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 not always wise, however, either for himself or his country; for he became deeply involved in the South Sea Scheme, in the disastrous collapse of which (1720) he lost the ample wealth he had amassed. As a director of the company, moreover, he was suspected of fraudulent complicity, taken into custody, and heavily fined; but £10,000 was allowed him out of the wreck of his estate, and with this his skill and enterprise soon constructed a second fortune. He died at Putney in 1736, leaving the bulk of his property to his two daughters-nearly disinheriting his only son, the father of the historian, for having married against his wishes. This son (by name Edward) was educated at Westminster and Cambridge, but never took a degree, travelled, became member of Parliament, first for Petersfield (1734), then for Southampton (1741), joined the party against Sir Robert Walpole, and (as his son confesses, not much to his father's honour) was animated in so doing by "private revenge" against the supposed "oppressor" of his family in the South Sea affair. If so, revenge, as usual, was blind; for Walpole had sought rather to moderate than to inflame public feeling against the projectors.

The historian was born at Putney, Surrey, April 27 (Old Style), 1737. His mother, Judith Porten, was the daughter of a London merchant. He was the eldest of a family of six sons and a daughter, and the only one who survived childhood; his own life in youth hung by so mere a thread as to be again and again despaired of. His mother, between domestic cares and constant infirmities (which, how ever, did not prevent an occasional plunge into fashionable dissipation in compliance with her husband's wishes), did but little for him. The "true mother of his mind as well as of his health ” was a maiden aunt-Catherine Porten by name with respect to whom he expresses himself in language of the most grateful remembrance. "Many anxious and solitary days," says Gibbon, “did she consume with patient trial of every mode of relief and amusement. Many wakeful nights did she sit by my bedside in tremb ling expectation that each hour would be my last." As circumstances allowed, she appears to have taught him reading, writing, and arithmetic-acquisitions made with so little of remembered pain that "were not the error corrected by analogy," he says, "I should be tempted to conceive them as innate." At seven he was committed for eighteen months to the care of a private tutor, John Kirkby by name, and the author, among other things, of a "philosophical fiction," entitled the Life of Automathes. Of Kirkby, from whom he learned the rudiments of English and Latin grammar, he speaks gratefully, and doubtless truly, so far as he could trust the impressions of childhood. With reference to Automathes he is much more reserved in his praise, denying alike its originality, its depth, and its elegance; but, he adds, "the book is not devoid of entertainment or in

straction."

In his ninth year (1746), during a "lucid interval of comparative health," he was sent to a school at Kingstonupon-Thames; but his former infirmities soon returned, and his progress, by his own confession, was slow and unsatisfactory. "My timid reserve was astonished by the crowd and tumult of the school; the want of strength and activity disqualified me for the sports of the play-field.. By the common methods of discipline, at the expense

1 The celebrated William Law had been for some time the private tator of this Edward Gibbon, who is supposed to have been the original of the rather clever sketch of "Flatus" in the Serious Call

of many tears and some blood, I purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax," but manifestly, in his own opinion, the Arabian Nights, Pope's Homer, and Dryden's Virgil, eagerly read, had at this period exercised a much more powerful influence on his intellectual development than Phædrus and Cornelius Nepos, "painfully construed and darkly understood."

