EDWARD GIBBON

(1737-1794)

BY W. E. H. LECKY

HE history of Gibbon has been described by John Stuart Mill

as the only eighteenth-century history that has withstood nineteenth-century criticism; and whatever objections modern critics may bring against some of its parts, the substantial justice of this verdict will scarcely be contested. No other history of that century has been so often reprinted, annotated, and discussed, or remains to the present day a capital authority on the great period of which it treats. As a composition it stands unchallenged and conspicuous among the masterpieces of English literature, while as a history it covers a space of more than twelve hundred years, including some of the most momentous events in the annals of mankind.

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Gibbon was born at Putney, Surrey, April 27th, 1737. Though his father was a member of Parliament and the owner of a moderate competence, the author of this great work was essentially a selfeducated man. Weak health and almost constant illness in early boyhood broke up his school life, which appears to have been fitfully and most imperfectly conducted,-withdrew him from boyish games, but also gave him, as it has given to many other shy and sedentary boys, an early and inveterate passion for reading. His reading, however, was very unlike that of an ordinary boy. He has given a graphic picture of the ardor with which, when he was only fourteen, he flung himself into serious but unguided study; which was at first purely desultory, but gradually contracted into historic lines, and soon concentrated itself mainly on that Oriental history which he was one day so brilliantly to illuminate. "Before I was sixteen,” he says, "I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks; and the same ardor led me to guess at the French of D'Herbelot, and to construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's 'Abulfaragius.»»

His health however gradually improved, and when he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, it might have been expected that a new period of intellectual development would have begun; but Oxford had at this time sunk to the lowest depth of stagnation, and to Gibbon it proved extremely uncongenial. He complained that he found no guidance, no stimulus, and no discipline, and that the fourteen