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English Men of Letters
Edited by John Morley
GIBBON
by
JAMES COTTER MORISON, M.A.
Lincoln College, Oxford
London:
MacMillan and Co.
1878.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
GIBBON'S EARLY LIFE UP TO THE TIME OF HIS LEAVING OXFORD
CHAPTER II.
AT LAUSANNE
CHAPTER III.
IN THE MILITIA
CHAPTER IV.
THE ITALIAN JOURNEY
CHAPTER V.
LITERARY SCHEMES.--THE HISTORY OF SWITZERLAND.--DISSERTATION ON THE
SIXTH ÆNEID.--FATHER'S DEATH.--SETTLEMENT IN LONDON
CHAPTER VI.
LIFE IN LONDON.--PARLIAMENT.--THE BOARD OF TRADE.--THE DECLINE AND
FALL.--MIGRATION TO LAUSANNE
CHAPTER VII.
THE FIRST THREE VOLUMES OF THE DECLINE AND FALL
CHAPTER VIII.
THE LAST TEN TEARS OF HIS LIFE AT LAUSANNE
CHAPTER IX.
THE LAST THREE VOLUMES OF THE DECLINE AND FALL
CHAPTER X.
LAST ILLNESS.--DEATH.--CONCLUSION
GIBBON
CHAPTER I.
GIBBON'S EARLY LIFE UP TO THE TIME OF HIS LEAVING OXFORD.
Edward Gibbon[1] was born at Putney, near London, on 27th April in
the year 1737. After the reformation of the calendar his birthday
became the 8th of May. He was the eldest of a family of seven
children; but his five brothers and only sister all died in early
infancy, and he could remember in after life his sister alone, whom he
also regretted.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Gibbon's Memoirs and Letters are of such easy access that
I have not deemed it necessary to encumber these pages with references
to them. Any one who wishes to control my statements will have no
difficulty in doing so with the Miscellaneous Works, edited by Lord
Sheffield, in his hand. Whenever I advance anything that seems to
require corroboration, I have been careful to give my authority.]
He is at some pains in his Memoirs to show the length and quality of
his pedigree, which he traces back to the times of the Second and
Third Edwards. Noting the fact, we pass on to a nearer ancestor, his
grandfather, who seems to have been a person of considerable energy
of character and business talent. He made a large fortune, which he
lost in the South-Sea Scheme, and then made another before his death.
He was one of the Commissioners of Customs, and sat at the Board with
the poet Prior; Bolingbroke was heard to declare that no man knew
better than Mr. Edward Gibbon the commerce and finances of England.
His son, the historian's father, was a person of very inferior stamp.
He was educated at Westminster and Cambridge, travelled on the
Continent, sat in Parliament, lived beyond his means as a country
gentleman, and here his achievements came to an end. He seems to have
been a kindly but a weak and impulsive man, who however had the merit
of obtaining and deserving his son's affection by genial sympathy and
kindly treatment.
Gibbon's childhood was passed in chronic illness, debility, and
disease. All attempts to give him a regular education were frustrated
by his precarious health. The longest period he ever passed at school
were two years at Westminster, but he was constantly moved from one
school to another. This even his delicacy can hardly explain, and it
must have been fatal to all sustained study. Two facts he mentions of
his school life, which paint the manners of the age. In the year 1746
such was the strength of party spirit that he, a child of nine years
of age, "was reviled and buffeted for the sins of his Tory ancestors."
