of a martyr or leader of men. No one will ever call him ultimus Romanorum, or the thunder-god; no one pretends that he is one of the great souls who inspire their age. We do not set him on any moral pinnacle, either as man or as teacher; nor do we rank him with the master spirits who form the conscience of generations. Without unwisely exaggerating his intellectual forces, without weakly closing our eyes upon his moral shortcomings, we can do full justice to the magnificent literary art, to the lovable nature, the indomitable industry, the noble equanimity of the man. We come, then, to-day, neither to praise nor to criticise; we offer round his tomb no idle encomium, nor do we presume to weigh his ashes in our critical scales. We come to meditate again over all that recalls the charm and sweet sociability of a warm and generous friend; to study with rekindled zest the cherished remnants which friendship has preserved of one of the greatest masters of historical research that has ever adorned the literature of Europe…. Edward Gibbon had his worries like other men—worries hardly ever the consequence of any error of his own—but how little of repining or of irritation does he display! He was bitterly and unjustly attacked; but how little is there of controversy; and even in his replies to Priestley and to Davies his language is measured, dignified, and calm. No one pretends that Edward Gibbon had any trace in his nature of passionate impulse or of spiritual nobility. His warmest affection is cast into a Ciceronian mould; and his imperturbable good sense always remains his dominant note. Gibbon was neither a Burke nor a Shelley, still less was he a Rousseau or a Carlyle. He was a delightful companion, a hearty friend, an indomitable student, and an infallible master of that equanimity which stamps such men as Hume, Adam Smith, and Turgot. It is the mitis sapientia Læli which breathes through every line of these elaborate letters.

  There is usually a tendency to underrate Gibbon’s military experiences…. He was evidently an officer of more than ordinary intelligence, and possessed some military aptitude. He went beyond the requirements of an infantry captain by closely studying the language and science of tactics; indeed all that pertained to the serious side of soldiering he studied with a perseverance which might have been expected of a man that wrote his memoirs nine times before he was satisfied. While acquiring personal experience he was studying the campaigns of all the great masters of the art of war, in exactly the manner which Napoleon half a century later laid down as the only means of becoming a great captain.

  He was one of those happiest of mortals who do not need the “preponderance from without,” for whose guidance Wilhelm Meister longed; for him the preponderance within spoke clear enough. The call to be a scholar was in him from the first, the special call to history came later. Both were promptly, strenuously, unwearyingly obeyed; and to that cheerful and long-sustained obedience the historian owed one of the happiest of lives, and we owe the greatest work of history in a modern language.

  Gibbon’s service in Parliament covered the period of the American Revolution, and during the latter part of the time he was a member of the Board of Trade. The complete correspondence of these years sets his political career in a much better light than did the selections published by Lord Sheffield. We find that Gibbon made a serious attempt to inform himself on the American question, and that he really appreciated the importance of the crisis. Mr. Cotter Morison, relying on the fragmentary letters, has depicted Gibbon’s parliamentary career much too unfavourably.

  He was a little slow, a little pompous, a little affected and pedantic. In the general type of his mind and character he bore much more resemblance to Hume, Adam Smith, or Reynolds, than to Johnson or Burke. A reserved scholar, who was rather proud of being a man of the world; a confirmed bachelor, much wedded to his comforts though caring nothing for luxury, he was eminently moderate in his ambitions, and there was not a trace of passion or enthusiasm in his nature. Such a man was not likely to inspire any strong devotion. But his temper was most kindly, equable, and contented; he was a steady friend, and he appears to have been always liked and honored in the cultivated and uncontentious society in which he delighted. His life was not a great one, but it was in all essentials blameless and happy. He found the work which was most congenial to him. He pursued it with admirable industry and with brilliant success, and he left behind him a book which is not likely to be forgotten while the English language endures.

Mademoiselle Curchod

  The cooling-off of Mr. Gibbon has made me think meanly of him. I have been going over his book, and he seems to me to be straining at esprit. He is not the man for me; nor can I think that he will be the one for Mademoiselle Curchod. Any one who does not know her value is not worthy of her; but a man who has come to that knowledge and then withdraws himself, is only worthy of contempt…. I would sooner a thousand times that he left her poor and free among you than that he brought her rich and miserable away to England.

  I should be ashamed if the warm season of youth had passed away without any sense of friendship or love; and in the choice of their objects I may applaud the discernment of my head or heart…. The beauty of Mademoiselle Curchod, the daughter of a country clergyman, was adorned with science and virtue: she listened to the tenderness which she had inspired; but the romantic hopes of youth and passion were crushed, on my return, by the prejudice or prudence of an English parent. I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life; and my cure was accelerated by a faithful report of the tranquility and cheerfulness of the Lady herself. Her equal behaviour under the tryals of indigence and prosperity has displayed the firmness of her character. A citizen of Geneva, a rich banker of Paris, made himself happy by rewarding her merit; the genius of her husband has raised him to a perilous eminence; and Madame Necker now divides and alleviates the cares of the first minister of the finances of France.

  The letter in which Gibbon communicated to Mademoiselle Curchod the opposition of his father to their marriage still exists in manuscript. The first pages are tender and melancholy, as might be expected from an unhappy lover; the latter becomes by degrees calm and reasonable, and the letter concludes with these words:—C’est pourquoi, Mademoiselle, j’ai l’honneur d’être votre très humble et très obéissant serviteur, Edward Gibbon. He truly loved Mademoiselle Curchod; but every one loves according to his character, and that of Gibbon was incapable of a despairing passion.

  His love affair—his first and only one—was transient enough…. 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 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.

  That the passion which she inspired in him was tender, pure, and fitted to raise to a higher level a nature which in some respects was much in need of such elevation will be doubted by none but the hopelessly cynical; and probably there are few readers who can peruse the paragraph in which Gibbon “approaches the delicate subject of his early love,” without discerning in it a pathos much deeper than that of which the writer was himself aware.

  It becomes a kind of “Ring and the Book,” but a Gibbonian “Ring and the Book”—every voice is the voice of Gibbon, and as we turn the pages we always see the same short fat figure explaining and pronouncing, and hear no echoes from the market-place, or the law-courts. When the historian treats of his early love affair, it is especially entertaining to have his feelings described in many ways and at different periods of his life. Gibbon’s love-story, told by himself, has always interested and amused his fellows—it is a literary curiosity—a perennial joke—but even here we might welcome another point of view. In the original collection edited by Gibbon’s friend, several letters from his correspondents were inserted—all worth reading in their way. But far the most interesting were a number of letters written by Mme. Necker to her former lover. They extend over a long stretch of time, and bear witness to an extraordinary loyal and faithful tenderness on her part. Some of the love for him, which Gibbon has disregarded, seems to have always remained in the bottom of her heart, and while she learned to realize that his genius lay in friendship and not in courtship, she adapted herself to his temperament and gave him to the last day of his life an unswerving affection.

  The tone in which Gibbon generally refers to love affairs in his history is not altogether edifying, and hardly implies that his passion had purified or ennobled his mind.

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–88

  You have, unexpectedly, given the world a classic history. The fame it must acquire will tend every day to acquit this panegyric of flattery.

  As I ran through your volume of History with great avidity and impatience, I cannot forbear discovering somewhat of the same impatience in returning you thanks for your agreeable present, and expressing the satisfaction which the performance has given me. Whether I consider the dignity of your style, the depth of your matter, or the extensiveness of your learning, I must regard the work as equally the object of esteem, and I own that, if I had not previously had the happiness of your personal acquaintance, such a performance from an Englishman in our age would have given me some surprize.

