Gibbon, EDWARD, the greatest of English, perhaps of all historians, was born at Putney, near London, 27th April (8th May in new style) 1737, the eldest, and sole survivor beyond the years of infancy, of the seven children of Edward Gibbon and of Judith Porten. In Gibbon's case the task of the biographer has been made easy by his own autobiography, which comes down to within five years of his death, and which with all its exquisite art is perhaps the most veracious example of its class in the English tongue. Gibbon's parents were both of good family; his father, a country gentleman of a nature kindly but weak, and himself the son of an able financier who lost a fortune in the South Sea bubble, and made another before his death. The boy's childhood was sickly from a strange nervous affection, which contracted his legs alternately and caused excruciating pain. The very preservation of his life he ascribed to the more than maternal care of his aunt, Catherine Porten, whose devotion he repaid with a constant affection. His studies were desultory perforce, and two miserable years at Westminster were all the regular schooling that he got. After his fourteenth year his weakness began to disappear, and his father, without permitting him to wait until he was adequately prepared, carried him off to Magdalen College, and entered him as a gentleman commoner, April 3, 1752. At no period in its history had Oxford reached such a depth of degeneracy. 'The fellows of my time,' says Gibbon, 'were decent easy men who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder; their days were filled by a series of uniform employments; the chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the common room, till they retired, weary and well satisfied, to a long slumber. From the toil of reading, or thinking, or writing, they had absolved their conscience; and the first shoots of learning and ingenuity withered in the ground, without yielding any fruits to the owners or the public. . . . Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal; their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth; and their constitutional toasts were not expressive of the most lively loyalty for the house of Hanover.' Such was the atmosphere into which Gibbon was flung at the age of fifteen, 'with a stock of erudition which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy might have been ashamed,' and here he spent fourteen months—'the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life; the reader will pronounce between the school and the scholar.' From his childhood he had been fond of religious disputation, and his incursions into the bewildering mazes of a great controversy made him at sixteen a convert to the Church of Rome, and shut the gates of Oxford upon him. His father next placed him under the care of the poet and deist Mallet, but by his philosophy the young enthusiast was 'rather scandalised than reclaimed.' To effect his cure from popery he was next sent to Lausanne to board in the house of a Calvinist minister, M. Pavilliard, a poor but worthy and intelligent man, who judiciously suggested books and arguments to his young charge, and had the satisfaction of seeing him reconverted to Protestantism. Gibbon tells us that 'the various articles of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream; and after a full conviction, on Christmas-day 1754, I received the sacrament in the church of Lausanne. It was here that I suspended my religious inquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and Protestants.' He lived for nearly five years in M. Pavilliard's house, respecting the minister, and enduring with greater or less equanimity the 'uncleanly avarice' of his wife; and here he began and carried out with rare steadfastness of purpose those private studies in French literature, but especially in the Latin classics, which, aided by his prodigious memory, made him a master of erudition without a superior, and with hardly an equal. Here also he fell in love with Mademoiselle Suzanne Curchod, the beautiful and accomplished daughter of the obscure minister of Crassy, who lived to become the wife of the great French minister and financier, M. Necker, and the mother of the gifted Madame de Staël. He found on his return to England that his father would not hear of the 'strange alliance,' and in the calm reflection of thirty years later he adds, 'After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate; 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. My cure was accelerated by a faithful report of the tranquillity and cheerfulness of the lady herself, and my love subsided in friendship and esteem.' They remained constant friends in later life, and the former lover during a visit to Paris (1765) visited her daily in her salon, 'soft, yielding, humble, and decorous to a fault,' as Madame Necker describes him in a familiar letter to a friend.
