receiving the universal testimonies of respect, due no less to her character than to her fortune.

With regard to his moral qualities, some may perhaps be curious to know what he himself thought of them at the age of twenty-five. The following are the reflections which he penned in his Journal on the day when he entered on his twenty-sixth year. "It appeared to me," he said, " upon this inquiry, that my character was virtuous, incapable of a base action, and formed for generous ones, yet proud, violent, and disagreeable in society. Wit, I have none. My imagination is rather strong than pleasing; my memory both capacious and retentive. The shining qualities of my understanding are extensiveness and penetration; but I want both quickness and exactness."

By the evidence afforded in Gibbon's works, their readers will appreciate the opinion which he has here pronounced of his mind. From that opinion we may form this idea of his moral character. If a man in self-communion bears witness to himself that he is virtuous, though he may err in the extent which he accords to the duties of virtue, still he proves thereby that he feels disposed to perform those duties to the full of such accorded extent. Such a man, beyond all doubt, is, and always will be, upright, because he takes pleasure in being so. The pride and arrogance, of which he accused himself, were never observed by those who knew him at later periods. His anxiety to overcome such tendencies may have made them more perceptible to himself than they were to others; they may, too, have yielded to reason, or subsided in the calm of conscious success. His manners in society were not indeed formed by that modesty which forgets self, nor by that amiable politeness which gives way to others and puts self aside; but his self-love never took any repulsive form Anxious to succeed and please, he coveted attention, and obtained it without difficulty, by a conversation, animated, spirited, and full of matter. His tone might be sometimes keen, but it was edged less by an offensive ambition of dictating to others, than by a confidence in himself, which was justified by his resources and his success. But it did not betray him into rapid or impetuous speech. His great conversational defect was a studied arrangement of his words, which never allowed him to utter one not worth hearing. This might have been attributed to some difficulty in speaking fluently a foreign language, if his friend, Lord Sheffield, while defending him against this charge of arranging what he intended to say before he spoke, had not admitted, that even before writing a note or a letter, he completely arranged in his mind what he meant to express." The same appears to have been the case also in whatever he wrote, In his Letters on Literature, Dr. Gregory says: "Gibbon composed while walking in his room, and never penned a sentence

till he had perfectly constructed and arranged it in his head." French, too, was as familiar to him as English. He had spoken no other at Lausanne, and it there became vernacular to him. None would have suspected that it was not his mother-tongue, had he not betrayed himself by a forced accent, by some trips of pronunciation, and harsh tones: these offended ears accustomed from infancy to softer inflections, and detracted from the pleasure of hearing him talk.

The first work which he published, three years after his return to London, was in French. This was his Essai sur l'Etude de la Littérature." Well written and replete with excellent criticism, it was still little read in England. In France, men of letters regarded it as the production of one equal to higher undertakings; on men of the world it made little impression, since they are rarely satisfied with any work from which they can obtain no other positive result, than that it had a talented author. It was, however, in the fashionable world, that Gibbon was ambitious to succeed. Society had always many charms for him. Hearts that have no strong attachment or deep feeling, are won by it; for them, existence is sufficiently animated by that stirring intercommunication of impulses and ideas which leave them no time to discover how little sincerity aud real warmth of heart there is in general society. Gibbon knew that the first qualification for moving gracefully in the world is, to be a man of fashion, and therefore, always desired to be considered as such. This he carried sometimes to the extreme of the weakest vanity. In the account which he gives of his interview with the Duc de Nivernois, he complains, that though politely received, he was treated rather as a man of letters than as a man of fashion, in consequence of the terms in which his letter of introduction was written by Dr. Maty. In 1763, two years after the publication of his Essai sur l'Etude de la Littérature," he again left England to travel, but under circumstances very different from those in which he quitted its shores ten years before. Preceded by a rising reputation. he arrived at Paris. For a man of Gibbon's character, that city, as it then was, would have been a happy abode. He passed three months there, frequenting the circles most suited to him, and lamented that the time so soon expired. "Had I been rich and independent." he said, "I should have prolonged and, perhaps, have fixed my residence at Paris." But Italy awaited him. There it was, that, from amidst many projected works, the plans of which had long occupied his mind, successively adopted and rejected, first arose the idea of that which afterwards employed so large a portion of his life, and established his renown.

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"It was at Rome," he says, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea

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of writing the Decline and Fall of the city first started to my mind. But," he adds, my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city, rather than of the empire; and though my reading and reflections began to point towards that object, some years elapsed, and several avocations intervened, before I was seriously engaged in the execution of that laborious work." Never losing sight, yet never taking a nearer view, of the subject, which" cultivated at an awful distance," Gibbon conhe says he ceived and even commenced other historical works. only compositions which he completed and published in this interval, were some critical and occasional pieces. With an eye always fixed on the object to which his efforts tended, he approached it slowly; and without doubt, the original idea remained deeply impressed on his mind.

