the letters which I found at Lyons were expressive of some
impatience. Rome and Italy had satiated my curious appetite, and I
was now ready to return to the peaceful retreat of my family and
books. After a happy fortnight I reluctantly left Paris, embarked
at Calais, again landed at Dover, after an interval of two years and
five months, and hastily drove through the summer dust and solitude
of London. On June 25 1765 I arrived at my father's house: and the
five years and a half between my travels and my father's death
(1770) are the portion of my life which I passed with the least
enjoyment, and which I remember with the least satisfaction. Every
spring I attended the monthly meeting and exercise of the militia at
Southampton; and by the resignation of my father, and the death of
Sir Thomas Worsley, I was successively promoted to the rank of major
and lieutenant-colonel commandant; but I was each year more
disgusted with the inn, the wine, the company, and the tiresome
repetition of annual attendance and daily exercise. At home, the
oeconomy of the family and farm still maintained the same creditable
appearance. My connection with Mrs. Gibbon was mellowed into a warm
and solid attachment: my growing years abolished the distance that
might yet remain between a parent and a son, and my behaviour
satisfied my father, who was proud of the success, however imperfect
in his own life-time, of my literary talents. Our solitude was soon
and often enlivened by the visit of the friend of my youth, Mr.
Deyverdun, whose absence from Lausanne I had sincerely lamented.
About three years after my first departure, he had emigrated from
his native lake to the banks of the Oder in Germany. The res
augusta domi, the waste of a decent patrimony, by an improvident
father, obliged him, like many of his countrymen, to confide in his
own industry; and he was entrusted with the education of a young
prince, the grandson of the Margrave of Schavedt, of the Royal
Family of Prussia. Our friendship was never cooled, our
correspondence was sometimes interrupted; but I rather wished than
hoped to obtain Mr. Deyverdun for the companion of my Italian tour.
An unhappy, though honourable passion, drove him from his German
court; and the attractions of hope and curiosity were fortified by
the expectation of my speedy return to England. During four
successive summers he passed several weeks or months at Beriton, and
our free conversations, on every topic that-could interest the heart
or understanding, would have reconciled me to a desert or a prison.
In the winter months of London my sphere of knowledge and action was
somewhat enlarged, by the many new acquaintance which I had
contracted in the militia and abroad; and I must regret, as more
than an acquaintance, Mr. Godfrey Clarke of Derbyshire, an amiable
and worthy young man, who was snatched away by an untimely death. A
weekly convivial meeting was established by myself and travellers,
under the name of the Roman Club.
The renewal, or perhaps the improvement, of my English life was
embittered by the alteration of my own feelings. At the age of
twenty-one I was, in my proper station of a youth, delivered from
the yoke of education, and delighted with the comparative state of
liberty and affluence. My filial obedience was natural and easy;
and in the gay prospect of futurity, my ambition did not extend
beyond the enjoyment of my books, my leisure, and my patrimonial
estate, undisturbed by the cares of a family and the duties of a
profession. But in the militia I was armed with power; in my
travels, I was exempt from controul; and as I approached, as I
gradually passed my thirtieth year, I began to feel the desire of
being master to my own house. The most gentle authority will
sometimes frown without reason, the most cheerful submission will
sometimes murmur without cause; and such is the law of our imperfect
nature, that we must either command or obey; that our personal
liberty is supported by the obsequiousness of our own dependants.