Gibbon returned to his father's house in 1758. He was well received, and 'ever after continued on the same terms of equal and easy politeness.' He became much attached to his step-mother, and the two 'easily adopted the tender names and genuine characters of mother and son.' He brought with him the first pages of a little book which at length he published in 1761 in French, under the title of Essai sur l'Étude de la Littérature. He had joined the Hampshire militia, and for the next two and a half years led a wandering life of military servitude as a captain—an irksome discipline, but one which he admits was not unprofitable to him. 'The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire.' Meantime he revolved within his mind many projects for a historical work, and, the militia being disbanded, visited Paris and Lausanne, and extended his travels into Italy. 'It was at Rome,' he tells us, '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 of writing the decline and fall of the city first started into my mind. But 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.'
One of the projects taken up and abandoned after two years' preparatory studies was a history of Switzerland in conjunction with his friend Deyverdun, with whom also he planned and actually printed two volumes of a periodical work entitled Mémoires Littéraires de la Grande Brctagne (1767-68). Another work was his anonymous Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Æneid, a bitter attack upon the paradox advanced in Warburton's Divine Legation, that Virgil in the sixth book of his Æneid, in the visit of Æneas and the Sibyl to the shades, allegorised his hero's initiations, as a lawgiver, into the Eleusinian mysteries. In 1770 his father died, leaving his affairs in disorder, from which Gibbon within two years contrived to extricate himself, and settle in London. In 1774 he entered parliament as member for the borough of Liskeard at the beginning of the struggle with America, and 'supported with many a sincere and silent vote the rights, though not, perhaps, the interest of the mother-country.' He sat afterwards also for Lyminster, altogether for eight sessions, without ever summoning courage to speak. In a letter (1775) to Holroyd (the future Lord Sheffield) he writes: 'I am still a mute; it is more tremendous than I imagined; the great speakers fill me with despair; the bad ones with terror.' His constant support of government was rewarded in 1779 by a post as one of the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, which brought a welcome addition to his income of over £700 a year, but of which he was deprived three years later on the suppression of the office through the exertions of Burke.
After the labours of seven years and infinite fastidiousness in its composition, he published the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in February 1776. Its success was immediate, and it was not for some time that the religious world awakened to the insidiously dangerous character of the attack upon Christianity in the 15th and 16th chapters, which while not formally denying the 'convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and the ruling providence of its great author,' proceed to account for the rapid growth of the early Christian church by 'secondary' or merely human causes—most of them rather its effects. Of these he offered five: (1) the inflexible and intolerant zeal of the Christians; (2) the doctrine of a future life, improved by every additional circumstance which could give weight and efficacy to that important truth; (3) the miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church; (4) the virtues of the primitive Christians; (5) the union and discipline of the Christian republic. Gibbon was by temper incapable of apprehending spiritual aspirations by sympathetic insight, and he assailed with sneer and innuendo what he did not understand yet instinctively disliked, but feared openly to attack. He was too worldly and altogether too much a true son of his century to estimate aright what was really unworldly; and, moreover, this inability was intensified by his own cold and composed temperament and the reflex effect of his peculiar experiences.