  Gibbon I detect a frequent poacher in the “Philosophical Essays” of Bolingbroke: as in his representation of the unsocial character of the Jewish religion; and in his insinuation of the suspicions cast by succeeding miracles, acknowledged to be false, on prior ones contended to be true. Indeed it seems not unlikely that he caught the first hint of his theological chapters from this work.

  Another d—mn’d thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! eh! Mr. Gibbon?

  I can recollect no historical work from which I ever received so much instruction, and when I consider in what a barren field you had to glean and pick up materials I am truly astonished at the connected and interesting story you have formed.

  You will be diverted to hear that Mr. Gibbon has quarrelled with me. He lent me his second volume in the middle of November. I returned it with a most civil panegyric. He came for more incense; I gave it, but alas! with too much sincerity; I added, “Mr. Gibbon, I am sorry you should have pitched on so disgusting a subject as the Constantinopolitan History. There is so much of the Arians and Eunomians, and semi-Pelagians; and there is such a strange contrast between Roman and Gothic manners, and so little harmony between a Consul Sabinus and a Ricimer, Duke of the Palace, that though you have written the story as well as it could be written, I fear few will have patience to read it.” He coloured: all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp angles; he screwed up his button-mouth, and rapping his snuff-box, said, “It had never been put together before”—so well, he meant to add—but gulped it. He meant so well certainly, for Tillemont, whom he quotes in every page, has done the very thing. Well, from that hour to this, I have never seen him, though he used to call once or twice a week; nor has he sent me the third volume, as he promised. I well knew his vanity, even about his ridiculous face and person, but thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably.

  If there be any certain method of discovering a man’s real object, yours has been to discredit Christianity in fact, while in words you represent yourself as a friend to it; a conduct which I scruple not to call highly unworthy and mean; an insult on the common sense of the Christian world.

  I now feel as if a mountain was removed from my breast; as far as I can judge, the public unanimously applauds my compliment to Lord North, and does not appear dissatisfied with the conclusion of my work, I look back with amazement on the road which I have travelled, but which I should never have entered had I been previously apprized of its length.

  I cannot express to you the pleasure it gives me to find, that, by the universal assent of every man of taste and learning whom I either know or correspond with, it sets you at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe.

  You desire to know my opinion of Mr. Gibbon. I can say very little about him, for such is the affectation of his style, that I could never get through the half of one of his volumes. If anybody would translate him into good classical English, (such, I mean, as Addison, Swift, Lord Lyttelton, &c., wrote), I should read him with eagerness; for I know there must be much curious matter in his work. His cavils against religion, have, I think, been all confuted; he does not seem to understand that part of his subject: indeed I have never yet met with a man, or with an author, who both understood Christianity, and disbelieved it.

  It is a most wonderful mass of information, not only on history, but almost on all the ingredients of history, as war, government, commerce, coin, and what not. If it has a fault, it is in embracing too much, and consequently in not detailing enough, and in striding backwards and forwards from one set of princes to another, and from one subject to another; so that, without much historic knowledge, and without much memory, and much method in one’s memory, it is almost impossible not to be sometimes bewildered: nay, his own impatience to tell what he knows, makes the author, though commonly so explicit, not perfectly clear in his expressions. The last chapter of the fourth volume, I own, made me recoil, and I could scarcely push through it. So far from being Catholic or heretic, I wished Mr. Gibbon had never heard of Monophysites, Nestorians, or any such fools! But the sixth volume made ample amends; Mahomet and the Popes were gentlemen and good company. I abominate fractions of theology and reformation.

  His reflections are often 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, or the Christians persecuted…. He often makes, when he cannot readily find, an occasion to insult our religion, which he hates so cordially that he might seem to revenge some personal insult. Such is his eagerness in the cause, that he stoops to the most despicable pun, or to the most awkward perversion of language, for the pleasure of turning the Scriptures into ribaldry, or of calling Jesus an impostor.

  I am at a loss how to describe the success of the work without betraying the vanity of the writer. The first impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand; and the bookseller’s property was twice invaded by the pyrates of Dublin. My book was on every table, and almost on every toilette; the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day; nor was the general voice disturbed by the barking of any profane critic…. 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 berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the Lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.

  The work of Gibbon excites my utmost admiration; not so much by the immense learning and industry which it displays, as by the commanding intellect, the keen sagacity, apparent in almost every page. The admiration of his ability extends even to his manner of showing his hatred to Christianity, which is exquisitely subtle and acute, and adapted to do very great mischief, even where there is not the smallest avowal of hostility. It is to be deplored that a great part of the early history of the Christian Church was exactly such as a man like him could have wished.

  The author of the “History of the Decline,” &c., appears to have possessed a considerable share of sense, ingenuity, and knowledge of his subject, together with great industry. But these qualities or talents are disgraced,—by a false taste of composition, which prompts him continually to employ a verbose, inflated style, in order to obtain the praise of force and energy,—by a perpetual affectation of wit, irony, and satire, altogether unsuited to the historic character,—and, what is worse, by a freethinking, licentious spirit, which spares neither morals nor religion, and must make every honest man regard him as a bad citizen and pernicious writer. All these miscarriages may be traced up to one common source, an excessive vanity.

  The uncommon sum Gibbon received for copyright, though it excited the astonishment of the philosopher himself, was for the continued labour of a whole life, and probably the library he had purchased for his work equalled at least in cost the produce of his pen; the tools cost the workman as much as he obtained for his work. Six thousand pounds gained on these terms will keep an author indigent.

  Gibbon is a writer full of thoughts; his language is in general powerful and exquisite, but it has, to a great excess, the faults of elaborateness, pompousness, and monotony. His style is full of Latin and French words and phrases…. The work of Gibbon, however instructive and fascinating it may be, is nevertheless at bottom an offensive one, on account of his deficiency in feeling, and his propensity to the infidel opinions and impious mockeries of Voltaire. These are things extremely unworthy of a historian, and in the periodic and somewhat cumbrous style of Gibbon they appear set off to far less advantage than in the light and airy compositions of his master. He never seems to be naturally a wit, but impresses us with the idea that he would very fain be one if he could.

  But the high estimation in which Mr. Gibbon’s outline is held on the continent, where the Roman Law has for so many centuries been thoroughly studied, and elaborately written on, will be regarded as strong evidence of its high merit.

  A work of immense research and splendid execution…. Alternately delighted and offended by the gorgeous colouring with which his fancy invests the rude and scanty materials of his narrative; sometimes fatigued by the learning of his notes, occasionally amused by their liveliness, frequently disgusted by their obscenity, and admiring or deploring the bitterness of his skilful irony—I toiled through his massy tomes with exemplary patience. His style is exuberant, sonorous, and epigrammatic to a degree that is often displeasing. He yields to Hume in elegance and distinctness—to Robertson in talents for general disquisition—but he excels them both in a species of brief and shrewd remark for which he seems to have taken Tacitus as a model, more than any other that I know of.

  Arrived at Bury before tea. My brother and sister were going to hear an astronomical lecture. I stayed alone and read a chapter in Gibbon on the early history of the Germans. Having previously read the first two lectures of Schlegel, I had the pleasure of comparison, and I found much in Gibbon that I had thought original in Schlegel.

  Gibbon was not, like Hume, a self-thinking, deep-fathoming man, who searched into the nature of things, existence and thought, but was in these respects like the French, or like the Scotchman Brougham, who has also attained this Franco-Genevese capacity, of quickly making other people’s thoughts and investigations his own, and propounding them in an admirable manner. Like the great French writers, he can take a quick and comprehensive view of various departments of knowledge, and we can therefore learn most readily through his instrumentality the results of the learned labours of the great collectors of materials upon the theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence of the times of declining antiquity, and of the rising middle ages. Because his eloquence and his great skill in representation give a charm and splendour to the thoughts which he wishes to disseminate, he has the full right of all men who are great in politics and literature to claim, that nobody should ask, whether he was really in earnest, or how his language and his conduct harmonized.