In December 1747 his mother died, and he was taken home. After a short time his father removed to the "rustic solitude" of Buriton (Hants), but young Gibbon lived chiefly at the house of his maternal grandfather, at Putney, where, under the care of his devoted aunt, he developed, he tells us, that passionate love of reading "which he would not exchange for all the treasures of India," and where his mind received its most decided stimulus. Of 1748 he says, "This year, the twelfth of my age, I shall note as the most propitious to the growth of my intellectual stature." After detailing the circumstances which unlocked for him the door of his grandfather's "tolerable library," he says, "I turned over many English pages of poetry and romance, of history and travels. Where a title attracted my eye, without fear or awe I snatched the volume from the shelf." In 1749, in his twelfth year, he was sent to Westminster, still residing, however, with his aunt, who, rendered destitute by her father's bankruptcy, but unwilling to live a life of dependence, had opened a boarding-house for Westminster school. Here in the course of two years (1749-50), interrupted by danger and debility, he "painfully climbed into the third form;" but it was left to his riper age to "acquire the beauties of the Latin and the rudiments of the Greek tongue.' The continual attacks of sickness which had retarded his progress induced his aunt, by medical advice, to take him to Bath; but the mineral waters had no effect. He then resided for a time in the house of a physician at Winchester; the physician did as little as the mineral waters; and, after a further trial of Bath, he once more returned to Putney, and made a last futile attempt to study at Westminster. Finally, it was concluded that he would never be able to encounter the discipline of a school; and casual instructors, at various times and places, were provided for him. Meanwhile his indiscriminate appetite for reading had begun to fix itself more and more decidedly upon history; and the list of historical works devoured by him during this period of chronic ill-health is simply astonishing. It included, besides Hearne's Ductor Historicus and the successive volumes of the Universal History, which was then in course of publication, Littlebury's Herodotus, Spelman's Xenophon, Gordon's Tacitus, an anonymous translation of Procopius; "many crude lumps of Speed, Rapin, Mezeray, Davila, Machiavel, Father Paul, Bower, &c., were hastily gulped. I devoured them like so many novels; and I swallowed with the same voracious appetite the descriptions of India and China, of Mexico and Peru." His first introduction to the historic scenes the study of which afterwards formed the passion of his life took place in 1751, when, while along with his father visiting a friend in Wiltshire, he discovered in the library "a common book, the continuation of Echard's Roman History.” "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." Soon afterwards his fancy kindled with the first glimpses into Oriental history, the wild "barbaric" charm of which he never ceased to feel. Ockley's book on the Saracens "first opened his eyes" to the striking career of Mahomet and his hordes; and with his characteristic ardour of literary research, after exhausting all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the

Tartars and Turks, he forthwith plunged into the French | of D'Herbelot, and the Latin of Pocock's version of Abulfaragius, sometimes understanding them, but oftener only guessing their meaning. He soon learned to call to his aid the subsidiary sciences of geography and chronology, and before he was quite capable of reading them had already attempted to weigh in his childish balance the competing systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of Marsham and Newton. 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 tells us "nature displayed in his favour her mysterious energies," and all his infirmities suddenly vanished. Thenceforward, while never possessing or abusing the insolence of health, he could say "few persons have been more exempt from real or imaginary ills." His unexpected recovery revived his father's hopes for his education, hitherto so much neglected if judged by ordinary standards; and accordingly in January 1752 he was placed at Esher, Surrey, under the care of Dr Francis, the well known translator of Horace. 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, 3d 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 school-boy might be ashamed." And indeed his huge wallet of scraps stood him in little stead at the trim banquets to which he was invited at Oxford, while the wandering habits by which he had filled it absolutely unfitted him to be a guest. He was not well grounded in any of the elementary branches, which are essential to university studies, and to all success in their prosecution. It was natural therefore that he should dislike the university, and as natural that the university should dislike him. Many of his complaints of the system were certainly just; but it may be doubted whether any university system would have been profitable to him, considering his antecedents. He complains especially of his tutors, and in one case with abundant reason; but, by his own confession, they might have recriminated with justice, for he indulged in gay society, and kept late hours. His observations, however, on the defects of the English university system, some of which have only very recently been removed, are acute and well worth pondering, however little relevant to his own case. He remained at Magdalen about fourteen months. "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. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life."

But thus "idle" though he may have been as a "student," he already meditated authorship. In the first long vacation during which he, doubtless with some sarcasm, says that "his taste for books began to revive"--he contemplated a treatise on the age of Sesostris, in which (and it was characteristic) his chief object was to investigate not so much the events as the probable epoch of the reign of that semi-mythical monarch, whom he was inclined to regard as having been contemporary with Solomon. Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I