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But the

Those who study his picture of the Roman Empire, under Augustus and his first successors, must feel that it was inspired by the sight of Rome, of "the Eternal City," into which Gibbon owns that he entered with such emotions as caused him “a sleepless night." Perhaps, too, they may find, in the impressions of the moment, when the work was first conceived, one cause of Gibbon's hostility to Christianity. Deliberately to have projected this, would have been inconsistent with his character, which was in no degree susceptible of party-spirit; nor would it have been less discrepant with that moderation of idea and sentiment which in all things, whether individual or universal, placed the good and the evil side by side with each other. But, always under the influence of that first impression while writing his "History of the Decline of the Empire," Gibbon saw in Christianity only the institution, which had substituted the vespers and processions of bare-footed monks, for the magnificent ceremonial of Jupiter's worship, and the august triumphs of the Capitol.*

Relinquishing, at length, all other pursuits, he gave himself up wholly to his great work. Study and reading opened to him a wider horizon, and insensibly expanded his first plan. The death of his father, and the settlement of his affairs, the duties of the House of Commons, of which he had become a member, and the dissipations of a London life, prolonged, but did not break off his labours; they delayed till 1776 the publication of the first quarto volume, or first two in octavo, of the work, on which he had been employed. Its success was prodigious. Two or three editions were exhausted, and had established the author's reputation,

This ingenious conjecture of M. Guizot is scarcely confirmed by Gibbon himself, who said in his Memoirs: "As I believed and as I still believe, that the propagation of the Gospel and the triumph of the Church are inseparably connected with the decline of the Roman monarchy, I weighed the causes and effects of the revolution, and contrasted the narratives and apologies of the Christians themselves, with the glances of candour or enmity, which the Pagans have cast on the rising sects." This view of the subject goes far beyond a mere change of forms.-ED.

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before criticism had time to raise its voice. This, however, made itself heard at last. All the religious party, so numerous and respected in England, united to condemn the last two chapters of the volume, the 15th and 16th of the work, which contain the history of the establishment of Christianity. Many and loud were their protests. To Gibbon these were unexpected and startling. "Had I believed," he said in his Memoirs, that the majority of English readers were so fondly attached even to the name and shadow of Christianity, had I foreseen that the pious, the timid, and the prudent, would feel, or affect to feel, with such exquisite sensibility, I might, perhaps, have softened the two invidious chapters, which would create many enemies and conciliate few friends."

This surprise seems to announce a mind so prepossessed by its own ideas, as to have no perception of those of others. Such prepossession may be an incontestable evidence of sincerity; but it raises a suspicion that the judgment is neither unprejudiced nor accurate. Where prejudice prevails, honesty cannot be perfectly sound. There may be no fixed design to mislead others; but there is self-deceit. In this frame of mind, a writer, to uphold what he considers to be truth, has recourse to little liberties, which he either avows not to himself, or professes to regard as unworthy of notice; and his passions overcome his scruples, by exaggerating the importance of their victory. Thus it was, no doubt, that Gibbon found nothing in the history of Christianity, but what favoured the opinions which he had formed before he had strictly examined the facts. The alteration of some passages, which he quoted, whether curtailed designedly, or negligently read, furnished arms to his adversaries, by giving them reason to suspect him of dishonesty. The whole sacerdotal order was leagued against him. His most active opponents were rewarded by dignities and favours; ironically he congratulated himself on having given "a royal pension to Mr. Davies and collated Dr. Apthorp to an archiepiscopal living."* The pleasure of thus bantering adversaries, who had, in almost every instance, attacked him with more vehemence than discretion, compensated the first vexation of their attacks, and, perhaps, caused him to overlook the real wrongs, for which he had to reproach himself.

The new historian received from Hume and Robertson the most flattering testimonies of esteem; both of them were apprehensive that the two denounced chapters would injure the success of his work. The high opinion which they expressed of his talents, authorized Gibbon, while expressing the gratification afforded him by a letter received from Hume, to say modestly in his Memoirs : But I never presumed to accept a place in the or inadvertence, rendered this in French by "It

M. Guizot, through misconception fortune d'un archevêque."-ED.

Triumvirate of British historians." Hume, especially, was warm in his admiration of Gibbon's work, whose opinions on many subjects coincided with his own, and who, on his part, also placed the ability of Hume above that of Robertson. Whatever may be thought of this judgment, that of Hume will scarcely be admitted without some modification, when, in his letter to Gibbon, he praises "the dignity of his style." Dignity does not appear to me to be the character of Gibbon's style, which is epigrammatic generally, and more effective in pointedness than iL elevation. I subscribe more readily to the opinion of Robertson, who, after having done justice to the extent of his knowledge, to his researches and accuracy, commended his narrative as perspicuous and interesting, his style as elegant and forcible, and a very peculiar happiness in many of his expressions," although he thought some passages rather too laboured and others too quaint. The causes of this fault may be discovered in Gibbon's habit of composition, in the impediments which he had to avoid, and the models which he had preferred. His outset "Three times," he says, was laborious. "did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third;" and that he found it very difficult to "hit the middle tone, between a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation." We find him elsewhere stating, that when he wished to write, in French, a history of Switzerland, "he was conscious that his style, above prose and below poetry, degenerated into a verbose and turgid declamation." This he imputed to his "injudicious choice of a foreign language." Yet, in another part of his Memoirs, he owned that it was from a French work, Les Lettres Provinciales of Pascal, which he perused almost every year, that he "learned to manage the weapon of grave and temperate irony." In his Essai sur l'Etude de la Littérature, he added, that a desire to imitate Montesquieu, often exposed him to the danger of becoming obscure and expressing common-place thoughts "with a sententious and oracular brevity.' The two writers whoin he had always before him, to repress the natural inflation of a yet unformed style, were then Pascal and Montesquieu. To repress it within the compass required by his selected models, demanded vigorous efforts. Such are perceptible in his earlier chapters, before the style which he formed for himself became habitual. But as these efforts in time were rendered easier, so were they then more relaxed.

In his Memoirs, and in the advertisement prefixed to his last volumes, Gibbon congratulated himself on his acquired ease. Some may think that, in his concluding volumes, this ease was purchased at the expense of correctness. Accustomed to conquer his faults, he began to be less strict in watching them, and was sometimen betrayed into that declamatory strain which subEtitutes the convenient make-shift of a vague and sonorous