  I have had occasion, during my labors, to consult the writings of philosophers, who have treated on the finances of the Roman Empire; of scholars, who have investigated the chronology; of theologians, who have searched the depths of ecclesiastical history; of writers on law, who have studied with care the Roman jurisprudence; of Orientalists, who have occupied themselves with the Arabians and the Koran; of modern historians, who have entered upon extensive researches touching the crusades and their influence; each of these writers has remarked and pointed out, in the “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” some negligences, some false or imperfect views, some omissions, which it is impossible not to suppose voluntary; they have rectified some facts, combated with advantage some assertions; but in general they have taken the researches and the ideas of Gibbon, as points of departure, or as proofs of the researches or of the new opinions which they have advanced.

  There is no writer who exhibits more distinctly the full development of the principles of modern history, with all its virtues and defects, than Gibbon…. Gibbon was a more vivacious draughtsman than most writers of his school. He was, moreover, deeply versed in geography, chronology, antiquities, verbal criticism—in short, in all the sciences in any way subsidiary to his art. The extent of his subject permitted him to indulge in those elaborate disquisitions so congenial to the spirit of modern history on the most momentous and interesting topics, while his early studies enabled him to embellish the drier details of his narrative with the charms of a liberal and elegant scholarship. What, then, was wanting to this accomplished writer? Good faith. His defects were precisely of the class of which we have before been speaking, and his most elaborate efforts exhibit too often the perversion of learning and ingenuity to the vindication of preconceived hypotheses. He cannot, indeed, be convicted of ignorance or literal inaccuracy, as he has triumphantly proved in his discomfiture of the unfortunate Davis. But his disingenuous mode of conducting the argument leads precisely to the same unfair result. Thus, in his celebrated chapters on the “Progress of Christianity,” which he tells us were “reduced by three successive revisals from a bulky volume to their present size,” he has often slurred over in the text such particulars as might reflect most credit on the character of the religion, or shuffled them into a note at the bottom of the page, while all that admits of a doubtful complexion in its early propagation is ostentatiously blazoned, and set in contrast to the most amiable features of paganism. At the same time, by a style of innuendo that conveys “more than meets the ear,” he has contrived, with Iago-like duplicity, to breathe a taint of suspicion on the purity which he dares not openly assail.

  Gibbon, the architect of a bridge over the dark gulf which separates ancient from modern times, whose vivid genius has tinged with brilliant colours the greatest historical work in existence.

  Gibbon’s style is detestable, but his style is not the worst thing about him. His history has proved an effectual bar to all real familiarity with the temper and habits of imperial Rome. Few persons read the original authorities, even those which are classical; and certainly no distinct knowledge of the actual state of the empire can be obtained from Gibbon’s rhetorical sketches. He takes notice of nothing but what may produce an effect; he skips on from eminence to eminence, without ever taking you through the valleys between: in fact, his work is little else but a disguised collection of all the splendid anecdotes which he could find in any book concerning any persons or nations from the Antonines to the capture of Constantinople. When I read a chapter in Gibbon I seem to be looking through a luminous haze or fog:—figures come and go, I know not how or why, all larger than life, or distorted or discoloured; nothing is real, vivid, true; all is scenical, and as it were, exhibited by candlelight. And then to call it a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire! Was there ever a greater misnomer? I protest I do not remember a single philosophical attempt made throughout the work to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline or fall of that empire. How miserably deficient is the narrative of the important reign of Justinian! And that poor scepticism, which Gibbon mistook for Socratic philosophy, has led him to misstate and mistake the character and influence of Christianity in a way which even an avowed infidel or atheist would not and could not have done. Gibbon was a man of immense reading; but he had no philosophy; and he never fully understood the principle upon which the best of the old historians wrote. He attempted to imitate their artificial construction of the whole work—their dramatic ordonnance of the parts—without seeing that their histories were intended more as documents illustrative of the truths of political philosophy than as mere chronicles of events.

  We have ourselves followed the track of Gibbon through many parts of his work; we have read his authorities with constant reference to his pages, and we must pronounce our deliberate judgment in terms of the highest admiration of his general accuracy. Many of his seeming errors are almost inevitable from the close condensation of his matter. From the immense range of his history it was sometimes necessary to compress into a single sentence, a whole vague and diffuse page of a Byzantine chronicler. Perhaps something of importance may thus escape, and his expressions may not quite contain the whole substance of the quotation. His limits, at times, compel him to sketch; where that is the case, it is not fair to expect the full details of the picture. At times he can only deal with important results; and in his account of a war, it sometimes requires great attention to discover that the events, which seem to be comprehended in a single campaign, occupy several years. But this admirable skill in selecting and giving prominence to the points which are of real weight and importance—this distribution of light and shade—though perhaps it may occasionally betray him into vague and imperfect statements, is one of the highest excellencies of Gibbon’s historic manner. It is the more striking, when we pass from the works of his chief authorities, where, after labouring through long, minute and wearisome descriptions of the accessary and subordinate circumstances, a single unmarked and undistinguished sentence, which we may overlook from the inattention of fatigue, contains the great moral and political result.

  Perhaps the most masterly and elaborate account of the Civil Law which is extant is to be found in the forty-fourth chapter of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Lord Mansfield characterised it as “beautiful and spirited.”

  Another very celebrated historian, we mean Gibbon—not a man of mere science and analysis, like Hume, but with some (though not the truest or profoundest) artistic feeling of the picturesque, and from whom, therefore, rather more might have been expected—has with much pains succeeded in producing a tolerably graphic picture of here and there a battle, a tumult, or an insurrection; his book is full of movement and costume, and would make a series of very pretty ballets at the Opera house, and the ballets would give us fully as distinct an idea of the Roman empire, and how it declined and fell, as the book does. If we want that, we must look for it anywhere but in Gibbon. One touch of M. Guizot removes a portion of the veil which hid from us the recesses of private life under the Roman empire, lets in a ray of light which penetrates as far even as the domestic hearth of a subject of Rome, and shews us the Government at work making that desolate; but no similar gleam of light from Gibbon’s mind ever reaches the subject; human life, in the times he wrote about, is not what he concerned himself with.

  A greater historian than Robertson, but not so great as Hume. With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more futile account of human things than he has done of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; assigning no profound cause for these phenomena, nothing but diseased nerves, and all sorts of miserable motives, to the actors in them.

  The great work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history. The literature of Europe offers no substitute for “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” It has obtained undisputed possession, as rightful occupant, of the vast period which it comprehends. However, some subjects which it embraces may have undergone more complete investigation, on the general view of the whole period, this history is the sole undisputed authority to which all defer, and from which few appeal to the original writers, or to more modern compilers. The inherent interest of the subject; the inexhaustible labor employed upon it; the immense condensation of matter; the luminous arrangement; the general accuracy; the style, which, however monotonous from its uniform stateliness, and sometimes wearisome from its elaborate art, is throughout vigorous, animated, often picturesque, always commands attention, always conveys its meaning with emphatic energy, describes with singular breadth and fidelity, and generalizes with unrivalled felicity of expression; all these high qualifications have secured, and seem likely to secure, its permanent place in historic literature.

  I read a good deal of Gibbon. He is grossly partial to the pagan persecutors; quite offensively so. His opinion of the Christian fathers is very little removed from mine; but his excuses for the tyranny of their oppressors give to his book the character which Porson describes. He writes like a man who had received some personal injury from Christianity, and wished to be revenged on it and all its professors.

