of the truth of the evangelic history were by no means deeply rooted in his mind. Indeed he soon became a confirmed sceptic. While at Lausanne he pursued a regular and steady course of study, and seems to have adopted the opinions which were so prevalent just before the outbreak of the first French revolution. Nor is this to be wondered at: his mind appears to have been strikingly similar in its principal features to the character of the Encyclopédiste intellect; the same acuteness and activity, the same confidence in its own powers, the same distrust of the virtue and disinterestedness of mankind, and the same tendency towards the actual and sensuous rather than the abstract and the ideal. In 1758 he returned to England, and gave the first fruit of his reading in a little essay, written in French, on the Study of Literature: and during great part of the war he held the commission of captain in a body of militia. Four years afterwards he again visited the continent, where he passed a considerable time in travelling through France and Italy, and it was during these wanderings that he first conceived the idea of his great work. The incident, so eventful in the annals of English literature, took place at Rome, October 15th, 1764, and is immortalised in his own picturesque words: "As I sat musing," he says, "amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind." gigantic a task was not to be executed, or even begun, without immense preparatory labour, and without the author passing through a period of uncertainty and vague agitation when determining upon the plan, the extent, the arrangement, and even the style of the work. He returned to England in 1765, and, on the death of his father, Gibbon, who had come into possession of an embarrassed fortune, ultimately entered upon a political career. During all this time his great plan was working and fermenting in his head, and he underwent those throes and struggles which genius ever feels in giving birth to a mighty and durable offspring. These he has related, and described how long it was ere his subject arranged itself before his mental eye in a definite form and with intelligible order and completeness: he has told us how often he was tempted to abandon in despair the accumulated materials of years of study; how he composed the first chapter three times, and the second and third twice over, ere he was satisfied with their effect. Such is the training of genius, such are the labours by which alone great productions can be created. But so Gibbon was elected in 1774 member of Parliament for the borough of Liskeard; but though he sat for many sessions in the House of Commons, he never ventured to take part in the debates: his knowledge and intellectual powers were very great, nor was he unconscious of his own gifts, but his taste was fastidious, and his habits were those rather of the man of letters than of the statesman. He sate, therefore, invariably silent, filled, as he says, by the good speakers with despair of imitation, and by the bad ones with the dread of failure and ridicule. In reward for his adherence to the ministerial party Lord North appointed him one of the Commissioners of Trade, so that this historian, like his illustrious contemporary Hume, occupied a place in the government of his country. The It was in 1776 that appeared the first volume of his History, and the book became instantly so popular that its success rather resembled that of some amusing work of fiction than of a grave and serious history. It was the talk and admiration of the day; the volume was found in the library of every reader, and in the dressing-room and boudoir of the fashionable and the fair. Gibbon was greeted with the warm and generous applauses of Hume, Robertson, and all the distinguished literary men of his day, both in England and abroad; and when we reflect upon the brilliancy and originality of the work itself, we can easily account for the delight with which it was received : even its faults were of a nature to impress and to attract. period which forms the subject of the work was one which, though fertile in splendid, impressive, and pathetic events, had never been studied or investigated by a genius sufficiently patient and enlightened to disentangle the contradictions and complexities of the barbarous historians in whose works alone the materials were to be found. The antecedent and subsequent epochs had been repeatedly discussed; but the long interval between the commencement of the decadence of Rome and the consummation of its ruin had remained, like some desolate border-country, unvisited and unexplored; it was a region of gloom and darkness-a twilight between the ancient and modern world. His genius was peculiarly calculated to give full effect to the grand but confused details of this astonishing picture, and his solemn, gorgeous, and rhetorical style was in happy harmony with the character of the times which he described. It would seem as if he had studied the writings of the Lower Empire till he had caught, perhaps involuntarily, something of their Asiatic splendour -the barbaric pearl and gold," which dazzles the imagination though it does not gratify the taste; and of which the writings of the Greek and Latin fathers give a striking example. We have said that Gibbon, like Hume, is one of the most dangerous enemies by whom the Christian faith was ever assailed-he was the more dangerous because he was insidious. The following is the plan of his tactics. He does not formally deny the evidence upon which is based the structure of Christianity, but he indirectly includes that system in the same category with the mythologies of paganism. The rapid spread of Christianity he explains by merely secondary causes; and in relating the disgraceful corruptions, persecutions, and superstitions which so soon supplanted the pure morality of the primitive Church, he leads the reader to consider these less as the results of human crime, folly, and ambition, than as the necessary consequences of the system itself. He either did not or would not distinguish between the parceque and quoique; and represents what is in reality an abuse as an inevitable consequence. Byron well describes him as 66 Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer, Moreover, though perpetually warmed by the grand or touching incidents he relates into noble bursts of eloquence and enthusiasm, he has no admiration for the struggles of Christian fortitude and the triumphs of Christian virtue. The same energy and virtue which, appearing in a heathen or a Mahomedan, fills his heart with fervour, and his lofty periods with a swelling grandeur, leaves him cold and impassible, or