While so many of my acquaintance were married or in parliament, or
advancing with a rapid step in the various roads of honour and
fortune, I stood alone, immoveable and insignificant; for after the
monthly meeting of 1770, I had even withdrawn myself from the
militia, by the resignation of an empty and barren commission. My
temper is not susceptible of envy, and the view of successful merit
has always excited my warmest applause. The miseries of a vacant
life were never known to a man whose hours were insufficient for the
inexhaustible pleasures of study. But I lamented that at the proper
age I had not embraced the lucrative pursuits of the law or of
trade, the chances of civil office or India adventure, or even the
fat slumbers of the church; and my repentance became more lively as
the loss of time was more irretrievable. Experience shewed me the
use of grafting my private consequence on the importance of a great
professional body; the benefits of those firm connections which are
cemented by hope and interest, by gratitude and emulation, by the
mutual exchange of services and favours. From the emoluments of a
profession I might have derived an ample fortune, or a competent
income, instead of being stinted to the same narrow allowance, to be
increased only by an event which I sincerely deprecated. The
progress and the knowledge of our domestic disorders aggravated my
anxiety, and I began to apprehend that I might be left in my old age
without the fruits either of industry or inheritance.
In the first summer after my return, whilst I enjoyed at Beriton the
society of my friend Deyverdun, our daily conversations expatiated
over the field of ancient and modern literature; and we freely
discussed my studies, my first Essay, and my future projects. The
Decline and Fall of Rome I still contemplated at an awful distance:
but the two historical designs which had balanced my choice were
submitted to his taste: and in the parallel between the Revolutions
of Florence and Switzerland, our common partiality for a country
which was his by birth, and mine by adoption, inclined the scale in
favour of the latter. According to the plan, which was soon
conceived and digested, I embraced a period of two hundred years,
from the association of the three peasants of the Alps to the
plenitude and prosperity of the Helvetic body in the sixteenth
century. I should have described the deliverance and victory of the
Swiss, who have never shed the blood of their tyrants but in a field
of battle; the laws and manners of the confederate states; the
splendid trophies of the Austrian, Burgundian, and Italian wars; and
the wisdom of a nation, which, after some sallies of martial
adventure, has been content to guard the blessings of peace with the
sword of freedom.
--Manus haec inimica tyrannis
Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem.
My judgment, as well as my enthusiasm, was satisfied with the
glorious theme; and the assistance of Deyverdun seemed to remove an
insuperable obstacle. The French or Latin memorials, of which I was
not ignorant, are inconsiderable in number and weight; but in the
perfect acquaintance of my friend with the German language, I found
the key of a more valuable collection. The most necessary books
were procured; he translated, for my use, the folio volume of
Schilling, a copious and contemporary relation of the war of
Burgundy; we read and marked the most interesting parts of the great
chronicle of Tschudi; and by his labour, or that of an inferior
assistant, large extracts were made from the History of Lauffer and
the Dictionary of Lew: yet such was the distance and delay, that two
years elapsed in these preparatory steps; and it was late in the
third summer (1767) before I entered, with these slender materials,
on the more agreeable task of composition. A specimen of my
History, the first book, was read the following winter in a literary
society of foreigners in London; and as the author was unknown, I
listened, without observation, to the free strictures, and
unfavourable sentence, of my judges. The momentary sensation was
painful; but their condemnation was ratified by my cooler thoughts.
I delivered my imperfect sheets to the flames,--and for ever
renounced a design in which some expence, much labour, and more time
had been so vainly consumed. I cannot regret the loss of a slight
and superficial essay, for such the work must have been in the hands
of a stranger, uninformed by the scholars and statesmen, and remote
from the libraries and archives of the Swiss republics. My ancient
habits, and the presence of Deyverdun, encouraged me to write in
French for the continent of Europe; but I was conscious myself that
my style, above prose and below poetry, degenerated into a verbose
and turgid declamation. Perhaps I may impute the failure to the
injudicious choice of a foreign language. Perhaps I may suspect
that the language itself is ill adapted to sustain the vigour and
dignity of an important narrative. But if France, so rich in
literary merit, had produced a great original historian, his genius
would have formed and fixed the idiom to the proper tone, the
peculiar model of historical eloquence.