  He had three hobbies which he rode to the death (stuffed puppets as they were), and which he kept in condition by the continual sacrifice of all that is valuable in language. These hobbies were Dignity—Modulation—Laconism. Dignity is all very well; and history demands it for its general tone; but the being everlastingly on stilts is not only troublesome and awkward, but dangerous. He who falls en homme ordinaire—from the mere slipping of his feet—is usually an object of sympathy; but all men tumble now and then, and this tumbling from high sticks is sure to provoke laughter. His modulation, however, is always ridiculous; for it is so uniform, so continuous, and so jauntily kept up, that we almost fancy the writer waltzing to his words. With him, to speak lucidly was a far less merit than to speak smoothly and curtly. There is a way in which, through the nature of language itself, we may often save a few words by talking backwards; and this is, therefore, a favorite practice with Gibbon.

  If his work be not always history, it is often something more than history, and above it: it is philosophy, it is theology, it is wit and eloquence, it is criticism the most masterly upon every subject with which literature can be connected. If the style be so constantly elevated as to be often obscure, to be often monotonous, to be sometimes even ludicrously disproportioned to the subject; it must at the same time be allowed, that whenever an opportunity presents itself, it is the striking and adequate representation of comprehensive thought and weighty remark. It may be necessary no doubt to warn the student against the imitation of a mode of writing so little easy and natural. But the very necessity of the caution implies the attraction that is to be resisted; and it must be confessed that the chapters of the “Decline and Fall” are replete with paragraphs of such melody and grandeur as would be the fittest to convey to a youth of genius the full charm of literary composition; and such as, when once heard, however unattainable to the immaturity of his own mind, he would alone consent to admire, or sigh to emulate…. When such is the work, it is placed beyond the justice or the injustice of criticism; the Christian may have, but too often, very just reason to complain, the moralist to reprove, the man of taste to censure,—even the historical inquirer may be fatigued and irritated by the unseasonable and obscure splendour through which he is to discover the objects of his research. But the whole is, notwithstanding, such an assemblage of merits so various, so interesting, and so rare, that the “History of the Decline and Fall” must always be considered as one of the most extraordinary monuments that has appeared of the literary powers of a single mind, and its fame can perish only with the civilization of the world.

  The great merit of Gibbon is his extraordinary industry, and the general fidelity of his statements, as attested by the constant references which he makes to his numerous and varied authorities—references which enable the “most faithful of historians” to ascertain clearly their accuracy, that is, the truth of his narrative. This is the very first virtue of the historical character; and that merit, therefore, is fully possessed by Gibbon. In it he is the worthy rival of Robertson, and in it he forms a remarkable contrast to Hume. The next great merit of Gibbon is the judgment with which he weighs conflicting authorities and the freedom with which he rejects improbable relations. His sagacity is remarkable; and his attention seems ever awake…. The third excellence of his work is its varied learning, distributed in the vast body of notes which accompany the text, and which contain no small portion of a critical abstract, serving for a catalogue raisonné, of the works referred to in the page…. It must, lastly, be allowed, that the narrative is as lucid as the confused nature of the subject will admit; and that, whatever defects may be ascribed to it, there is nothing tiring or monotonous, nothing to prevent the reader’s attention from being kept ever awake. When the nature of the subject is considered, perhaps there may some doubt arise, if the chaster style of Livy, of Robertson, or even of Hume, could have rendered this story as attractive as Gibbon’s manner, singularly free from all approach to monotony, though often deviating widely from simplicity and nature.

  Every intelligent reader felt that only a most uncommon sagacity could have seen through the confusion of the chaotic variety of his materials, estimating their claims and merits, and their often obscure relations with each other. So far from complaining of any want of clearness in the narrative, the wonder is, that he should ever have been able to subdue them into tolerable harmony and order. He seems never to have been weary of searching into the endless range of subjects presented, balancing authorities and determining their accuracy with a precision and faithfulness which few will venture to impeach.

  It is acknowledged that Gibbon wrote with a preconceived, speculative object. Cold design overlays every page. His work is rather an elegant oration, pronounced with sustained diction, than a living picture of the past. The order into which he reduced an immense quantity of chaotic material is, perhaps, its most striking charm.

  Fox used to say that Gibbon’s history was immortal, because nobody could do without it; nobody, without vast expense of time and labour, could get elsewhere the information which it contains. I think, and so Lord Grenville thought, that the introductory chapters are the finest part of that history: it was certainly more difficult to write them than the rest of the work.

  There is no more solid book in the world than Gibbon’s history. Only consider the chronology. It begins before the year one and goes down to the year 1453, and is a schedule or series of schedules of important events during that time. Scarcely any fact deeply affecting European civilisation is wholly passed over, and the great majority of facts are elaborately recounted. Laws, dynasties, churches, barbarians, appear and disappear. Everything changes; the old world—the classical civilisation of form and definition—passes away, a new world of free spirit and inward growth emerges; between the two lies a mixed weltering interval of trouble and confusion, when everybody hates everybody, and the historical student leads a life of skirmishes, is oppressed with broils and feuds. All through this long period Gibbon’s history goes with steady consistent pace; like a Roman legion through a troubled country—hæret pede pes; up hill and down hill, through marsh and thicket, through Goth or Parthian—the firm defined array passes forward—a type of order, and an emblem of civilisation. Whatever may be the defects of Gibbon’s history, none can deny him a proud precision and a style in marching order…. Gibbon’s reflections connect the events; they are not sermons between them. But, notwithstanding, the manner of the “Decline and Fall” is the last which should be recommended for strict imitation. It is not a style in which you can tell the truth. A monotonous writer is suited only to monotonous matter. Truth is of various kinds—grave, solemn, dignified, petty, low, ordinary; and an historian who has to tell the truth must be able to tell what is vulgar as well as what is great, what is little as well as what is amazing. Gibbon is at fault here.

  “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall” has now been jealously scrutinized by two generations of eager and unscrupulous opponents; and I am only expressing the general opinions of competent judges when I say that by each successive scrutiny it has gained fresh reputation. Against his celebrated fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, all the devices of controversy have been exhausted; but the only result has been, that while the fame of the historian is untarnished, the attacks of his enemies are falling into complete oblivion. The work of Gibbon remains; but who is there who feels any interest in what was written against him?

  Guizot and Milman have both subjected the original authorities, consulted by Gibbon in his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to the intensest scrutiny, to see if the historian has perverted, falsified, or suppressed facts. Their judgment is in favor of his honesty and his conscientious research. Yet this by no means proves that we can obtain through his history the real truth of persons and events. The whole immense tract of history he traverses he has thoroughly Gibbonized. The qualities of his character steal out in every paragraph; the words are instinct with Gibbon’s nature; though the facts may be obtained from without, the relations in which they are disposed are communicated from within; and the human race for fifteen centuries is made tributary to Gibbon’s thought, wears the colors and badges of Gibbon’s nature, is denied the possession of any pure and exalted experiences which Gibbon cannot verify by his own; and the reader, who is magnetized by the historian’s genius, rises from the perusal of the vast work, informed of nothing as it was in itself, but everything as it appeared to Gibbon, and especially doubting two things,—that there is any chastity in women, or any divine truth in Christianity.