resolved to write a book;" but the discovery of his own weakness, he adds, was the first symptom of taste. On his first return to Oxford the work was "wisely relinquished," and never afterwards resumed. The most memorable incident, however, in Gibbon's stay at Oxford was his temporary conversion to the doctrines of the church of Rome. The bold criticism of Middleton's recently (1749) published Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church, appears to have given the first shock to his Protestantism, not indeed by destroying his previous belief that the gift of miraculous powers had continued to subsist in the church during the first four or five centuries of Christianity, but by con-1 vincing him that within the same period most of the leading doctrines of popery had been already introduced both in theory and in practice. At this stage he was introduced by a friend (Mr Molesworth) to Bossuet's Variations of Protestantism, and Exposition of Catholic Doctrine (see Gibbon, Decline and Fall, c. xv., note 79). "These works," says he, "achieved my conversion, and I surely fell by a noble hand." In bringing about this "fall," however, Parsons the Jesuit appears to have had a considerable share; at least Lord Sheffield has recorded that on the only occasion on which Gibbon talked with him on the subject he imputed the change in his religious views principally to that vigorous writer, who, in his opinion, had urged all the best arguments in favour of Roman Catholicism. But be this as it may, he had no sooner adopted his new creed than he resolved to profess it; CC a momentary glow of enthusiasm" had raised him above all temporal considerations, and accordingly, on June 8, 1753, he records that having "privately abjured the heresies" of his childhood before a Catholic priest of the name of Baker, a Jesuit, in London, he announced the same to his father in an elaborate controversial epistle which his spiritual adviser much approved, and which he himself afterwards described to Lord Sheffield as having been "written with all the pomp, the dignity, and self-satisfaction of a martyr."

The elder Gibbon heard with indignant surprise of this act of juvenile apostasy, and, indiscreetly giving vent to his wrath, precipitated the expulsion of his son from Oxford, a punishment which the culprit, in after years at least, found no cause to deplore. In his Memoirs he speaks of the results of his "childish revolt against the religion of his country" with undisguised self-gratulation. It had de livered him for ever from the "port and prejudice" of the university, and led him into the bright paths of philosophic freedom. That his conversion was sincere at the time, that it marked a real if but a transitory phase of genuine religious conviction, we have no reason to doubt, notwithstanding the scepticism he has himself expressed. "To my present feelings it seems incredible that I should ever believe that I believed in transubstantiation," he indeed declares; but his incredulous astonishment is not unmixed with undoubting pride. "I could not blush that my tender mind was entangled in the sophistry which had reduced the acute and manly understandings of a Chillingworth or a Bayle." Nor is the sincerity of the Catholicism he professed in these boyish days in any way discredited by the fact of his subsequent lack of religion. Indeed, as one of the acutest and most sympathetic of his critics has remarked, the deep and settled grudge he has betrayed towards every form of Christian belief, in all the writings of his maturity, may be taken as evidence that he had at one time.experienced in his own person at least some of the painful workings of a positive faith.

But little time was lost by the elder Gibbon in the formation of a new plan of education for his son, and in devising some method which if possible might effect the cure of his "spiritual malady." The result of deliberation, aided by the

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." 1.

In 1758 he returned with mingled joy and regret to England, and was kindly received at home, But he found a stepmother there; and this apparition on his father's hearth at first rather appalled him. The cordial and gentle manners of Mrs Gibbon, however, and her unremitting care for his happiness, won him from his first prejudices, and gave her a permanent place in his esteem and affection. He seems to have been much indulged, and to have led a very pleasant life of it; he pleased himself in moderate excursions, frequented the theatre, mingled, though not very often, in society; was sometimes a little extravagant, and sometimes a little dissipated, but never lost the benefits of his Lausanne exile; and easily settled into a sober, dis: creet, calculating Epicurean philosopher, who sought the summum bonum of man in temperate, regulated, and elevated pleasure. The first two years after his return to England he spent principally at his father's country seat at Buriton, in Hampshire, only nine months being given to the metropolis. He has left an amusing account of his employments in the country, where his love of study was at once inflamed by a large and unwonted command of books and checked by the necessary interruptions of his otherwise happy domestic life. After breakfast "he was expected," he says, to spend an hour with Mrs Gibbon; after tea his father claimed his conversation; in the midst of an interesting work he was often called down to entertain idle visitors; and, worst of all, he was periodically compelled to return the well-meant compliments. He mentions that he dreaded the "recurrence of the full moon," which was the period generally selected for the more convenient accomplishment of such formidable excursions.