Secondly, the worthy pedagogues of that day found no readier way of
leading the most studious of boys to a love of science than corporal
punishment. "At the expense of many tears and some blood I purchased
the knowledge of the Latin syntax." Whether all love of study would
have been flogged out of him if he had remained at school, it is
difficult to say, but it is not an improbable supposition that this
would have happened. The risk was removed by his complete failure of
health. "A strange nervous affection, which alternately contracted his
legs and produced, without any visible symptom, the most excruciating
pain," was his chief affliction, followed by intervals of languor and
debility. The saving of his life during these dangerous years Gibbon
unhesitatingly ascribes to the more than maternal care of his aunt,
Catherine Porten, on writing whose name for the first time in his
Memoirs, "he felt a tear of gratitude trickling down his cheek." "If
there be any," he continues, "as I trust there are some, who rejoice
that I live, to that dear and excellent woman they must hold
themselves indebted. Many anxious and solitary hours and days did she
consume in the patient trial of relief and amusement; many wakeful
nights did she sit by my bedside in trembling expectation that every
hour would be my last." Gibbon is rather anxious to get over these
details, and declares he has no wish to expatiate on a "disgusting
topic." This is quite in the style of the _ancien régime_. There was
no blame attached to any one for being ill in those days, but people
were expected to keep their infirmities to themselves. "People knew
how to live and die in those days, and kept their infirmities out of
sight. You might have the gout, but you must walk about all the same
without making grimaces. It was a point of good breeding to hide one's
sufferings."[2] Similarly Walpole was much offended by a too faithful
publication of Madame de Sévigné's _Letters_. "Heaven forbid," he
says, "that I should say that the letters of Madame de Sévigné were
bad. I only meant that they were full of family details and mortal
distempers, to which the most immortal of us are subject." But Gibbon
was above all things a veracious historian, and fortunately has not
refrained from giving us a truthful picture of his childhood.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: George Sand, quoted in Taine's _Ancien Régime_, p. 181.]
Of his studies, or rather his reading--his early and invincible love
of reading, which he would not exchange for the treasures of India--he
gives us a full account, and we notice at once the interesting fact
that a considerable portion of the historical field afterwards
occupied by his great work had been already gone over by Gibbon before
he was well in his teens. "My indiscriminate appetite subsided by
degrees into the historic line, and since philosophy has exploded all
innate ideas and natural propensities, I must ascribe the choice to
the assiduous perusal of the _Universal History_ as the octavo volumes
successively appeared. This unequal work referred and introduced me to
the Greek and Roman historians, to as many at least as were accessible
to an English reader. All that I could find were greedily devoured,
from Littlebury's lame _Herodotus_ to Spelman's valuable _Xenophon_,
to the pompous folios of Gordon's _Tacitus_, and a ragged _Procopius_
of the beginning of the last century." Referring to an accident which
threw the continuation of Echard's _Roman History_ in his way, he
says, "To me the reigns of the successors of Constantine were
absolutely new, and I was immersed in the passage of the Goths over
the Danube, when the summons of the dinner-bell reluctantly dragged me
from my intellectual feast.... I procured the second and third
volumes of Howell's _History of the World_, which exhibit the
Byzantine period on a larger scale. Mahomet and his Saracens soon
fixed my attention, and some instinct of criticism directed me to the
genuine sources. Simon Ockley first opened my eyes, and I was led from
one book to another till I had ranged round the circle of Oriental
history. Before I was sixteen I had exhausted all that could be
learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks,
and the same ardour urged me to guess at the French of D'Herbelot and
to construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's _Abulfaragius_." Here is
in rough outline a large portion at least of the _Decline and Fall_
already surveyed. The fact shows how deep was the sympathy that Gibbon
had for his subject, and that there was a sort of pre-established
harmony between his mind and the historical period he afterwards
illustrated.
Up to the age of fourteen it seemed that Gibbon, as he says, was
destined to remain through life an illiterate cripple. But as he
approached his sixteenth year, a great change took place in his
constitution, and his diseases, instead of growing with his growth and
strengthening with his strength, wonderfully vanished. This unexpected
recovery was not seized by his father in a rational spirit, as
affording a welcome opportunity of repairing the defects of a hitherto
imperfect education. Instead of using the occasion thus presented of
recovering some of the precious time lost, of laying a sound
foundation of scholarship and learning on which a superstructure at
the university or elsewhere could be ultimately built, he carried the
lad off in an impulse of perplexity and impatience, and entered him as
a gentleman commoner at Magdalen College just before he had completed
his fifteenth year (1752, April 3). This was perhaps the most unwise
step he could have taken under the circumstances. Gibbon was too young
and too ignorant to profit by the advantages offered by Oxford to a
more mature student, and his status as a gentleman commoner seemed
intended to class him among the idle and dissipated who are only
expected to waste their money and their time. A good education is
generally considered as reflecting no small credit on its possessor;
but in the majority of cases it reflects credit on the wise solicitude
of his parents or guardians rather than on himself. If Gibbon escaped
the peril of being an ignorant and frivolous lounger, the merit was
his own.