  The student must have perceived at once that this unbeliever, however he might adopt the cant of the philosophers, was no mere philosophical historian in the Hume and Voltaire sense of the word; that he had devoted intense labour to his task; that he had succeeded in presenting a picture of the past ages such as had not been presented before. He might detect many sophisms in the arguments of his fifteenth and sixteenth chapters. But what are all these arguments to the actual vision of the evils of human society under the Christian dispensation? It is these that give the special pleas for secondary causes their weight. It is these that tempt to the notion that those secondary causes were many of them not divine, but devilish. If that conviction is truly followed out, Gibbon himself will be the best of preachers. He will be the brilliant and eloquent witness for a divine power which has been at work in all ages to counteract the devilish power; which has been stronger to support a righteous kingdom on earth than all evil influences, proceeding from those who call themselves divine ministers, have been to destroy it. But if his reasoning and facts are merely brought face to face with arguments, to prove that at a certain moment there was launched into the world, with miraculous sanctions, a religion the outward displays of which, through subsequent ages, have been so mixed,—which has apparently prompted so many evil deeds—the result must be, in a multitude of cases, a negative indifferent scepticism, in not a few, a positive infidelity.

  He did not write expressly against Christianity; but the subject came across his path in travelling over the vast space of time which he embraced in his magnificent “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” It is a subject of regret to be compelled to direct hostile remarks against one who has deserved so well of the world. That work, though in the pageantry of its style it in some sense reflects the art and taste of the age in which it was written, yet in its love of solid information and deep research is the noblest work of history in the English tongue. Grand alike in its subject, its composition, and its perspective, it has a right to a place among the highest works of human conception; and sustains the relation to history which the works of Michael Angelo bear to art.

	Gibbon has planted laurels long to bloom
	Above the ruins of sepulchral Rome.
	He sang no dirge, but mused upon the land
	Where Freedom took his solitary stand.
	To him Thucydides and Livius bow,
	And Superstition veils her wrinkled brow.

  The famous XVIth chapter of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” was assailed furiously, but in vain, each assault exposing the weakness of the assailants; and it was only by adopting his history, and editing it with judicious notes, that the church silenced the enemy it could not crush.

  I have finished Gibbon, with a great deduction from the high esteem I have had of him ever since the old Kirkcaldy days, when I first read the twelve volumes of poor Irving’s copy in twelve consecutive days. A man of endless reading and research, but of a most disagreeable style, and a great want of the highest faculties (which indeed are very rare) of what we could call a classical historian, compared with Herodotus, for instance, and his perfect clearness and simplicity in every part.

  A man of genius; not for what he has done for history, but what he has done for literature, in showing that no theme is so huge but that art may proportion it and adorn it till it charms,—the work which lastingly charms being always and alone the proof of genius. When one turns from other histories to his mighty achievement, one feels that it is really as incomparable for its noble manner as for the grandeur of the story it narrates. That story assumes at his touch the majestic forms, the lofty movement, of an epic; its advance is rhythmical; in the strong pulse of its antitheses is the fire, the life of a poetic sense; its music, rich and full, has a martial vigor, its colors are the blazons of shields and banners.

  It would be difficult to name any writer in our language, especially among the few who deserve to be compared with him, who is so un-English, not in a bad sense of the word, as implying objectionable qualities, but as wanting the clear insular stamp and native flavour. If an intelligent Chinese or Persian were to read his book in a French translation, he would not readily guess that it was written by an Englishman. It really bears the imprint of no nationality, and is emphatically European…. An indefinable stamp of weightiness is impressed on Gibbon’s writing; he has a baritone manliness which banishes everything small, trivial, or weak. When he is eloquent (and it should be remembered to his credit that he never affects eloquence, though he occasionally affects dignity), he rises without effort into real grandeur. On the whole we may say that his manner, with certain manifest faults, is not unworthy of his matter, and the praise is great.

  Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” leaves a reader cold who cares only to quicken his own inmost being by contact with what is most precious in man’s spiritual history; one chapter of Augustine’s “Confessions,” one sentence of the “Imitation”—each a live coal from off the altar—will be of more worth to such an one than all the mass and laboured majesty of Gibbon. But one who can gaze with a certain impersonal regard on the spectacle of the world will find the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” more than almost any other single book, replenish and dilate the mind.

  Though Gibbon’s history was completed nearly a century ago, its great importance has not declined, and it is probably still entitled to be esteemed as the greatest historical work ever written…. The minuteness and comprehensiveness of Gibbon’s historical knowledge are somewhat appalling to the scholarship of the present day…. So thorough were his methods that the laborious investigations of German scholarship, the keen criticisms of theological zeal, and the steady researches of a century have brought to light very few important errors in the results of his labours. But it is not merely the learning of the work, learned as it is, that gives it character as a history. It is also that ingenious skill by which the vast erudition, the boundless range, the infinite variety, and the gorgeous magnificence of the details are all wrought together into a symmetrical whole. Two objections to Gibbon’s history have often been urged. The one is to the stately magnificence of his style, the other to his strong bias against Christianity. In both of these objections there is considerable reason. The majestic periods with which the author describes even the least important events are a source either of annoyance or of amusement to nearly every modern reader. The other characteristic not only leads the author to describe the origin and growth of Christianity without sympathy, but it throws a gloomy hue over the whole, and gives to events as they pass before the reader something of the melancholy pomp of a funeral procession. But whatever objections different minds may raise, either to the unbending stateliness of his style or to the stinging sarcasm of his spirits, these peculiarities will prevent no genuine scholar from studying the work and profiting by it.

  No Christian, therefore, but will rejoice that, with its great faults on this side, a history like that of Gibbon has been written; and Christianity needs too much to have its infirmities, as a human product, displayed for its own correction, to quarrel even with its severest censor who challenges historical evidence for his accusations. In particular allegations Gibbon may have failed, but many of his charges hit some weak point, where Christianity is the better for the criticism; and if his general spirit be complained of, as, for example, in his sympathy with Mohammedanism rather than with so much higher a faith, this teaches the Church of Christ to remember its own corruption as the precursor of its defeat, while there is no more striking moral which Gibbon has unconsciously helped to point than the divine vitality, as since tested, of the one religion, while the other has been sinking into senility and exhaustion. In this point of view, or as a permanent measure of the strength and enduring resource of Christianity, the celebrated inquiry of Gibbon as to Secondary Causes of the success of Christianity has a special interest.

  If you want to know where the world was, and how it fared with it during the first ten centuries of our era, read Gibbon. No other writer can do for you just what he does. No one else has had the courage to attempt his task over again. The laborious student of history may go to the many and obscure sources from which Gibbon drew the materials for his great work, and correct or supplement him here and there, as Milman has done; but the general reader wants the completed structure, and not the mountain quarries from which the blocks came; and the complete structure you get in Gibbon. To omit him is to leave a gap in your knowledge of the history of the world which nothing else can fill. As Carlyle said to Emerson, he “is the splendid bridge which connects the old world with the new;” very artificial, but very real for all that, and very helpful to any who have business that way. The case may be even more strongly stated than that. To read Gibbon is to be present at the creation of the world—the modern world…. Ruskin objects to Gibbon’s style as the “worst English ever written by an educated Englishman.” It was the style of his age and country brought to perfection, the stately curvilinear or orbicular style; every sentence makes a complete circle; but it is always a real thought, a real distinction that sweeps through the circle. Modern style is more linear, more direct and picturesque; and in the case of such a writer as Ruskin, much more loose, discursive and audacious. The highly artificial buckram style of the age of Gibbon has doubtless had its day, but it gave us some noble literature, and is no more to be treated with contempt than the age which produced it is to be treated with contempt.

  Gibbon has a good deal to answer for. You can find nearly every fact in him, but he began by making the subject ridiculous, by trotting out some absurd, and, if possible, indecent anecdote, as if it were a summary of the whole reign. It is that chapter which gives the impression, and those which follow never take it away. I believe that Pipin was made patrician by authority of Constantine Kopronymos, but that Pope Stephen bamboozled them all round.