It was in search of some liberal and lucrative employment that my
friend Deyverdun had visited England. His remittances from home
were scanty and precarious. My purse was always open, but it was
often empty; and I bitterly felt the want of riches and power, which
might have enabled me to correct the errors of his fortune. His
wishes and qualifications solicited the station of the travelling
governor of some wealthy pupil; but every vacancy provoked so many
eager candidates, that for a long time I struggled without success;
nor was it till after much application that I could even place him
as a clerk in the office of the secretary of state. In a residence
of several years he never acquired the just pronunciation and
familiar use of the English tongue, but he read our most difficult
authors with ease and taste: his critical knowledge of our language
and poetry was such as few foreigners have possessed; and few of our
countrymen could enjoy the theatre of Shakspeare and Garrick with
more exquisite feeling and discernment. The consciousness of his
own strength, and the assurance of my aid, emboldened him to imitate
the example of Dr. Maty, whose Journal Britannique was esteemed and
regretted; and to improve his model, by uniting with the
transactions of literature a philosophic view of the arts and
manners of the British nation. Our journal for the year 1767, under
the title of Memoires Literaires de la Grand Bretagne, was soon
finished, and sent to the press. For the first article, Lord
Lyttelton's History of Henry II., I must own myself responsible; but
the public has ratified my judgment of that voluminous work, in
which sense and learning are not illuminated by a ray of genius.
The next specimen was the choice of my friend, the Bath Guide, a
light and whimsical performance, of local, and even verbal,
pleasantry. I started at the attempt: he smiled at my fears: his
courage was justified by success; and a master of both languages
will applaud the curious felicity with which he has transfused into
French prose the spirit, and even the humour, of the English verse.
It is not my wish to deny how deeply I was interested in these
Memoirs, of which I need not surely be ashamed; but at the distance
of more than twenty years, it would be impossible for me to
ascertain the respective shares of the two associates. A long and
intimate communication of ideas had cast our sentiments and style in
the same mould. In our social labours we composed and corrected by
turns; and the praise which I might honestly bestow, would fall
perhaps on some article or passage most properly my own. A second
volume (for the year 1768) was published of these Memoirs. I will
presume to say, that their merit was superior to their reputation;
but it is not less true, that they were productive of more
reputation than emolument. They introduced my friend to the
protection, and myself to the acquaintance, of the Earl of
Chesterfield, whose age and infirmities secluded him from the world;
and of Mr. David Hume, who was under-secretary to the office in
which Deyverdun was more humbly employed. The former accepted a
dedication,(April 12, 1769,) and reserved the author for the future
education of his successor: the latter enriched the Journal with a
reply to Mr. Walpole's Historical Doubts, which he afterwards shaped
into the form of a note. The materials of the third volume were
almost completed, when I recommended Deyverdun as governor to Sir
Richard Worsley, a youth, the son of my old Lieutenant-colonel, who
was lately deceased. They set forwards on their travels; nor did
they return to England till some time after my father's death.
My next publication was an accidental sally of love and resentment;
of my reverence for modest genius, and my aversion for insolent
pedantry. The sixth book of the AEneid is the most pleasing and
perfect composition of Latin poetry. The descent of AEneas and the
Sibyl to the infernal regions, to the world of spirits, expands an
awful and boundless prospect, from the nocturnal gloom of the
Cumaean grot,
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram,
to the meridian brightness of the Elysian fields;
Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit
Purpureo--
from the dreams of simple Nature, to the dreams, alas! of Egyptian
theology, and the philosophy of the Greeks. But the final
dismission of the hero through the ivory gate, whence
Falsa ad coelum mittunt insomnia manes,
seems to dissolve the whole enchantment, and leaves the reader in a
state of cold and anxious scepticism. This most lame and impotent
conclusion has been variously imputed to the taste or irreligion of
Virgil; but, according to the more elaborate interpretation of
Bishop Warburton, the descent to hell is not a false, but a mimic
scene; which represents the initiation of AEneas, in the character
of a law-giver, to the Eleusinian mysteries. This hypothesis, a
singular chapter in the Divine Legation of Moses, had been admitted
by many as true; it was praised by all as ingenious; nor had it been
exposed, in a space of thirty years, to a fair and critical
discussion. The learning and the abilities of the author had raised
him to a just eminence; but he reigned the dictator and tyrant of
the world of literature. The real merit of Warburton was degraded
by the pride and presumption with which he pronounced his infallible
decrees; in his polemic writings he lashed his antagonists without
mercy or moderation; and his servile flatterers, (see the base and
malignant Essay on the Delicacy of Friendship,) exalting the master
critic far above Aristotle and Longinus, assaulted every modest
dissenter who refused to consult the oracle, and to adore the idol.
