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.—MORISON, JAMES COTTER, 1878, Gibbon, (English Men of Letters), p. 77.

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.-FITZGERALD, PERCY, 1883, Kings and Queens of an Hour, vol. I, p. 340.

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 facade 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 twentyyears' work were written. Unfortunately, the oft-quoted passage describing that event assigns it to "a summerhouse 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. - BURTON, SIR RICHARD F., 1889, Letters, Life by His Wife, vol. II, p. 371.

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 attitute to Christianity is the feature in his great work which has done most to dimish 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. -DUFF, SIR M. E. GRANT, 1894, Proceedings of the Gibbon Commemoration, Nov. 15, p. 15.

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 menworries 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 Lali which breathes through every line of these elaborate letters.-HARRISON, FREDERIC, 1894, Gibbon Commemoration, Nov.15.

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. HOLDEN, R., 1895, Gibbon as a Soldier, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 71, p. 38.

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.-BAILEY, J. C., 1897, The Man Gibbon, Fortnightly Review, vol. 67, p. 455.

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.-BOURNE, EDWARD GAYLORD, 1897, American Historical Revie vol. 2, p. 728.

He was 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.-LECKY, WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE, 1897, Library of the World's Best Literature, ed. Warner, vol. XI, p. 6278.

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.-ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES, 1763, Letter to Moulton.

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 in

spired; 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.GIBBON, EDWARD, C 1789, Autobiography, Memoir C., ed. Murray, p. 238.

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 obeissant 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.-SUARD, M., 1828, Life.

His love affair-his first and only onewas 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 ing his disapprobation, he surrendered very profound. On his father's expressthe object of his affection with as little resistance as he had surrendered his Romanism.-ROGERS, HENRY, 1857, Encyclopædia Britannica, Eighth edition.

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.BLACK, J. SUTHERLAND, 1879, Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth edition.

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 fellowsit is a literary curiosity-a perennial jokebut 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.LYTTLETON, EDITH, 1897, The Sequel to Gibbon's Love-Story, National Review, vol. 29, p. 904.

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. STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1898, Studies of a Biographer, vol. I, p. 169.

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.-WALPOLE, HORACE, 1776, To Edward Gibbon, Feb. 14; Letters, ed. Cunningham, vol. VI, p. 308.

As I ran through your volume of His tory 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. -HUME, DAVID, 1776, Letter to Edward Gibbon, March 18.

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 insinuations 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.-GREEN, THOMAS, 1779-1810, Diary of a Lover of Literature.

Another d-mn'd thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! eh! Mr. Gibbon? - GLOUCESTER, DUKE OF?, 1781, On Presentation of the Second Volume of the Decline and Fall.

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.ROBERTSON, WILLIAM, 1781, Letter to Edward Gibbon, May 12.

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, Sabinus and a Ricimer, Duke of the Paland so little harmony between a Consul ace, 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.

WALPOLE, HORACE, 1781, To Rev. William Mason, Jan. 27; Letters, ed. Cunningham, vol. VII, p. 505.

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. PRIESTLEY, JOSEPH,

1782, A Letter to Edward Gibbon on the Decline and Fall.

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.-GIBBON, EDWARD, 1788, Private Letters, vol. II, p. 170.

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. SMITH, ADAM, 1788, Letter to Edward Gibbon, Dec. 10.

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.-BEATTIE, JAMES, 1788, Letter to Duchess of Gordon, November 20th; Works, ed. Forbes, vol. III, p. 56.

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.-WALPOLE, HORACE, 1788, To Thomas Barrett, June 5; Letters, ed. Cunningham, vol. IX, p. 126.

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.-PORSON, RICHARD, 1790, Letters to Archdeacon Travis, Preface.

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 summerhouse 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