GIBBON.
The historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was born at Putney in Surrey, in May, 1737. He was the eldest son of Edward Gibbon, a gentleman of some fortune, and a strong attachment to Tory principles. His mother’s name was Porten. But in his Memoirs, written at the close of his life, he betrays no strong sense of gratitude or affection towards either of his parents; while he acknowledges with abundant warmth the most important obligations to his aunt, Catharine Porten. To her lessons he ascribes his “invincible love for reading;” to her care he attributes the very preservation of his precarious life; and he designates her, in the calmness of distant reflection, as the true mother both of his body and his mind.
From a private school he was removed to Westminster; from Westminster to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was admitted as a gentleman-commoner, April 3, 1752. About this time his constitution, hitherto extremely feeble, acquired a sudden vigour, which never deserted him during the rest of his life. At Oxford he made absolutely no proficiency in any branch of knowledge, or any useful accomplishment. “To the University of Oxford (he says) I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother.” Accordingly he exhausts the severity of his sarcasm, both upon the system which was there established, and upon the men who administered it, without honestly inquiring whether he had laboured to extract, even from an imperfect system, the modicum of advantage which it was capable of yielding. But his recollections of Oxford were embittered by his subsequent contest with some of the clergy, and the hostiletreatment which he sustained at their hands; and the principles which he embraced in after life would have rendered him equally intolerant of any institution, standing on a religious foundation.
During his residence at Oxford, and at the usually unreflecting age of sixteen, he was converted to the Roman Catholic faith. He was first stirred to thought by the “bold criticism” of Middleton. He then “swallowed” the miracles of the Basils, the Chrysostoms, and other Fathers of the Church; and Bossuet achieved the conquest by the ‘Exposition of the Catholic Doctrine,’ and the ‘History of the Variations.’ And then he made his formal recantation before a Jesuit, named Baker, one of the Chaplains of the Sardinian Ambassador. In his retrospect upon this the most singular incident in the history of his mind, Gibbon might indeed profess to be proud of his change of opinion, as a sacrifice of interest to principle; but he probably conveys his habitual reflections more faithfully when he says, with his usual strength: “To my present feelings it seems incredible that I should ever believe that I believed in transubstantiation.”
He was immediately removed from Oxford, and placed under the care of a tutor at Lausanne. To a Swiss pastor, named Pavillard, was entrusted the delicate office of disentangling the mind of Gibbon from the intricacies of popery, and leading it back again into the pale of the Protestant Church. He succeeded: by seasonable arguments, and judicious admonitions, aided perhaps by the influence of a mild and benevolent character, he prevailed over the hasty caprice of a powerful intellect; and on Christmas-day, in 1754, Gibbon publicly renounced his adopted creed, and received the sacrament in the church of Lausanne. There is no reason to suspect the sincerity of this recantation, or to believe that he had yet fallen either into scepticism, or indifference.
He remained, in the whole, five years at Lausanne, and by his “serious character, and soft and quiet manners” he won the respect and affection of his tutor. During this time he laid the foundation of those studious habits, which formed the pride and happiness of his later life. Besides a passionate devotion to French literature and great diligence in forming a correct style in that language, he read, according to a regular system, the whole of the Latin Classics; he acquired the rudiments of Greek; and gained some insight into the principles of mathematics. But this last pursuit he never afterwards renewed; though he would lead us to believe that a readiness in calculation was the talent of his childhood, and that nature had qualified him to succeed in that branch of application.
He was presented to Voltaire, at that time resident at Geneva, without being distinguished by any particular mark of his attention. Yet he was a constant spectator at the poet’s little theatre, when he recited his own verses, and represented his own characters. It was likewise during this period that he formed an attachment for Madlle. Curchod, the daughter of a Swiss pastor, and afterwards the wife of Necker. The attachment appears to have been mutual; but his father prevented the marriage, and he remained faithful during the rest of his life to the memory of his youthful passion.
He returned to England in May, 1758, and remained there, with a short interval, for the twenty-five following years. His father’s residence was Buriton, near Petersfield; and, as he passed some time there, he became in 1760 a captain in the South Hampshire militia: an incident which might well pass unnoticed in the life of an ordinary person, but which in this case is dignified by the value which Gibbon himself has set upon it, and the conviction long afterwards expressed by him—“that the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers was not useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.”