Hume, who was then slowly dying (March 1776), in a characteristic and highly complimentary letter said about these chapters: 'I think you have observed a very prudent temperament; but it was impossible to treat the subject so as not to give grounds of suspicion against you, and you may expect that a clamour will arise.' The prophecy proved true, and Gibbon was ere long assailed by a loud discharge of 'ecclesiastical ordnance,' which he professes to have found but empty sound, 'mischievous only in the intention.' He claims to have helped his assailants to being rewarded in this world. He only deigned to reply when Henry E. Davies of Oxford impugned 'not the faith, but the fidelity of the historian'; still, he would not print his Vindication in quarto lest it should be bound and preserved with the history itself. He persevered assiduously with his great work, and had two more volumes ready in 1781. And now, having lost office, and finding it difficult to live easily in London upon his income, he determined to accept Deyverdun's invitation to settle down with him in his house at Lausanne. He started in September 1783, and spent the next four years in the midst of his 6000 volumes, in calm and uninterrupted work, never moving the while a dozen miles out of the town. He had nearly completed the fourth volume before leaving London, the fifth was finished in twenty-one months, the sixth in little more than a year. The conclusion must be told in his own memorable and touching words: 'It was on the day, or rather the 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 summer-house 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 recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future fate of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.' A month later he started for England to superintend the printing of the work. The fourth volume took three months; the last two were issued in the May of 1788. He returned immediately to Lausanne, where within a twelvemonth his much-loved companion Deyverdun died—a blow which affected him deeply, and from which indeed he never fully recovered. The state of France filled him with trouble, though it was some solace to have the exiled Neckers beside him at Coppet, near Lausanne. The letters between his old love and himself are creditable in the highest degree to the hearts of both. 'Come to us,' she writes, 'when you are restored to health and to yourself; that moment should always belong to your first and your last friend, and I do not know which of those titles is the sweetest and dearest to my heart.' But his last years were not happy; good living and want of exercise had brought on burdensome corpulency, and he began to be racked with the torture of gout. His aunt had already died in 1786, Deyverdun and other favourite friends had quickly followed, and last came the unexpected death of his dear friend, Lady Sheffield. At once, though travelling was now terrible to him, he made up his mind to go to console Lord Sheffield, and within a month he was with him. After three months' stay at Sheffield Place, and a visit to his aged step-mother at Bath, he came to London, where a few days later he was seized with an attack of dropsy, the result of a rupture which he had neglected for over thirty years. An operation gave temporary relief, and he went again a little into society, but two months later he died, without apprehension or suffering, in St James's Street, London, 16th January 1794.
The monumental work of Gibbon is likely to remain our masterpiece in history. The magnitude of the subject is nobly sustained by the dignity of the treatment, and the whole fabric stands out a marvellous bridge flung by genius and erudition across the weltering centuries of confusion that separate the old world from the new. The glowing imagination of the writer gives life and vigour to the rounded periods and to the stately and pompous march of the narrative, and all defects of taste disappear in the admiration extorted from the most reluctant reader. Perhaps his most unique merit is his supreme and almost epic power of moulding into a lucid unity a bewildering multitude of details, and giving life and sequence to the whole. His prodigious memory moved freely under a ponderous weight of learning which his quickening imagination fused into a glowing stream of continuous narrative, which is yet, with all its detail, a marvel of condensation. The story of Constantinople is his greatest effort—his treatment of Julian, of Justinian, of the Arabs, and of the Crusades, the most splendid single episodes in our historical literature. He has painted in gorgeous colours all the splendours of the ancient Paganism, and portrayed with matchless force every figure that crossed the stage of history for a thousand years; for the moral beauty of Christianity alone he has no enthusiasm—the heroism of its martyr-witnesses and its saints touches not his imagination nor warms his dramatic sense to life. This elemental defect set aside, few faults of detail have been discovered in his work, the enduring merit of which it may be permitted to summarise in the words of a great modern master of history, whose own studies have followed closely in his track. 'That Gibbon should ever be displaced,' says Mr Freeman, 'seems impossible. That wonderful man monopolised, so to speak, the historical genius and the historical learning of a whole generation, and left little indeed of either for his contemporaries. He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside. We may correct and improve from the stores which have been opened since Gibbon's time; we may write again large parts of his story from other and often truer and more wholesome points of view; but the work of Gibbon as a whole, as the encyclopædic history of 1300 years, as the grandest of historical designs, carried out alike with wonderful power and with wonderful accuracy, must ever keep its place. Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read too.'
Lord Sheffield collected his Miscellaneous Works (2 vols. 1796; enlarged ed. 5 vols. 1814). Sir W. Smith's edition of The Decline and Fall (8 vols. 1854-55) contains the notes of Guizot and Mihnau; a new edition, in 7 vols., edited by J. B. Bury, was begun in 1896. In 1897 another Lord Sheffield published the six versions of the Autobiography from which Miss Holroyd pieced together the text till then accepted; and two volumes of the letters were edited by Professor Prothero. See the monograph by J. C. Morison (1878), and Frederic Harrison's address at the Gibbon Commemoration (1895).