In a land of liberty, such despotism must provoke a general
opposition, and the zeal of opposition is seldom candid or
impartial. A late professor of Oxford, (Dr. Lowth,) in a pointed
and polished epistle, (Aug. 31, 1765,) defended himself, and
attacked the Bishop; and, whatsoever might be the merits of an
insignificant controversy, his victory was clearly established by
the silent confusion of Warburton and his slaves. I too, without
any private offence, was ambitious of breaking a lance against the
giant's shield; and in the beginning of the year 1770, my Critical
Observations on the Sixth Book of the AEneid were sent, without my
name, to the press. In this short Essay, my first English
publication, I aimed my strokes against the person and the
hypothesis of Bishop Warburton. I proved, at least to my own
satisfaction, that the ancient lawgivers did not invent the
mysteries, and that AEneas was never invested with the office of
lawgiver: that there is not any argument, any circumstance, which
can melt a fable into allegory, or remove the scene from the Lake
Avernus to the Temple of Ceres: that such a wild supposition is
equally injurious to the poet and the man: that if Virgil was not
initiated he could not, if he were, he would not, reveal the secrets
of the initiation: that the anathema of Horace (vetabo qui Cereris
sacrum vulgarit, &c.) at once attests his own ignorance and the
innocence of his friend. As the Bishop of Gloucester and his party
maintained a discreet silence, my critical disquisition was soon
lost among the pamphlets of the day; but the public coldness was
overbalanced to my feelings by the weighty approbation of the last
and best editor of Virgil, Professor Heyne of Gottingen, who
acquiesces in my confutation, and styles the unknown author, doctus
- - - et elegantissimus Britannus. But I cannot resist the
temptation of transcribing the favourable judgment of Mr. Hayley,
himself a poet and a scholar "An intricate hypothesis, twisted into
a long and laboured chain of quotation and argument, the
Dissertation on the Sixth Book of Virgil, remained some time
unrefuted. - - - At length, a superior, but anonymous, critic
arose, who, in one of the most judicious and spirited essays that
our nation has produced, on a point of classical literature,
completely overturned this ill-founded edifice, and exposed the
arrogance and futility of its assuming architect." He even
condescends to justify an acrimony of style, which had been gently
blamed by the more unbiassed German; "Paullo acrius quam velis - - -
perstrinxit." But I cannot forgive myself the contemptuous
treatment of a span who, with all his faults, was entitled to my
esteem; [Note: The Divine Legation of Moses is a monument, already
crumbling in the dust, of the vigour and weakness of the human mind.
If Warburton's new argument proved anything, it would be a
demonstration against the legislator, who left his people without
the knowledge of a future state. But some episodes of the work, on
the Greek philosophy, the hieroglyphics of Egypt, &c. are entitled
to the praise of learning, imagination, and discernment.] and I can
less forgive, in a personal attack, the cowardly concealment of my
name and character.
In the fifteen years between my Essay on the Study of Literature and
the first volume of the Decline and Fall, (1761-1776,) this
criticism on Warburton, and some articles in the journal, were my
sole publications. It is more especially incumbent on me to mark
the employment, or to confess the waste of time, from my travels to
my father's death, an interval in which I was not diverted by any
professional duties from the labours and pleasures of a studious
life. 1. As soon as I was released from the fruitless task of the
Swiss revolutions, (1768,) I began gradually to advance from the
wish to the hope, from the hope to the design, from the design to
the execution, of my historical work, of whose limits and extent I
had yet a very inadequate notion. The Classics, as low as Tacitus,
the younger Pliny, and Juvenal, were my old and familiar companions.