  In accuracy, thoroughness, lucidity, and comprehensive grasp of a vast subject, the “History” is unsurpassable. It is the one English history which may be regarded as definitive. The philosophy is of course that of the age of Voltaire and implies a deficient insight into the great social forces. The style, though variously judged, has at least the cardinal merit of admirable clearness, and if pompous is always animated. Whatever its shortcomings the book is artistically imposing as well as historically unimpeachable as a vast panorama of a great period. Gibbon’s fortunate choice of a subject enabled him to write the one book in which the clearness of his own age is combined with a thoroughness of research which has made it a standard for his successors.

  It is no personal paradox, but the judgment of all competent men, that the “Decline and Fall” of Gibbon is the most perfect historical composition that exists in any language: at once scrupulously faithful in its facts; consummate in its literary art; and comprehensive in analysis of the forces affecting society over a very long and crowded epoch. In eight moderate volumes, of which every sentence is compacted of learning and brimful of thought, and yet every page is as fascinating as romance, this great historian has condensed the history of the civilised world over the vast period of fourteen centuries—linking the ancient world to the modern, the Eastern world to the Western, and marshalling in one magnificent panorama the contrasts, the relations, and the analogies of all. If Gibbon has not the monumental simplicity of Thucydides, or the profound insight of Tacitus, he has performed a feat which neither has attempted. “Survey mankind,” says our poet, “from China to Peru!” And our historian surveys mankind from Britain to Tartary, from the Sahara to Siberia, and weaves for one-third of all recorded time the epic of the human race.

  A great work then, and a great work now, measured by what standard we will. To say that one approaches the accuracy of Gibbon is to exhaust praise; to say that one surpasses him in reach of learning is to deal in hyperbole.

  Gibbon gave a new impetus to the study of the history of Roman law through the celebrated 44th chapter of his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” It was translated by Professor Hugo of Göttingen and Professor Warnkönig of Liège, and has been used as the text-book on Civil Law in some of the foreign universities…. Herder, Savigny, and Niebuhr stand all under the immediate influence of Gibbon, and Lessing saw in him kindred tendencies, though in a different direction.

  Gibbon was the first to write a complete history on the largest scale, with a magnificent sense of proportion, and with profound original research; tracing the complex, stormy evolution of the modern world out of the ancient, and the momentous transitions from polytheism and slavery to monotheism and free industry. It is the history of civilization during thirteen centuries. The vast canvas is filled without confusion, without apparent effort, and without discord by one glowing, distinct, harmonious composition. He was not a philosophic historian, nor did he profess the profound insight of Thucydides, of Tacitus, of Bacon, or of Hume, into the springs of human action; but he was great in research, and his work remains as the initial triumph of a great historical method. Allowing for manifest defects, arising from its ornate and elaborate style; from his perverse misconception of Christianity; from his disbelief in heroism, in popular enthusiasm, and in self-devotion; and from his own epicurean and aristocratic habit of mind, his “Decline and Fall” stands alone and unrivalled for breadth, knowledge, unity of conception, and splendour of form. It resembles the stately, solid, irresistible march of a Roman Legion; and is characterized by Niebuhr as the greatest achievement of human thought and erudition in the department of history.

  Permanently established its author in that position of supremacy as a historian of which each succeeding generation renders his tenure more secure…. On the merits and demerits of his style it cannot be pretended that the same consensus of competent opinion prevails. It has been reprehended by many who had some right to criticise it, and by more who had not. Coleridge, whose own prose style, with all its eloquence, left much to be desired, condemned it in terms so extravagant as to discredit the critic rather than the criticised; but others, reviewing it with less bias, and expressing themselves with more moderation, have managed to draw up a pretty long list of objections to it. It has been pronounced monotonous, inelastic, affected, pompous; it has been called exotic in its spirit, and un-English in its structure. The most serious of these charges is, perhaps the second.

  One who is, all things told and all things allowed for, the greatest historian of the world.

  If we continue Gibbon in his fame, it will be for love of his art, not for worship of his scholarship. We some of us, nowadays, know the period of which he wrote better even than he did; but which one of us shall build so admirable a monument to ourselves, as artists, out of what we know? The scholar finds his immortality in the form he gives to his work. It is a hard saying, but the truth of it is inexorable: be an artist, or prepare for oblivion.

  To Edward Gibbon, who timidly deprecated comparison with Robertson and Hume, criticism is steadily awarding a place higher and higher above them. He is, indeed, one of the great writers of the century, one of those who exemplify in the finest way the signal merits of the age in which he flourished. The book by which he mainly survives, the vast “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” began to appear in 1776, and was not completed until 1788. It was at once discovered by all who were competent to judge, that here was a new thing introduced into the literature of the world.

  Gibbon excels all other English historians in symmetry, proportion, perspective, and arrangement, which are also the pre-eminent and characteristic merits of the best French literature. We find in his writing nothing of the great miscalculations of space that were made by such writers as Macaulay and Buckle; nothing of the awkward repetitions, the confused arrangement, the semi-detached and disjointed episodes that mar the beauty of many other histories of no small merit. Vast and multifarious as are the subjects which he has treated, his work is a great whole, admirably woven in all its parts. On the other hand, his foreign taste may perhaps be seen in his neglect of the Saxon element, which is the most vigorous and homely element in English prose. Probably in no other English writer does the Latin element so entirely predominate. Gibbon never wrote an unmeaning and very seldom an obscure sentence; he could always paint with sustained and stately eloquence an illustrious character or a splendid scene: but he was wholly wanting in the grace of simplicity, and a monotony of glitter and of mannerism is the great defect of his style. He possessed, to a degree which even Tacitus and Bacon had hardly surpassed, the supreme literary gift of condensation, and it gives an admirable force and vividness to his narrative; but it is sometimes carried to excess. Not unfrequently it is attained by an excessive allusiveness, and a wide knowledge of the subject is needed to enable the reader to perceive the full import and meaning conveyed or hinted at by a mere turn of phrase. But though his style is artificial and pedantic, and greatly wanting in flexibility, it has a rare power of clinging to the memory, and it has profoundly influenced English prose.

  The author’s profits for the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” by Gibbon, are put down at £10,000.

Autobiography, 1796–1896

  Papa has read us several parts of Mr. Gibbon’s Memoirs, written so exactly in the style of his conversation that, while we felt delighted at the beauty of the thoughts and elegance of the language, we could not help feeling a severe pang at the idea we should never hear his instructive and amusing conversation any more.

  The most important part consists of Memoirs of Mr. Gibbon’s life and writings, a work which he seems to have projected with peculiar solicitude and attention, and of which he left six different sketches, all in his own hand-writing. One of these sketches, the most diffuse and circumstantial, so far as it proceeds, ends at the time when he quitted Oxford. Another at the year 1764, when he travelled to Italy. A third, at his father’s death, in 1770. A fourth, which he continued to a short time after his return to Lausanne in 1788, appears in the form of Annals, much less detailed than the others. The two remaining sketches are still more imperfect. It is difficult to discover the order in which these several pieces were written, but there is reason to believe that the most copious was the last. From all these the following Memoirs have been carefully selected, and put together.

  The private memoirs of Gibbon the historian have just been published. In them we are able to trace with considerable accuracy the progress of his mind. While he was at college, he became reconciled to the Roman Catholic faith. By this circumstance he incurred his father’s displeasure, who banished him to an obscure situation in Switzerland, where he was obliged to live upon a scanty provision, and was far removed from all the customary amusements of men of birth and fortune. If this train of circumstances had not taken place, would he ever have been the historian of the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” Yet how unusual were his attainments in consequence of these events, in learning, in acuteness of research, and intuition of genius.

