John Bagnell Bury

“ The ministry of Lord North, however, was tottering, and soon after fell; the Board of Trade was abolished by the passing of Burke’s bill in 1782, and Gibbon’s salary vanished with it—no trifle, for his expenditure had been for three years on a scale somewhat disproportionate to his private fortune. He did not like to depend on statesmen’s promises, which are proverbially uncertain of fulfilment; he as little liked to retrench; and he was wearied of parliament, where he had never given any but silent votes. ”

“ Having sold all his property except his library—to him equally a necessary and a luxury—Gibbon repaired to Lausanne in September 1783, and took up his abode with his early friend Deyverdun, now a resident there. Perfectly free from every engagement but those which his own tastes imposed, easy in his circumstances, commanding just as much society, and that as select, as he pleased, with the noblest scenery spread out at his feet, no situation can be imagined more favourable for the prosecution of his literary enterprise ”

“ He was a son of the 18th century; he had studied with sympathy Locke and Montesquieu; no one appreciated more keenly than he did political liberty and the freedom of an Englishman. This is illustrated by his love of Switzerland, his intense interest in the fortunes of that country, his design of writing “The History of the Liberty of the Swiss”—a theme, he says “from which the dullest stranger would catch fire.” Such views and sentiments are incompatible with the idealization of a benevolent despotism. Yet in this matter Gibbon has been grossly misapprehended and misrepresented. ”

“ Thus the later part of the Decline and Fall, while the narrative of certain episodes will always be read with profit, does not convey a true idea of the history of the empire or of its significance in the history of Europe. It must be added that the pages on the Slavonic peoples and their relations to the empire are conspicuously insufficient; but it must be taken into account that it was not till many years after Gibbon’s death that Slavonic history began to receive due attention, in consequence of the rise of competent scholars among the Slavs themselves. ”

“ He points out that under this benevolent despotism, though men might be happy, their happiness was unstable, because it depended on the character of a single man; and the highest praise he can give to those virtuous princes is that they “deserved the honour of restoring the republic, had the Romans of their days been capable of a rational freedom.” The criterion by which Gibbon judged civilization and progress was the measure in which the happiness of men is secured, and of that happiness he considered political freedom an essential condition. ”

“ At this early period he seems already to have adopted in some degree the plan of study he followed in after life and recommended in his Essai sur l’étude—that is, of letting his subject rather than his author determine his course, of suspending the perusal of a book to reflect, and to compare the statements with those of other authors—so that he often read portions of many volumes while mastering one.
Towards his sixteenth year he tell us “nature displayed in his favour her mysterious energies,” and all his infirmities suddenly vanished. ”

“ GIBBON, EDWARD (1737–1794) , English historian, was descended, he tells us in his autobiography, from a Kentish family of considerable antiquity; among his remoter ancestors he reckons the lord high treasurer Fiennes, Lord Say and Sele, whom Shakespeare has immortalized in his Henry VI. His grandfather was a man of ability, an enterprising merchant of London, one of the commissioners of customs under the Tory ministry during the last four years of Queen Anne, and, in the judgment of Lord Bolingbroke, as deeply versed in the “commerce and finances of England” as any man of his time. ”

“ He was better skilled in investigating the past than in divining the future. While Burke and Fox and so many great statesmen proclaimed the consequences of the collision with America, Gibbon saw nothing but colonies in rebellion, and a paternal government justly incensed. His silent votes were all given on that hypothesis. In a similar manner, while he abhorred the French Revolution when it came, he seems to have had no apprehension, like Chesterfield, Burke, or even Horace Walpole, of its approach ”

“ My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to affect. But at the distance of twenty-five years I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the Eternal City. ”

“ No, indeed.’ That admiration for an empire of more than two hundred millions of men, where not one had the right to call himself free; that effeminate philosophy which has more praise for luxury and pleasures than for all the virtues; that style always elegant and never energetic, reveal at the most the elector of Hanover’s slave.” This criticism is based on a perverse misreading of the historian’s observations on the age of Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines. ”

“ The account of the causes of the expansion of Christianity is chiefly to be criticized for its omissions. There were a number of important contributory conditions (enumerated in Harnack’s Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums) which Gibbon did not take into account. He rightly insisted on the facilities of communication created by the Roman empire, but did not emphasize the diffusion of Judaism. And he did not realize the importance of the kinship between Christian doctrine and Hellenistic syncretism, which helped to promote the reception of Christianity. ”

“ Hesitating for some time between the revolutions of Florence and those of Switzerland, he consulted M. Deyverdun, a young Swiss with whom he had formed a close and intimate friendship during his first residence at Lausanne, and finally decided in favour of the land which was his “friend’s by birth” and “his own by adoption.” He executed the first book in French; it was read (in 1767) , as an anonymous production, before a literary society of foreigners in London, and condemned. Gibbon sat and listened unobserved to their strictures. ”

“ But Gibbon’s friends in a few weeks discovered that the new tutor preferred the pleasures of London to the instruction of his pupils, and in this perplexity decided to send him prematurely to Oxford, where he was matriculated as a gentleman commoner of Magdalen College, 3rd April 1752. According to his own testimony he arrived at the university “with a stock of information which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy might be ashamed.” ”

“ 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. During the remainder of his residence at Lausanne he had good reason to “indulge his dream of felicity” ”

