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NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
LONDON: METHUEN & CO.

1900

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PREFACE

66

IF, as Johnson said, there had been only three books "written by man that were wished longer by their readers," the eighteenth century was not to draw to its close without seeing a fourth added. With Don Quixote, The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, the Autobiography of Edward Gibbon was henceforth to rank as “a work whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day". It is indeed so short that it can be read by the light of a single pair of candles; it is so interesting in its subject, and so alluring in its turns of thought and its style, that in a second and a third reading it gives scarcely less pleasure than in the first. Among the books in which men have told the story of their own lives it stands in the front rank. It is a striking fact that one of the first of autobiographies and the first of biographies were written in the same years. Boswell was still working at his Life of Johnson when Gibbon began those memoirs from which his autobiography, in the form in which it was given to the world, was so skilfully pieced together. But a short time had gone by since Johnson had said that "he did not think that the life of any literary man in England had been well written". That reproach against our writers he himself did much to lessen by his Lives of Cowley and of Milton, of Dryden and of Pope. It was finally removed by two members of that famous club which he had helped to found. However weak was the end of the eighteenth

century in works of imagination, in one great branch of literature it faded nobly away. Both in the Life of Johnson and in the Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, it "left something so written to after-times as they should not willingly let it die". Another hundred years have gone by. Many Englishmen since then have written their lives; of many Englishmen the lives have been written by others. Each of these books, in its own class, still remains without a rival. Of each of them it may still be said: "Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere".

Admirable as is Gibbon's Autobiography in its present form, we cannot help speculating on the perfection which it might have attained had it been completed by the hands of the author. He was an accomplished artist, who both knew how to plan a stately temple, and how to give to every corner its utmost polish. Though he left his work imperfect, happily we have little need to exclaim with the poet :

Ah, who can raise that wand of magic power,

Or the lost clue regain?

The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower

Unfinished must remain.

The six sketches of his life which he left, covering as they more or less did every part of it, excepting a year or two at the close, were in each one of these divisions so highly wrought that by a skilful editor they could be dovetailed into a single work which should show few traces of incompleteness. Judicious selection was what was most needed, for Gibbon in his different sketches often travelled over the same ground. In the main part of his task there seems nothing wanting. "The review of my moral and literary character," he wrote, "is the most interesting to myself and to the public." That review he left so nearly perfect that even he could have improved it but little.

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