  We are now “in the thick and bustle” of living biographers; but let a tribute of literary respect be paid to the recent dead. The autobiography of Gibbon, attached to his Posthumous Works edited by Lord Sheffield, has been perhaps the most popular production, of its kind, of modern times. It is winning in an unusual degree. The periods flow with a sort of liquid cadence. The facts are beautifully brought together, and ingeniously argued upon; and the life of a studious Recluse has something about it of the air of a romantic Adventurer. This is attributable to the charm—the polish—the harmony of the style. But the autobiography of Gibbon is, in fact, the consummation of Art: and never were pages more determinedly and more elaborately written for the admiration of posterity.

  Read Gibbon’s autobiography again; it rouses me like a bugle.

  The most imposing of domestic narratives, the model of dignified detail.

  English literature is rich in autobiography. It has, indeed, no tale so deep and subtle as that which is told in the “Confessions of St. Augustine.” It has no such complete and unreserved unbosoming of a life as is given by the strange Italian, Benvenuto Cellini, who is the prince of unconcealment. But there is hardly any self-told life in any language which is more attractive than the autobiography of Edward Gibbon, in which he recounts the story of his own career in the same stately, pure prose in which he narrates the “Decline and Fall of Rome.” It must have needed a great faith in a man’s self to write those sonorous pages. Two passages in them have passed into the history of man. One is that in which he describes how, in Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as he sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started in his mind. The other is the passage in which the great historian records how, on the night of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, he wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house at Lausanne, and how then, laying down his pen, he “took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commanded a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains.” The story is all very solemn and exalted. It is full of the feeling that the beginning and ending of a great literary work is as great an achievement as the foundation and completion of an empire—as worthy of record and of honor; and as we read we feel so too.

  He had written a magnificent history of the Roman Empire. It remained to write the history of the historian. Accordingly we have the autobiography. These two immortal works act and react upon one another; the history sends us to the autobiography, and the autobiography returns us to the history…. He made six different sketches of the autobiography. It is a most studied performance, and may be boldly pronounced perfect.

  Lord Sheffield executed his editorial task with extreme judgment, singular ingenuity, but remarkable freedom…. Quite a third of the whole manuscript is omitted, and many of the most piquant passages that Gibbon ever wrote were suppressed by the caution or the delicacy of his editor and his family. The result is a problem of singular literary interest. A piece, most elaborately composed by one of the greatest writers who ever used our language, an autobiography often pronounced to be the best we possess, is now proved to be in no sense the simple work of that illustrious pen, but to have been dexterously pieced together out of seven fragmentary sketches and adapted into a single and coherent narrative.

  It is one of the best specimens of self-portraiture in the language, reflecting with pellucid clearness both the life and character, the merits and defects, of its author.

  All critics agree that Gibbon’s autobiography is a model in its way.

  Gibbon’s miscellaneous work, both in English and French, is not inconsiderable, and it displays his peculiar characteristics; but the only piece of distinct literary importance is his “Autobiography.” This, upon which he seems to have amused himself by spending much pains, was left unsettled for press. Edited with singular judgment and success under the care of his intimate friend and literary executor Lord Sheffield, it has been for three generations one of the favourite things of its kind with all good judges, and is likely to continue so in the textus receptus, for which the fussy fidelity of modern literary methods will probably try in vain to substitute a chaos of rough drafts.

  If, as Johnson said, there had been only three books “written by man that were wished longer by their readers,” the eighteenth century was not to draw to its close without seeing a fourth added. With “Don Quixote,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and “Robinson Crusoe,” the “Autobiography of Edward Gibbon” was henceforth to rank as “a work whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.” It is indeed so short that it can be read by the light of a single pair of candles; it is so interesting in its subject, and so alluring in its turns of thought and its style, that in a second and a third reading it gives scarcely less pleasure than in the first. Among the books in which men have told the story of their own lives it stands in the front rank.

Letters and Miscellaneous Works, 1796–1897

  I shall thus give more satisfaction, by employing the language of Mr. Gibbon, instead of my own; and the public will see him in a new and admirable light, as a writer of letters. By the insertion of a few occasional sentences, I shall obviate the disadvantages that are apt to arise from an interrupted narration. A prejudiced or a fastidious critic may condemn, perhaps, some parts of the letters as trivial; but many readers, I flatter myself, will be gratified by discovering, even in these, my friend’s affectionate feelings, and his character in familiar life. His letters in general bear a strong resemblance to the style and turn of his conversation: the characteristics of which were vivacity, elegance, and precision, with knowledge astonishingly extensive and correct. He never ceased to be instructive and entertaining; and in general there was a vein of pleasantry in his conversation which prevented its becoming languid, even during a residence of many months with a family in the country. It has been supposed that he always arranged what he intended to say, before he spoke; his quickness in conversation contradicts this notion: but it is very true, that before he sat down to write a note or letter, he completely arranged in his mind what he meant to express.

  On the style and spirit of Mr. Gibbon’s own letters it were vain to comment. They rank in the first class of epistolary composition, equally honourable to the head and heart of the writer. Ease, vigour, spirit, and the very soul of friendship pervade the whole. On the subject of religion, they maintained a general silence, which was obviously the effect of indifference; and on another subject they contain nothing that would put a Vestal to blush. On one or two occasions, however, enough is disclosed to shew, that with the proofs of Revelation, Gibbon rejected the probabilities of natural religion. Born with a constitution naturally incredulous, he had refined it into a systematic rejection of almost everything beyond the reach of the senses; and this state of the understanding, after the example of his school, he dignified with the name of Philosophy.

  I have finished reading the first volume of “Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works,” published by Lord Sheffield. Of mere worldly production, it is the most interesting that I have read for many years, more especially Gibbon’s own memoirs of himself. I have been acquainted with Lord Sheffield above forty years, and more than once met Gibbon at his house; and, if I remember rightly, the first time I was at Sheffield Place, which, I think, was in 1770, being invited by him on my advertising the intentions of the Eastern tour…. But, alas! the whole volume has not one word of Christianity in it, though many which mark the infidelity of the whole gang. Lord Sheffield never had a grain of religion, and his intimate connections with Gibbon would alone account for it.

  His letters have the faults of his conversation; they are not easy or natural; all is constrained, all for effect. No one can suppose in reading them that a word would have been changed, had the writer known they were to be published the morning after he dispatched them, and had sent them to the printing-office instead of the post-office.

  If the Memoirs give us Gibbon in the full dress of a fine gentleman of letters, the correspondence reveals to us the man as he was known to his valet and his housekeeper. The letters have the ease and freshness of conversations with intimate friends, and, considering the character of the century in which they were written, they present one feature which deserves special notice. Only one short sentence has been omitted as too coarse to be printed. With this solitary exception, the reader knows the worst as well as the best of Gibbon, and there are scarcely a dozen phrases, scattered over 800 pages, which will offend good taste or good feeling.

  It is Gibbon’s letters that will most interest the reader. With very few exceptions, they were addressed to his father, his stepmother, and his friend Lord Sheffield. The character of the man shines in them all. As a son he was constantly dutiful, devoted, obedient, and sympathetic.

