ERTSON (1721-1793), distinguished, like him, by the eloquence of his narrative, by the luminous dissertations on great historical questions introduced into his works, by the picturesque power of delineating characters and events, and also by a singular dignity and purity of style, which is almost free from Scotticisms. His personal career was that of a Presbyterian pastor, and he was highly celebrated for his eloquence in the pulpit. In 1762 he was elected Principal of the University of Edinburgh, where he had received his education, and he exhibited remarkable powers as a speaker and debater in the Scottish General Assembly of Divines. He produced three great historical works, the History of Scotland, embracing the reigns of the unfortunate Mary and of her son James VI. down to the accession of the latter to the throne of England, the History of the Reign of Charles V., and the History of the Discovery, and first Colonization by the Spaniards, of America. These three productions appeared respectively in 1759, 1769, and 1777.* In all of them we perceive a rich and melodious though somewhat artificial style, great though not always accurate research, and a strong power of vivid and pathetic description. The History of Scotland is perhaps the work most honorable to Robertson's genius, for in the other two the grandeur and dramatic interest of the subject were such that, in the hands even of an inferior author, the reader's curiosity could not but be excited and gratified. Moreover, though many of the general disquisitions prefixed to or introduced in Robertson's history are marked by largeness of view and lucidity of arrangement, his account of many episodes of the life of Charles V., and in particular of his retirement to San Yuste, contains much of the romantic and theatrical inaccuracy which recent investigations have dispelled: and in this work, as well as in the wondrous story of Columbus and the Conquestadors, he either knew not or neglected vast stores of information which would have thrown a very different light upon the characters and events he had to portray. This assertion will be amply proved by comparing Robertson's account of these great events with the more recent labors of Prescott, Motley, and others. In spite of these defects, Robertson's name will always retain an honorable place among the prose-writers and historians of England. § 3. But by far the greatest name in English historical literature indeed one of the very foremost names in all historical literature — is that of EDWARD GIBBON (1737-1794). Descended from an ancient family, he was born at Putney near London in 1737, and was the grandson of a merchant of large fortune. His health, during his boyhood and early youth, was exceedingly precarious, and he owed the gradual fortifying of his constitution, and the first development of his intellectual faculties, to the more than maternal care of an aunt, Catherine Porten. His education was at first neglected, but he gradually acquired an insatiable appetite for reading of all kinds, which at length * Robertson also published, in 1791, an Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Antients had of India; a work of great merit, though now superseded by more recent investigations. concentrated itself upon historical literature. He passed a short time at Westminster school, and was intrusted to several successive private tutors, but at the early age of fifteen was placed at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he remained only fourteen months, still pursuing his studies in a vague and desultory manner. An ardent fit of controversial reading, and the arguments he found in Pascal and Bossuet, overthrew his attachment to the doctrines of Protestantism, and on his formally embracing the Catholic faith, his father, shocked at such apostasy, sent him to Lausanne, where he was placed under the care of M. Pavillard, an eminent Swiss theologian. The arguments of his tutor so far prevailed as to induce him to re-enter the Protestant Church, though his religious belief from this time forward was little more than a sort of philosophical Deism. In Switzerland, however, he commenced that course of regular and systematic study, which gradually filled his mind with immeasurable stores of sacred and profane learning: and here too his mind acquired that strong sympathy with French modes of thought that make him the least national of all our great authors. While in Switzerland he conceived a passion for Susanne Curchod, afterwards the wife of Necker, and the mother of Madame de Staël; but Gibbon's sensibility was never very ardent, and he acquiesced, with decent readiness, in the refusal of his father to permit the union. Returning to England, he passed some time in the frivolous pleasures of a young gentleman of fortune; but without relaxing in his intense diligence of study, which he found means to maintain even during the five years he passed in military service as captain of the Hampshire militia. It was at this period that he gave to the world the first-fruits of his pen in the excellent little essay, written in French, on the Study of Literature. Between 1763 and 1765 he travelled over France, Switzerland, and Italy, and while at Rome, in 1764, the first idea of writing the history of the Decline and Fall of the mighty empire first flashed upon his mind. He has given a most striking and picturesque description of the moments of the generation and the completion of his great work. The sudden shock of conception given amid the sunset ruins of the Capitol, "while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter," found its picturesque consummation in the "valley of acacias" by the moonlit lake of Geneva in 1787. Gibbon returned to England in 1765, and set strenuously to work on the composition of his history, the first volume of which appeared in the following year, and was received not only with the applause of the learned, but with universal popularity among the fashionable world and the ladies. The praises of Hume found an echo in the gayest and most frivolous circles. At various intervals appeared the successive volumes, each of which excited the admiration and enthusiasm which the grandeur of the work was so calculated to inspire. Gibbon has related the hesitation, and almost terror, with which the immense extent and difficulty of his enterprise at first filled him, and the fastidious care with which he revised and re-revised the opening chapters, the first of which he wrote thrice, and the second twice over, before he was satisfied with the style; but as he advanced, the various parts of his gigantic subject took form and symmetry, and the increasing facility of composition enabled him to advance with steady speed. With the year 1774 begins Gibbon's political career: he sat in several successive Parliaments as member for Liskeard, and supported, with a silent vote for both modesty and vanity prevented him from trying his fortune as a speaker · the ministry, during the whole course of the American War, down to the formation of the Coalition Cabinet. Lord North rewarded his constant adhesion with the post of one of the Lords Commissioners of Trade, which Gibbon enjoyed for about three years, till the abolition of the office in 1782. In 1783 Gibbon determined to settle altogether at Lausanne. He established himself in the comfortable house which he had purchased on the lovely shore of Lake Leman, a spot forever memorable from the residence of this great genius. This was perhaps the happiest part of his life; he was able to devote himself in tranquillity to his mighty task, and his leisure