At no period in their history had the English universities sunk to a
lower condition as places of education than at the time when Gibbon
went up to Oxford. To speak of them as seats of learning seems like
irony; they were seats of nothing but coarse living and clownish
manners, the centres where all the faction, party spirit, and bigotry
of the country were gathered to a head. In this evil pre-eminence both
of the universities and all the colleges appear to have been upon a
level, though Lincoln College, Oxford, is mentioned as a bright
exception in John Wesley's day to the prevalent degeneracy. The
strange thing is that, with all their neglect of learning and
morality, the colleges were not the resorts of jovial if unseemly boon
companionship; they were collections of quarrelsome and spiteful
litigants, who spent their time in angry lawsuits. The indecent
contentions between Bentley and the Fellows of Trinity were no
isolated scandal. They are best known and remembered on account of the
eminence of the chief disputants, and of the melancholy waste of
Bentley's genius which they occasioned. Hearne writes of Oxford in
1726, "There are such differences now in the University of Oxford
(hardly one college but where all the members are busied in law
business and quarrels not at all relating to the promotion of
learning), that good letters decay every day, insomuch that this
ordination on Trinity Sunday at Oxford there were no fewer (as I am
informed) than fifteen denied orders for insufficiency, which is the
more to be noted because our bishops, and those employed by them, are
themselves illiterate men."[3] The state of things had not much
improved twenty or thirty years later when Gibbon went up, but perhaps
it had improved a little. He does not mention lawsuits as a favourite
pastime of the Fellows. "The Fellows or monks of my time," he says,
"were decent, easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder:
their days were filled by a series of uniform employments--the chapel,
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,
writing, or thinking they had absolved their consciences. 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 to the House of
Hanover." Some Oxonians perhaps could still partly realise the truth
of this original picture by their recollections of faint and feeble
copies of it drawn from their experience in youthful days. It seems to
be certain that the universities, far from setting a model of good
living, were really below the average standard of the morals and
manners of the age, and the standard was not high. Such a satire as
the _Terræ Filius_ of Amhurst cannot be accepted without large
deductions; but the caricaturist is compelled by the conditions of his
craft to aim at the _true seeming_, if he neglects the true, and with
the benefit of this limitation the _Terræ Filius_ reveals a deplorable
and revolting picture of vulgarity, insolence, and licence. The
universities are spoken of in terms of disparagement by men of all
classes. Lord Chesterfield speaks of the "rust" of Cambridge as
something of which a polished man should promptly rid himself. Adam
Smith showed his sense of the defects of Oxford in a stern section of
the _Wealth of Nations_, written twenty years after he had left the
place. Even youths like Gray and West, fresh from Eton, express
themselves with contempt for their respective universities. "Consider
me," says the latter, writing from Christ Church, "very seriously,
here is a strange country, inhabited by things that call themselves
Doctors and Masters of Arts, a country flowing with syllogisms and
ale; where Horace and Virgil are equally unknown." Gray, answering
from Peterhouse, can only do justice to his feelings by quoting the
words of the Hebrew prophet, and insists that Isaiah had Cambridge
equally with Babylon in view when he spoke of the wild beasts and wild
asses, of the satyrs that dance, of an inhabitation of dragons and a
court for owls.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: _Social Life at the English Universities_. By Christopher
Wordsworth. Page 57.]
Into such untoward company was Gibbon thrust by his careless father at
the age of fifteen. That he succumbed to the unwholesome atmosphere
cannot surprise us. He does not conceal, perhaps he rather
exaggerates, in his Memoirs, the depth of his fall. As Bunyan in a
state of grace accused himself of dreadful sins which in all
likelihood he never committed, so it is probable that Gibbon, in his
old age, when study and learning were the only passions he knew,
reflected with too much severity on the boyish freaks of his
university life. Moreover there appears to have been nothing coarse or
unworthy in his dissipation; he was simply idle. He justly lays much
of the blame on the authorities. To say that the discipline was lax
would be to pay it an unmerited compliment. There was no discipline at
all. He lived in Magdalen as he might have lived at the Angel or the
Mitre Tavern. He not only left his college, but he left the
university, whenever he liked. In one winter he made a tour to Bath,
another to Buckinghamshire, and he made four excursions to London,
"without once hearing the voice of admonition, without once feeling
the hand of control." Of study he had just as much and as little as he
pleased.