“ In as far as regards the instructor and guide thus selected, a more fortunate choice could scarcely have been made. From the testimony of his pupil, and the still more conclusive evidence of his own correspondence with the father, Pavilliard seems to have been a man of singular good sense, temper and tact. At the outset, indeed, there was one considerable obstacle to the free intercourse of tutor and pupil: M. Pavilliard appears to have known little of English, and young Gibbon knew practically nothing of French. But this difficulty was soon removed by the pupil’s diligence ”

“ Two years before the publication of this first volume Gibbon was elected member of parliament for Liskeard (1774) . His political duties did not suspend his prosecution of his history, except on one occasion, and for a little while, in 1779, when he undertook, on behalf of the ministry, a task which, if well performed, was also, it must be added, well rewarded. The French government had issued a manifesto preparatory to a declaration of war, and Gibbon was solicited by Chancellor Thurlow and Lord Weymouth, secretary of state, to answer it. ”

“ It is hardly fair perhaps to add a reference to Suard’s highly-coloured description of the short Silenus-like figure, not more than 56 in. in height, the slim legs, the large turned-in feet, the shrill piercing voice; but almost every one will remember, from Croker’s Boswell, Colman’s account of the great historian “tapping his snuff-box, smirking and smiling, and rounding his periods” from that mellifluous mouth. It has already been seen that Gibbon’s early ailments all left him on the approach of manhood ”

“ Some time before the publication of the essay, Gibbon had entered a new and, one might suppose, a very uncongenial scene of life. In an hour of patriotic ardour he became (June 12, 1759) a captain in the Hampshire militia, and for more than two years (May 10, 1760, to December 23, 1762) led a wandering life of “military servitude.” Hampshire, Kent, Wiltshire and Dorsetshire formed the successive theatres of what he calls his “bloodless and inglorious campaigns.” He complains of the busy idleness in which his time was spent ”

“ Since he wrote, new authorities have been discovered or rendered accessible; works in Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Armenian, Syriac, Arabic and other languages, which he was unable to consult, have been published. Again, many of the authorities which he used have been edited in superior texts. The relative weights of the sources have been more nicely determined by critical investigation. Archaeology has become a science. In the immense region which Gibbon surveyed there is hardly a section which has not been submitted to the microscopic examination of specialists. ”

“ He advised him to addict himself to an assiduous study of the more idiomatic English writers, such as Swift and Addison—with a view to unlearn his foreign idiom and recover his half-forgotten vernacular—a task, however, which he never perfectly accomplished. Much as he admired these writers, Hume and Robertson were still greater favourites, as well from their subject as for their style. ”

“ I began to study algebra under M. de Traytorrens, went through the elements of algebra and geometry, and the three first books of the Marquis de l’Hôpital’s Conic Sections. I also read Tibullus, Catullus, Propertius, Horace (with Dacier’s and Torrentius’s notes) , Virgil, Ovid’s Epistles, with Meziriac’s commentary, the Ars amandi and the Elegies; likewise the Augustus and Tiberius of Suetonius, and a Latin translation of Dion Cassius from the death of Julius Caesar to the death of Augustus. ”

“ Under the new influences which were brought to bear on him, he in less than two years resumed his Protestantism. “He is willing,” he says, to allow M. Pavilliard a “handsome share in his reconversion,” though he maintains, and no doubt rightly, that it was principally due “to his own solitary reflections.” ”

“ The militia was disbanded in 1762, and Gibbon joyfully shook off his bonds; but his literary projects were still to be postponed. Following his own wishes, though with his father’s consent, he had early in 1760 projected a Continental tour as the completion “of an English gentleman’s education.” This had been interrupted by the episode of the militia; now, however, he resumed his purpose, and left England in January 1763. ”

“ Gibbon, however, regrets that the style of his pamphlet was too acrimonious; and this regret, considering his antagonist’s slight claims to forbearance, is creditable to him. “I cannot forgive myself the contemptuous treatment of a man who, with all his faults, was entitled to my esteem ”

“ Here, however, fever made its appearance; and a removal to London (January 6, 1794) was considered imperative. Another operation brought him some relief; but a relapse occurred during the night of the 15th, and on the following day he peacefully breathed his last. His remains were laid in the burial place of the Sheffield family, Fletching, Sussex, where an epitaph by Dr Parr describes his character and work in the language at once of elegance, of moderation and of truth. ”

“ Gibbon’s literary art, the sustained excellence of his style, his piquant epigrams and his brilliant irony, would perhaps not secure for his work the immortality which it seems likely to enjoy, if it were not also marked by ecumenical grasp, extraordinary accuracy and striking acuteness of judgment. It is needless to say that in many points his statements and conclusions must now be corrected. He was never content with secondhand accounts when the primary sources were accessible; “I have always endeavoured,” he says, “to draw from the fountainhead ”

“ He was essentially humane; and it is worthy of notice that he was in favour of the abolition of slavery, while humane men like his friend Lord Sheffield, Dr Johnson and Boswell were opposed to the anti-slavery movement.
Bibliography.—Of the original quarto edition of The Decline and Fall, vol. i. appeared, as has already been stated, in 1776, vols. ii. and iii. in 1781 and vols. iv.-vi. (inscribed to Lord North) in 1788. In later editions vol. i. was considerably altered by the author; the others hardly at all. The number of modern reprints has been very considerable. ”