I insensibly plunged into the ocean of the Augustan history; and in
the descending series I investigated, with my pen almost always in
my hand, the original records, both Greek and Latin, from Dion
Cassius to Ammianus Marcellinus, from the reign of Trajan to the
last age of the Western Caesars. The subsidiary rays of medals, and
inscriptions of geography and chronology, were thrown on their
proper objects; and I applied the collections of Tillemont, whose
inimitable accuracy almost assumes the character of genius, to fix
and arrange within my reach the loose and scattered atoms of
historical information. Through the darkness of the middle ages I
explored my way in the Annals and Antiquities of Italy of the
learned Muratori; and diligently compared them with the parallel or
transverse lines of Sigonius and Maffei, Baronius and Pagi, till I
almost grasped the ruins of Rome in the fourteenth century, without
suspecting that this final chapter must be attained by the labour of
six quartos and twenty years. Among the books which I purchased,
the Theodocian Code, with the commentary of James Godefroy, must be
gratefully remembered. I used it (and much I used it) as a work of
history, rather than of jurisprudence: but in every light it may be
considered as a full and capacious repository of the political state
of the empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. As I believed, and
as I still believe, that the propagation of the Gospel, and the
triumph of the church, are inseparably connected with the decline of
the Roman monarchy, I weighed the causes and effects of the
revolution, and contrasted the narratives and apologies of the
Christians themselves, with the glances of candour or enmity which
the Pagans have cast on the rising sects, The Jewish and Heathen
testimonies, as they are collected and illustrated by Dr. Lardner,
directed, without superseding, my search of the originals; and in an
ample dissertation on the miraculous darkness of the passion, I
privately withdrew my conclusions from the silence of an unbelieving
age. I have assembled the preparatory studies, directly or
indirectly relative to my history; but, in strict equity, they must
be spread beyond this period of my life, over the two summers (1771
and 1772) that elapsed between my father's death and my settlement
in London. 2. In a free conversation with books and men, it would
be endless to enumerate the names and characters of all who are
introduced to our acquaintance; but in this general acquaintance we
may select the degrees of friendship and esteem, according to the
wise maxim, Multum legere potius quam multa. I reviewed, again and
again, the immortal works of the French and English, the Latin and
Italian classics. My Greek studies (though less assiduous than I
designed) maintained and extended my knowledge of that incomparable
idiom. Homer and Xenophon were still my favourite authors; and I
had almost prepared for the press an Essay on the Cyropoedia, which,
in my own judgment, is not unhappily laboured. After a certain age,
the new publications of merit are the sole food of the many; and the
must austere student will be often tempted to break the line, for
the sake of indulging his own curiosity, and of providing the topics
of fashionable currency. A more respectable motive maybe assigned
for the third perusal of Blackstone's Commentaries, and a copious
and critical abstract of that English work was my first serious
production in my native language. 3. My literary leisure was much
less complete and independent than it might appear to the eye of a
stranger. In the hurry of London I was destitute of books; in the
solitude of Hampshire I was not master of my time. My quiet was
gradually disturbed by our domestic anxiety, and I should be ashamed
of my unfeeling philosophy, had I found much time or taste for study
in the last fatal summer (1770) of my father's decay and
dissolution.
The disembodying of the militia at the close of the war (1763) had
restored the Major (a new Cincinnatus) to a life of agriculture.
His labours were useful, his pleasures innocent, his wishes
moderate; and my father seemed to enjoy the state of happiness which
is celebrated by poets and philosophers, as the most agreeable to
nature, and the least accessible to fortune.
Beatus ille, qui procul negotiis
(Ut prisca gens mortalium)
Paterna rura bubus exercet suis,
Solutus omni foenore.
HOR. Epod. ii.
Like the first mortals, blest is he,
From debts, and usury, and business free,
With his own team who ploughs the soil,
Which grateful once confessed his father's toil.
FRANCIS.