On the disbanding of the militia, in the beginning of 1763, he spent two or three months at Paris, from which he proceeded on his second visit to Lausanne. Here he remained for a year, occupied in various studies, especially that of geography; and then passed, in the spring of 1764, into Italy. An ardent curiosity, nourished by reading and meditation, carried him directly to Rome; and the emotions with which he approached and entered the Eternal City were, after an interval of twenty-five years, still fresh in his memory. “After a sleepless night I trod, with a lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Cæsar fell, was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed, before I could descend to a cool or minute investigation.” His enthusiasm gradually gave way to deep and philosophical reflection, not uninfluenced either by the scenes which surrounded him, or by the recollection of the past. He became curious to trace the links which connected what he had read with what he saw; and it was when he was musing in the ruins of the Capitol,while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the City first started to his mind. This idea, once suggested, was never abandoned; and though other avocations prevented him from immediately pursuing it, it remained immovably fixed in his mind, and was the object of his perpetual meditation.
Without claiming any precocity of genius, Gibbon describes his mind as having opened considerably in his twelfth year. He had an early and indiscriminate appetite for books, and had indulged it in much desultory reading even before his admission at Oxford. A preference for historical works already displayed itself. His attention was fixed by the accounts of Mahomet and the Saracens; and the ‘Continuation of Echard’s Roman History’ first introduced him to the successors of Constantine. But, as his studies had been directed only by his own curiosity, his information was partial and ill-digested, and more useful as the result of literary habits, than as a fund for the use of his maturer years. Yet even thus early he made an essay at historical composition; and the subject showed that his mind had been chiefly attracted by the records of the Eastern World. The ‘Age of Sesostris,’ suggested perhaps by the ‘Siècle de Louis XIV.,’ then new and popular, was the first production of the pen of Gibbon. But this attempt was presently abandoned; though the unfinished manuscript remained for twenty years at the bottom of a drawer, and was not finally destroyed till 1772. His first publication was an ‘Essai sur l’Etude de la Littérature.’ It appeared in the spring of 1761, and was written in French, through a secret ambition in the author to acquire a peculiar celebrity, as a successful writer in a foreign language. This dream, however, was not realised. The ‘Essai’ was received with little enthusiasm abroad, with absolute indifference at home. Nor, indeed, were its intrinsic merits, clouded as they were by an obscure and abrupt style, sufficient to establish the author’s claims to the reputation which he sought.
Gibbon then turned his thoughts to some historical subject; and among many that attracted him were The Life of Raleigh; The History of the Liberty of the Swiss; and that of the Republic of Florence under the House of Medici. But he appears not to have engaged seriously in any one of these, at the time of his second departure for the Continent. To the second of those subjects however he afterwards returned, again discarding his native tongue, for the use of what he deemed a more general language. He wrote his ‘History of Switzerland’ in Latin. But having caused a specimen of it to be recited in a society of literary foreigners in London, at which he was himself present, though not known as the author, he had the affliction of hearing its condemnation. He submitted to the sentence, and delivered the imperfect sheets to the flames. And it was in the same year (October 24, 1767) that Hume addressed to him a very sensible exhortation to confine his compositions to hisown language, as that which was destined, through conquest and colonization, to the most general prevalence in after-ages. It was worthy of the riper wisdom and genius of Hume, to direct the rising candidate for historical fame into the path wherein alone it was possible to find it; and to enlarge his views, to teach him to look beyond the actual and transient condition of the world, and fix his eyes upon the generations that were to come.
Gibbon mentions three works as having more than any others contributed to the formation of his mind: ‘Pascal’s Provincial Letters;’ ‘The Life of Julian, by the Abbé Bletterie;’ and ‘Giannone’s History of Naples.’ Not one of them was English; he acknowledges no early obligations to the literature of his own country; in fact, those five years which usually decide the character of the rest of life were entirely passed abroad, in the study and perpetual use of foreign languages, and the imitation of foreign literature. It was not then wonderful that he should continue for some time longer to follow the first impulse. But repeated failures would doubtless have shown him the false position in which he stood, even without the seasonable admonition administered by the authority of Hume.