"As soon as my tutor had sounded the insufficiency of his disciple in
school learning, he proposed that we should read every morning from
ten to eleven the comedies of Terence. During the first weeks I
constantly attended these lessons in my tutor's room; but as they
appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure, I was once tempted to
try the experiment of a formal apology. The apology was accepted with
a smile. I repeated the offence with less ceremony: the excuse was
admitted with the same indulgence; the slightest motive of laziness or
indisposition, the most trifling avocation at home or abroad was
allowed as a worthy impediment, nor did my tutor appear conscious of
my absence or neglect." No wonder he spoke with indignation of such
scandalous neglect. "To the University of Oxford," he says, "I
acknowledge no obligation, and she will as readily renounce me for a
son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen
months at Magdalen College; they proved the most idle and unprofitable
of my whole life. The reader will pronounce between the school and the
scholar." This is only just and fully merited by the abuses denounced.
One appreciates the anguish of the true scholar mourning over lost
time as a miser over lost gold. There was another side of the question
which naturally did not occur to Gibbon, but which may properly occur
to us. Did Gibbon lose as much as he thought in missing the scholastic
drill of the regular public school and university man? Something he
undoubtedly lost: he was never a finished scholar, up to the standard
even of his own day. If he had been, is it certain that the
accomplishment would have been all gain? It may be doubted. At a later
period Gibbon read the classics with the free and eager curiosity of a
thoughtful mind. It was a labour of love, of passionate ardour,
similar to the manly zeal of the great scholars of the Renaissance.
This appetite had not been blunted by enforced toil in a prescribed
groove. How much of that zest for antiquity, of that keen relish for
the classic writers which he afterwards acquired and retained through
life, might have been quenched if he had first made their acquaintance
as school-books? Above all, would he have looked on the ancient world
with such freedom and originality as he afterwards gained, if he had
worn through youth the harness of academical study? These questions do
not suggest an answer, but they may furnish a doubt. Oxford and
Cambridge for nearly a century have been turning out crowds of
thorough-paced scholars of the orthodox pattern. It is odd that the
two greatest historians who have been scholars as well--Gibbon and
Grote--were not university-bred men.
As if to prove by experiment where the fault lay, in "the school or
the scholar," Gibbon had no sooner left Oxford for the long vacation,
than his taste for study returned, and, not content with reading, he
attempted original composition. The subject he selected was a curious
one for a youth in his sixteenth year. It was an attempt to settle the
chronology of the age of Sesostris, and shows how soon the austere
side of history had attracted his attention. "In my childish balance,"
he says, "I presumed to weigh the systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of
Marsham and of Newton; and my sleep has been disturbed by the
difficulty of reconciling the Septuagint with the Hebrew computation."
Of course his essay had the usual value of such juvenile productions;
that is, none at all, except as an indication of early bias to serious
study of history. On his return to Oxford, the age of Sesostris was
wisely relinquished. He indeed soon commenced a line of study which
was destined to have a lasting influence on the remainder of his
course through life.