  Gibbon’s Letters may be said to derive more interest from him than he derives from them. They have not the audacious fun and commanding force of Byron’s, the full-blooded eloquence of Burns’s, the manly simplicity of Cowper’s, the profound humour and pathos of Carlyle’s. They are without the radiant geniality of Macaulay’s. They do not touch the high literary water-mark of Gray’s. They express the mundane sentiments of an earthly sage, in love, if the phrase may be pardoned, with peace and wealth. The secret of the charm which most of them undoubtedly have is that they reveal the inner homely side of the richest and most massive intellect which the eighteenth century produced. Gibbon was an indefatigable student, and so far as he could rise to enthusiasm, an enthusiastic admirer of Cicero. Perhaps the rather monotonous flow of the Ciceronian rhythm is too evident in his prose.

  But now that we have the intimate records of his daily life from youth to death in their original form, one wonders anew how so gigantic a work as the “Decline and Fall” was ever completed in about sixteen years amidst all the distractions of country squires, London gaieties, Parliamentary and official duties, interminable worries about his family and property, social scandals and importunate friends. In all these six hundred letters there is not very much about his studies and his writings, but a great deal about politics, society, and pecuniary cares. We are left to imagine for ourselves when the great scholar read, how he wrote, and why he never seemed to exchange a thought with any student of his own calibre of learning. One would think he was a man of fashion, a dilettante man of the world, a wit, a bon vivant, and a collector of high-life gossip. All this makes the zest of his “Letters,” which at times seem to recall to us the charm of a Boswell or a Horace Walpole. The world can now have all the fun, as Maria Holroyd said. But it leaves us with the puzzle even darker than before—how did Gibbon, whose whole epoch of really systematic study hardly lasted twenty-five years, acquire so stupendous a body of exact and curious learning?

General

  I prefer your style, as an historian, to that of the two most renowned writers of history the present day has seen. That you may not suspect me of having said more than my real opinion will warrant, I will tell you why. In your style I see no affectation. In every line of theirs I see nothing else. They disgust me always, Robertson with his pomp and his strut, and Gibbon with his finical and French manners.

  Though his style is in general correct and elegant, he sometimes “draws out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.” In endeavouring to avoid vulgar terms he too frequently dignifies trifles, and clothes common thoughts in a splendid dress that would be rich enough for the noblest ideas. In short we are too often reminded of that great man, Mr. Prig, the auctioneer, whose manner was so inimitably fine that he had as much to say on a ribbon as on a Raphael.

  Heard of the death of Mr. Gibbon, the calumniator of the despised Nazarene, the derider of Christianity. Awful dispensation! He too was my acquaintance. Lord, I bless Thee, considering how much infidel acquaintance I have had, that my soul never came into their secret! How many souls have his writings polluted! Lord preserve others from their contagion!

  None of the cursed Gibbonian fine writing, so fine and composite!

  I hear Gibbon’s artificial style still commended by a few; but it is his matter which preserves him.

  His way of writing reminds one of those persons who never dare look you full in the face.

  There can be no gainsaying the sentence of this great judge. To have your name mentioned by Gibbon, is like having it written on the dome of St. Peter’s. Pilgrims from all the world admire and behold it.

  Gibbon, however excellent an authority for facts, knew nothing about philosophy, and cared less.

  Gibbon’s literary ambition was never pure. It was rather a longing for temporary distinction than a desire to become of use to his age and his fellow men. He sought fame rather as a means of personal advantage than for any great and noble purpose. Even his love for literature was never that high and honorable passion which filled all the nature of Hume, and he seems now, abandoning the common professions as unsuited to his habits, to have betaken himself to his studies as a means of self-aggrandizement, rather than as the source of purest satisfaction…. Gibbon had none of the qualities of a good biographer. His style, heavy and sonorous, was never suited to convey the delicate painting of character, or to unfold a simple tale of domestic life and manners…. Gibbon is of all the historians the most learned. His rivals, Hume and Robertson, by whose side he modestly refused to place himself, sink into insignificance before the vast range of his acquirements. But his learning is not his chief excellence; his highest was that he was suited exactly to his theme. By nature, by the inclination of his taste, by his fondness for learned disquisition, by his clear method, by his grand and powerful style, by his imagination rising with his subject, by his accuracy and honesty of research, by his untiring labor, and above all by his single and unfaltering devotion to one absorbing theme, he was fitted above all men to become the historian of the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” On this field he can never have a rival. There may, perhaps, be written a history of England, possessing greater research and purer honesty, if not the simple and perfect manner of Hume; but we can hope for no second “History of the Decline and Fall of Rome.” The subject is fully occupied, and like the Coliseum or the Pyramids, Gibbon’s vast work must stand alone for ever.

  These will bring him to Gibbon, who will take him in charge and convey him with abundant entertainment down—with notice of all remarkable objects on the way—through fourteen hundred years of time. He cannot spare Gibbon, with his vast reading, with such wit and continuity of mind, that, though never profound, his book is one of the conveniences of civilization, like the new railroad from ocean to ocean,—and I think, will be sure to send the reader to his “Memoirs of Himself,” and the “Extracts from my Journal,” and “Abstracts from my Readings,” which will spur the laziest scholar to emulation of his prodigious performance.

  He possessed in the largest measure the author’s first great requisites—a full command of words, and the power of striking out fresh combinations. His chief mechanical peculiarities are an excessive use of the abstract noun, and an unusually abundant employment of descriptive and suggestive epithets. This last peculiarity is the main secret of what is often described as the “pregnancy” of his style; it forms one of the principal arts of condensation, brevity, compression. He conveys incidentally, by a passing adjective, information that Macaulay would have set forth in a special sentence: from its form, the expression seems to take for granted that the reader is already acquainted with the facts referred to, but substantially in an allusive way it adds to the knowledge of the most uninitiated.

  His English the worst ever written by an educated Englishman.

  He is retrogressive in the matter of sentence-length. Only 10 per cent. of his sentences fall below the 15-mark. His stately and sonorous periods have a harmony of their own, but it is not paragraph harmony. His sentences have much proportion, his paragraphs little. We admire the comprehensive analysis of the discourse into chapters and paragraphs, but we do not quite feel that the paragraph is an organism. It is a well-defined cage in which the splendid sentence is confined. His movement is not rapid, but the sequence is in general sure. Demonstratives are numerous. When an introductory pronoun would be ambiguous he adds a noun, seldom a repeated one, but rather a synonym. Inversions, so frequent in Burke, are infrequent here. Conjunctions the author utterly despises, depending on the sheer inertia of his rolling sentences to carry the thought ahead. No other writer examined shows so small a list of sentence-connectives. The abandonment of them is Gibbon’s only contribution to the development; and it may be questioned if the contribution is a real or a permanent one, depending as it does on balance in the sentence.

  Just in so far as Gibbon was not so great a man as Johnson, does his style fall below Johnson’s level. The strain of affectation, the undue elaboration, the tone of artificial irony are always unduly marked in that style. But the massiveness of Gibbon’s intellect, the largeness of his grasp, his unfailing sense of literary proportion, the fearless vigour of his historical conception,—all these are too great to be buried beneath the affectation. He towers above all competitors as a giant amongst the pigmies.

  To those who insist upon extreme ornamentation, or extreme simplicity of style, Gibbon’s, of course, must be distasteful. But to those who judge a thing by its possession of its own excellences, and not by its lack of the excellences of others, it must always be the subject of an immense admiration. In the first place it is perfectly clear, and for all its stateliness so little fatiguing to the reader that true Gibbonians read it, by snatches or in long draughts, as others read a newspaper or a novel for mere pastime. Although full of irony and epigram it is never uneasily charged with either; and the narrative is never broken, the composition never interrupted for the sake of a flourish or a “point.” It may be thought by some to abuse antithesis of sense and balance of cadence; but I should say myself that there is fully sufficient variety in the sentences and in the paragraph arrangement to prevent this.