Gibbon returned immediately from Italy to England, and retired to the peaceful retreat of his family and his books. Yet the five years which followed were those on which he reflected with least satisfaction. He was dependent on his father’s generosity, he had no professional occupation for an active and ambitious mind, his very reading was somewhat desultory, and his whole energies were not yet devoted to one great object. He felt the absence of this; and it was ill supplied by his ‘Critical Observations on the 6th Book of the Æneid,’ or his attempt at the History of Switzerland. The death of his father, in 1770, placed him in possession of a moderate fortune and of entire independence; and then it was that he entered in good earnest on the ‘History of the Decline and Fall.’
In 1772 he settled in London, and obtained a seat in parliament for Liskeard. He adhered to the Government of Lord North, and by “many a sincere and silent vote” on the American question, supported the rights (as he says), though not perhaps the interests, of the mother country. As a senator, he acquired no distinction. A mixture of timidity and pride, a want of physical energy and of that ready vigour of mind, which fits men for public life, better than habits of the sagest meditation, disqualified him for political polemics: and even his general opinions seem at that time to have been so little fixed, that when at last he accepted a place at the Board of Trade under LordNorth, he gave surprise and offence to the opposition, who considered him as on their side. He fell with his patron; and his natural distaste for politics being probably increased by this and a subsequent disappointment, he retired for ever from the disquietudes of public life.
During his residence in London, he published the first three volumes of his History. On the composition of the first he had bestowed peculiar care, and its reception repaid his labours. A very laudatory letter, which he received from Hume, foretold the attacks to which the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters would subject him; for which he was entirely unprepared. And in his subsequent reflections on this subject, he admits that, had he foreseen the offence they were calculated to give, he “might perhaps have softened the two invidious chapters, which would create many enemies, and conciliate few friends.” Among his ecclesiastical opponents, by far the most eloquent and powerful was Bishop Watson, whose high-minded hostility deserved the respect bestowed on it by the historian himself, in his celebrated Vindication.
The second and third volumes were not so favourably received as the first; the author himself admits that they are possibly too minute and prolix: and the work made as yet no progress on the continent. But he persevered with increasing zeal in the labour which was now become necessary to his happiness; and that he might the more exclusively devote himself to it, he returned to establish himself at Lausanne, in 1783, nearly twenty years after his second visit to that place. He made it his residence until 1793, and there composed the last three volumes of his history: and he has carefully recorded, that it was on the 27th of June, 1787, between eleven and twelve at night, in a summer-house in his garden, that he wrote the last sentence. His fourth volume cost him rather more than two years, his fifth rather less, and the sixth little more than one. It had been his habit, till quite at last, to close his studies with the day, and commonly begin them with the morning, and the result of this late change is observed in the increased rapidity with which the latter portion of the work was written. He visited England to superintend the printing of these three volumes, and published them together on his fifty-first birthday.
He lived only five years and seven months longer: and his premature death (for he died during the full vigour of all his faculties and talents) may be ascribed to his own singular improvidence. He had been afflicted above thirty years by a disease requiring surgical assistance, which he altogether neglected till it became incurable. He diedJanuary 16, 1794, at the house of his friend Lord Sheffield, and was buried in his lordship’s family vault at Fletching in Sussex.
Of his miscellaneous works, the following are some of the most remarkable:—
Historical.‘Outlines of the History of the World (written between 1755 and 1763); ‘Mémoire sur la Monarchie des Mèdes’ (do.); ‘Introduction à l’Histoire Générale de la République des Suisses’ (1767); ‘Antiquities of the House of Brunswick’ (1790).
Classical and critical.‘Essai sur l’Etude de la Littérature’; ‘Nomina Gentesque Antiquæ Italiæ’ (1763 and 1764); ‘Remarques sur les Ouvrages et sur le Caractère de Salluste, Jules César, Cornèle Nepos, Tite Live, &c.’; ‘Critical Observations on the Design of the 6th Book of the Æneid’ (1770); ‘Vindication of the History of the Decline and Fall.’
Miscellaneous.‘Mémoire Justicatif;’ ‘Principes des Poids, des Monnoies, et des Mesures des Anciens’ (1759); and ‘Dissertation sur les anciennes Mesures du Bas Empire’; ‘Selections from theExtraits raisonnés de mes Lectures, and from theRecueil de mes Observations’ (from 1754 to 1764); ‘Remarks on Blackstone’s Commentaries’ (1770). These, and many more than these, were the subjects to which he applied his extensive erudition—with more or less success, but never without throwing some light on whatever he undertook to treat.