His father's library, though large in comparison with that he commanded at Lausanne, contained, he says, "much trash;" but a gradual process of reconstruction transformed it at length into that "numerous and select" library which was the foundation of his works, and the best comfort of bis life both at home and abroad." No sooner had he returned home than he began the work of accumulation, and records that, on the receipt of his first quarter's allowance, a large share was appropriated to his literary wants. "He could never forget," he declares, "the joy with which he exchanged a bank note of twenty pounds for the twenty volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions," an Academy which has been well characterized (by SainteBeuve) as Gibbon's intellectual fatherland. It may not be uninteresting here to note the principles which guided him both now and afterwards in his literary purchases. "I am not conscious," says he, "of having ever bought a book from a motive of ostentation; every volume, before it was deposited on the shelf, was either read or sufficiently examined"; he also mentions that he soon adopted the, tolerating maxim of the elder Pliny, that no book is ever so bad as to be absolutely good for nothing.

In London he seems to have seen but little select society, -partly from his father's taste, "which had always preferred the highest and the lowest company," and partly from his own reserve and timidity, increased by his foreign education, which had made English habits unfamiliar, and the very language in some degree strange. And thus he was led to draw that interesting picture of the literary recluse among the crowds of London: "While coaches were rattling through Bond Street, I have passed many a solitary evening in my lodging with my books. My studies were

1 The affair, however, was not finally broken off till 1763. Mdlle. Curchod soon afterwards became the wife of Necker, the famous financier; and Gibbon and the Neckers frequently afterwards met on terms of mutual friendship and esteem.

sometimes interrupted with a sigh, which I breathed towards Lausanne; and on the approach of spring I with drew without reluctance from the noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without plea sure." He renewed former acquaintance, however, with the "poet" Mallet, and through him gained access to Lady Hervey's circle, where a congenial admiration, not to say affectation, of French manners and literature made him a welcome guest. It ought to be added that in each of the twenty-five years of his subsequent acquaintance with London "the prospect gradually brightened," and his social as well as his intellectual qualities secured him a wide circle of friends. In one respect Mallet gave him good counsel in those early days. He advised him to addict himself tc 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. Of his admiration of Hume's style, of its nameless grace of simple elegance, he has left us a strong expression, when he tells us that it often compelled him to close the historian's volumes with a mixed sensation of delight and despair.

In 1761 Gibbon, at the age of twenty-four, after many delays, and with many flutterings of hope and fear, gave to the world, in French, his maiden publication, an Essai sur l'Étude de la Littérature, which he had composed two years before. It was published partly in compliance with his father's wishes, who thought that the proof of some literary talent might introduce him favourably to public notice, and secure the recommendation of his friends for some appointment in connexion with the mission of the English plenipotentiaries to the congress at Augsburg which was at that time in contemplation. But in yielding to paternal authority, Gibbon frankly owns that he " complied, like a pious son, with the wish of his own heart."

The subject of this youthful effort was suggested, its author says, by a refinement of vanity-"the desire of justifying and praising the object of a favourite pursuit," namely, the study of ancient literature. Partly owing to its being written in French, partly to its character, the Essai excited more attention abroad than at home. Gibbon has criticized it with the utmost frankness, not to say severity; but, after every abatement, it is unquestionably a surprising effort for a mind so young, and contains many thoughts which would not have disgraced a thinker or a scholar of much maturer age. His account of its first reception and subsequent fortunes in England deserves to be cited as a curious piece of literary history. "In England," he says, "it was received with cold indifference, little read, and speedily forgotten. A small impression was slowly dispersed; the bookseller murmured, and the author (had his feelings been more exquisite) might have wept over the blunders and baldness of the English translation. The publication of my history fifteen years afterwards revived the memory of my first performance, and the essay was eagerly sought in the shops. But I refused the permission which Becket solicited of reprinting it; the public curiosity was imperfectly satisfied by a pirated copy of the bookseliers of Dublin; and when a copy of the original edition has been discovered in a sale, the primitive value of half-a-crown has risen to the fanciful price of a guinea or thirty shillings."2

Sometime before the publication of the essay, Gibbon

The Essai, in a good English translation, now appears in the Miscellaneous Works. Villemain finds in it " peu de vues, nulle originalité surtout, mais une grande passion littéraire, l'amour des recherches savantes et du beau langage." Sainte-Beuve's criticism is almost identical with Gibbon's own; but though he finds that "La