cavilling and contemptuous, when it is exhibited in the cause of Christianity. : In Gibbon's character there is also a peculiarity which, whether innate and natural or acquired from Voltaire and similar writers of that period, renders his writings dangerous to the young this is a peculiar filthiness of imagination, which seems to revel in objects and events of gross and sensual immorality. No sooner does he find occasion to relate a scandalous or obscene story (and the corruption of manners during the period which forms the subject of his history gives him but too many opportunities to indulge in this vein) than he seems to delineate it with a peculiar gusto and minuteness which is in the highest degree offensive. He does not hasten rapidly over such scenes, saying, with Dante, "Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa!" but he seems to take a perverse pleasure in dwelling on degrading images. Voltaire has much of this, and never omits an opportunity to introduce ideas not only sensual, but often physically disgusting; but in Voltaire these images are coloured by wit and sarcastic drollery, and are in harmony with the satiric petulance of his ridicule. In Gibbon the majestic solemnity of style, and the grave earnestness of the tone, render these offences against good taste exceedingly prominent and shocking. In 1781 were published the second and third volumes, and the three last in 1787. Gibbon, who has with a justifiable pride given us the anecdote of the circumstances attending the origin of his great work, has left us an equally minute and not less interesting record of his feelings at its conclusion:-"It was on the day, or rather 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 the 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." From Lausanne Gibbon again returned to England for a short time, but he came back again to Switzerland, where he remained till shortly before his death. Finding the society of Lausanne distracted by parties consequent upon the outbreak of the French Revolution, and induced by the death of Lord Sheffield, his most intimate friend, to return to London, in order to console and counsel the widow, he came back to his own country, and died in London in 1794. : With all its defects, Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' is a noble monument of genius and industry. The style is extraordinarily elevated and ornate, and resembles rather the antithetical tone of the French literature of the eighteenth century than an idiomatic English work. Indeed, so completely was Gibbon's mind saturated with French sympathies, that there is a tradition that he for some time hesitated whether his great work should be written in French or English. His narration is very clear, animated, and picturesque he brings before the reader's eye the persons and events which he describes; and wherever his scepticism and prejudices do not interfere, he gives a lively, penetrating, and natural account of the characters and motives of men. But his moral susceptibility was not very delicate, and he frequently lavishes on the external splendour of great actions that enthusiasm which should be reserved for the simple dignity of moral grandeur. His sympathies were somewhat theatrical; and though the general current of his narrative is exceedingly clear, his gorgeousness and measured pomp of language becomes fatiguing and oppressive. So great is his dread, too, of repeating the same word or name in the same page or at short intervals, that his expedients of finding a synonym are frequently productive of confusion and uncertainty in the reader. We cannot better conclude our remarks than by quoting the excellent and elaborate judgment of Guizot:-"After a first rapid perusal, which allowed me to feel nothing but the interest of a narrative. always animated, and, notwithstanding its extent and the variety of objects which it makes to pass before the view, always perspicuous, I entered upon a minute examination of the details of which it was composed; and the opinion which I then formed was, I confess, singularly severe. I discovered, in certain chapters, errors which appeared to me sufficiently important and numerous to make me believe that they had been written with extreme negligence; in others, I was struck with a certain tinge of partiality and prejudice, which imparted to the exposition of the facts that want of truth and justice which the English express by their happy term misrepresen tation. Some imperfect quotations, some passages omitted unintentionally or designedly, have cast a suspicion on the honesty of the author; and his violation of the first law of history-increased to my eyes by the prolonged attention with which I occupied myself with every phrase, every note, every reflection-caused me to form on the whole work a judgment far too rigorous. After having finished my labours, I allowed some time to elapse before I reviewed the whole. A second attentive and regular perusal of the entire work, of the notes of the author, and of those which I had thought it right to subjoin, showed me how much I had exaggerated the importance of the reproaches which Gibbon really deserved: I was struck with the same errors, the same partiality on certain subjects; but I had been far from doing adequate justice to the immensity of his researches, the variety of his knowledge, and, above all, to that truly philosophical discrimination which judges the past as it would judge the present; which does not permit itself to be blinded by the clouds which time gathers around the dead, and which prevent us from seeing that, under the toga as under the modern dress, in the senate as in our councils, men were what they still are, and that events took place eighteen centuries ago as they take place in our own days. I then felt that his book, in spite of its faults, will always be a noble work; and that we may correct his errors and combat his prejudices without ceasing to admit that few men have combined, if we are not to say in so high a degree, at least in a manner so complete and so well regulated, the necessary qualifications for a writer of history." CHAPTER XVI. THE TRANSITION SCHOOL. Landscape and Familiar Poetry-James Thomson-The Seasons-Episodes Castle of Indolence - Minor Works - Lyric Poetry-Thomas GrayThe Bard, and the Elegy-Collins and Shenstone-The SchoolmistressOssian-Chatterton and the Rowley Poems-William Cowper-George Crabbe-The Lowland Scots Dialect and Literature-Robert Burns. "THE less man really knows," says an eloquent and acute Russian writer, "the greater his contempt for the ordinary, for what surrounds him. A practical every-day truth appears to him a degra |