hours were enlivened with intellectual society and the companionship of his friend Deyverdun. At length his residence at Lausanne becoming disagreeable in consequence of the agitation which heralded the outbreak of the French Revolution, he returned to London in 1793, and died there in the following year. The personal character of Gibbon was rather respectable than attractive. Of a cold and somewhat selfish disposition, he played a prominent part in the brilliant intellectual circle which surrounded Burke and Johnson; his immense acquirements and refined manners rendered his conversation interesting and valuable, and his vanity, though concealed by good breeding and knowledge of the world, was not incompatible with generosity and benevolence. § 4. His History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is undoubtedly one of the greatest monuments of industry and genius. The task he undertook, to give a connected narrative of one of the most eventful periods in the annals of the world, -- was colossal. It embraced, exclusive of the introductory sketch of Roman history from the time of Augustus, of itself a noble monument of philosophical research, a period of upwards of thirteen centuries, that is, from about 180 to 1453 A. D. This immense space included not only the manhood and the decrepitude of the Roman Empire, but the irruption of the Barbarian nations, the establishment of the Byzantine power, the reorganization of the European nations, the foundation of the religious and political system of Mahometanism, and the Crusades. The enormous scope of the undertaking rendered indispensable not only the most vast and accurate knowledge of the whole range of classical, Byzantine, mediæval, and Oriental literature, but such a largeness of view as should give a clear and philosophical account of some of the greatest religious and social changes that have ever modified the destinies of our race; the rise of Christianity, the Mussulman dominion, and the institutions of Feudalism and Chivalry. Nor was the complexity of the subject less formidable than its extent; while the materials for much of its treatment were to be painfully sifted from the rubbish of the Byzantine annalists, and the wild exaggerations of the Eastern chroniclers. From this immense chaos were to be deduced light, order, and regularity, and the historian was to be familiar with the whole range of philosophy, science, politics, and war. Gibbon has confessed that his experience of parliamentary tactics and the knowledge of military affairs which he had acquired in the House of Commons and in the Hampshire militia, had been of signal service to him in describing the deliberations of senates and the movements of immense armies; for man is everywhere the same, and the historian possessed the rare art of bringing home to our sympathies and understanding the sentiments and actions of remote ages and distant peoples. Gibbon 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 described him as "Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer, But the accusations of having intentionally distorted facts or garbled authorities he has refuted in the Vindication in which he replied to his opponents. In the full and complete references and quotations with which he scrupulously fortifies his assertions and his deductions, we see a panoply which offers few weak places to the adversary. The deliberate opinion of Guizot, whom no one can accuse of indifference to religion, will be conclusive as to Gibbon's merit on this point. His style is remarkably pompous, elaborate, and sonorous: originally artificial, it had gradually become the natural garb of his thoughts. In the antithetical and epigrammatic structure of his phrases, and in the immense preponderance of the Latin over the Teutonic element in his diction, Gibbon is the least English of all our writers of the first class: and the ease with which whole pages of his writings may be translated, almost without a change of words or grammar, into French, render credible the statement of his having for some time hesitated whether to compose his work in that language or his mother-tongue. He was so fastidious in his search after elegance, that to avoid the repetition, at close intervals, of a name or event, he is apt, each time it occurs after the first, to express it by a periphrasis or an incidental allusion, to understand which often demands from the reader a degree of knowledge which few readers possess, and this is sometimes the cause of obscurity. His descriptions of events, as of battles, of nations, of individual characters, are wonderfully life-like and animated; and his chief sin against good taste is a somewhat too gorgeous and highlycolored tone. His imagination was sensuous, and he dwells with greater enthusiasm upon material grandeur than upon moral elevation; for his moral susceptibilities do not appear of a very lofty order. He had in common with Voltaire a peculiar and most offensive delight in dwelling upon scandalous and immoral stories, and this tendency, which in Voltaire's light and fleering style is less repulsive, becomes doubly odious when exhibited in combination with Gibbon's solemn and majestic language. § 5. Perhaps the most striking figure in the social and literary history of this period is that of SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784). His career was eminently that of a man of letters; and the slow and laborious efforts by which, in spite of every obstacle, personal as well as material, he raised himself to the highest intellectual supremacy present a spectacle equally instructive to us and honorable to him. He was born in 1709, the son of a learned, but poor and struggling provincial bookseller in Lichfield; and he exhibited, from his very childhood, the same singular union of mental power and constitutional indolence, ambition and hypochondriacal gloom, which distinguished him through life. He was disfigured and half blinded by a scrofulous disorder, which seamed and deformed a face and figure naturally imposing, and at the same time afflicted him with strange and involuntary contortions, reacting also upon his mind and temper, and making him sombre, despondent, and irritable. In the various humble seminaries, where he received his early education, he unfailingly took the first place; and being assisted by a benevolent patron with the means of studying at the University, he carried to Pembroke College, Oxford, an amount of scholarship very rare at his age. Here he remained about three years, remarkable for the roughness and uncouthness of his manners, and no less for his wit and insubordination, as well as for that sturdy spirit of independence which made him reject with indignation any offer of assistance. The story of his throwing away a pair of new shoes, which some one, pitying the poverty of the ragged student, had placed at his door, is striking, and even pathetic. His father's affairs being in hopeless confusion, and the promises of assistance not being fulfilled, he was obliged to leave the University without a degree; and receiving, at his father's death, only 207. as his share of the inheritance, he abandoned it to his mother's use, for he was ever a most dutiful and generous son, and entered upon the hard career of teacher and usher in various provincial schools. For success in this profession he was equally unfitted by his person, his nature, and the peculiar character of his mind and acquirements; and after unsuccessfully attempting to keep a school himself at Edial, near Lichfield, he began that tremendous struggle with labor and want, which |