He had an inborn taste for theology and the controversies which have
arisen concerning religious dogma. "From my childhood," he says, "I
had been fond of religious disputation: my poor aunt has often been
puzzled by the mysteries which she strove to believe." How he carried
the taste into mature life, his great chapters on the heresies and
controversies of the Early Church are there to show. This inclination
for theology, co-existing with a very different temper towards
religious sentiment, recalls the similar case of the author of the
_Historical and Critical Dictionary_, the illustrious Pierre Bayle,
whom Gibbon resembled in more ways than one. At Oxford his religious
education, like everything else connected with culture, had been
entirely neglected. It seems hardly credible, yet we have his word for
it, that he never subscribed or studied the Articles of the Church of
England, and was never confirmed. When he first went up, he was judged
to be too young, but the Vice-Chancellor directed him to return as
soon as he had completed his fifteenth year, recommending him in the
meantime to the instruction of his college. "My college forgot to
instruct; I forgot to return, and was myself forgotten by the first
magistrate of the university. Without a single lecture, either public
or private, either Christian or Protestant, without any academical
subscription, without any episcopal ordination, I was left by light of
my catechism to grope my way to the chapel and communion table, where
I was admitted without question how far or by what means I might be
qualified to receive the sacrament. Such almost incredible neglect was
productive of the worst mischiefs." What did Gibbon mean by this last
sentence? Did he, when he wrote it, towards the end of his life,
regret the want of early religious instruction? Nothing leads us to
think so, or to suppose that his subsequent loss of faith was a heavy
grief, supported, but painful to bear. His mind was by nature
positive, or even pagan, and he had nothing of what the Germans call
_religiosität_ in him. Still there is a passage in his Memoirs where
he oddly enough laments not having selected the _fat slumbers of the
Church_ as an eligible profession. Did he reflect that perhaps the
neglect of his religious education at Oxford had deprived him of a
bishopric or a good deanery, and the learned leisure which such
positions at that time conferred on those who cared for it? He could
not feel that he was morally, or even spiritually, unfit for an office
filled in his own time by such men as Warburton and Hurd. He would not
have disgraced the episcopal bench; he would have been dignified,
courteous, and hospitable; a patron and promoter of learning, we may
be sure. His literary labours would probably have consisted of an
edition of a Greek play or two, and certainly some treatise on the
Evidences of Christianity. But in that case we should not have had the
_Decline and Fall_.
The "blind activity of idleness" to which he was exposed at Oxford,
prevented any result of this kind. For want of anything better to do, he
was led to read Middleton's _Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers
which are Supposed to have Subsisted in the Christian Church_. Gibbon
says that the effect of Middleton's "bold criticism" upon him was
singular, and that instead of making him a sceptic, it made him more of
a believer. He might have reflected that it is the commonest of
occurrences for controversialists to produce exactly the opposite result
to that which they intend, and that as many an apology for Christianity
has sown the first seeds of infidelity, so an attack upon it might well
intensify faith. What follows is very curious. "The elegance of style
and freedom of argument were repelled by a shield of prejudice. I still
revered the character, or rather the names of the saints and fathers
whom Dr. Middleton exposes; nor could he destroy my implicit belief
that the gift of miraculous powers was continued in the Church during
the first four or five centuries of Christianity. But I was unable to
resist the weight of historical evidence, that within the same period
most of the leading doctrines of Popery were already introduced in
theory and practice. Nor was my conclusion absurd that miracles are the
test of truth, and that the Church must be orthodox and pure which was
so often approved by the visible interposition of the Deity. The
marvellous tales which are boldly attested by the Basils and
Chrysostoms, the Austins and Jeromes, compelled me to embrace the
superior merits of celibacy, the institution of the monastic life, the
use of the sign of the cross, of holy oil, and even of images, the
invocation of saints, the worship of relics, the rudiments of purgatory
in prayers for the dead, and the tremendous mystery of the sacrifice of
the body and the blood of Christ, which insensibly swelled into the
prodigy of transubstantiation." In this remarkable passage we have a
distinct foreshadow of the Tractarian movement, which came seventy or
eighty years afterwards. Gibbon in 1752, at the age of fifteen, took up
a position practically the same as Froude and Newman took up about the
year 1830. In other words, he reached the famous _via media_ at a bound.
But a second spring soon carried him clear of it, into the bosom of the
Church of Rome.
He had come to what are now called Church principles, by the energy of
his own mind working on the scanty data furnished him by Middleton. By
one of those accidents which usually happen in such cases, he made the
acquaintance of a young gentleman who had already embraced
Catholicism, and who was well provided with controversial tracts in
favour of Romanism. Among these were the two works of Bossuet, the
_Exposition of Catholic Doctrine_ and the _History of the Protestant
Variations_. Gibbon says: "I read, I applauded, I believed, and surely
I fell by a noble hand. I have since examined the originals with a
more discerning eye, and shall not hesitate to pronounce that Bossuet
is indeed a master of all the weapons of controversy. In the
_Exposition_, a specious apology, the orator assumes with consummate
art the tone of candour and simplicity, and the ten horned monster is
transformed at his magic touch into the milk-white hind, who must be
loved as soon as she is seen. In the _History_, a bold and well-aimed
attack, he displays, with a happy mixture of narrative and argument,
the faults and follies, the changes and contradictions of our first
Reformers, whose variations, as he dexterously contends, are the mark
of historical error, while the perpetual unity of the Catholic Church
is the sign and test of infallible truth. To my present feelings it
seems incredible that I should ever believe that I believed in
transubstantiation. But my conqueror oppressed me with the sacramental
words, '_Hoc est corpus meum_,' and dashed against each other the
figurative half meanings of the Protestant sects; every objection was
resolved into omnipotence, and, after repeating at St. Mary's the
Athanasian Creed, I humbly acquiesced in the mystery of the Real
Presence."
Many reflections are suggested on the respective domains of reason and
faith by these words, but they cannot be enlarged on here. No one,
nowadays, one may hope, would think of making Gibbon's conversion a
subject of reproach to him. The danger is rather that it should be
regarded with too much honour. It unquestionably shows the early and
trenchant force of his intellect: he mastered the logical position in
a moment; saw the necessity of a criterion of faith; and being told
that it was to be found in the practice of antiquity, boldly went
there, and abided by the result. But this praise to his head does not
extend to his heart. A more tender and deep moral nature would not
have moved so rapidly. We must in fairness remember that it was not
his fault that his religious education had been neglected at home, at
school, and at college. But we have no reason to think that had it
been attended to, the result would have been much otherwise. The root
of spiritual life did not exist in him. It never withered, because it
never shot up. Thus when he applied his acute mind to a religious
problem, he contemplated it with the coolness and impartiality of a
geometer or chess player, his intellect operated _in vacuo_ so to
speak, untrammelled by any bias of sentiment or early training. He had
no profound associations to tear out of his heart. He merely altered
the premisses of a syllogism. When Catholicism was presented to him in
a logical form, it met with no inward bar and repugnance. The house
was empty and ready for a new guest, or rather the first guest. If
Gibbon anticipated the Tractarian movement intellectually, he was
farther removed than the poles are asunder from the mystic reverent
spirit which inspired that movement. If we read the _Apologia_ of Dr.
Newman, we perceive the likeness and unlikeness of the two cases. "As
a matter of simple conscience," says the latter, "I felt it to be a
duty to protest against the Church of Rome." At the time he refers to
Dr. Newman was a Catholic to a degree Gibbon never dreamed of. But in
the one case conscience and heart-ties "strong as life, stronger
almost than death," arrested the conclusions of the intellect. Ground
which Gibbon dashed over in a few months or weeks, the great
Tractarian took ten years to traverse. So different is the mystic from
the positive mind.
Gibbon had no sooner settled his new religion than he resolved with a
frankness which did him all honour to profess it publicly. He wrote to
his father, announcing his conversion, a letter which he afterwards
described, when his sentiments had undergone a complete change, as
written with all the pomp, dignity, and self-satisfaction of a martyr.
A momentary glow of enthusiasm had raised him, as he said, above all
worldly considerations. He had no difficulty, in an excursion to
London, in finding a priest, who perceived in the first interview that
persuasion was needless. "After sounding the motives and merits of my
conversion, he consented to admit me into the pale of the Church, and
at his feet on the 8th of June 1753, I solemnly, though privately,
abjured the errors of heresy." He was exactly fifteen years and one
month old. Further details, which one would like to have, he does not
give. The scene even of the solemn act is not mentioned, nor whether
he was baptized again; but this may be taken for granted.
The fact of any one "going over to Rome" is too common an occurrence
nowadays to attract notice. But in the eighteenth century it was a
rare and startling phenomenon. Gibbon's father, who was "neither a
bigot nor a philosopher," was shocked and astonished by his "son's
strange departure from the religion of his country." He divulged the
secret of young Gibbon's conversion, and "the gates of Magdalen
College were for ever shut" against the latter's return. They really
needed no shutting at all. By the fact of his conversion to Romanism
he had ceased to be a member of the University.