Page images
PDF
EPUB

EDWARD GIBBON.

IBBON has so well told the story | they now stand, were constructed.

of his life in his memorable Autobiography, that subsequent writers in their account of the man, including his editor, the persevering Milman, have had no other course to pursue than to follow closely the details of his narrative. The Autobiography is indeed an extraordinary production among the works of its class. Its style is charming, with just enough of that elevation which gives such peculiar emphasis to the author's great work to impart to ordinary incidents a certain indescribable animation which we can find nowhere more agreeably displayed. Written evidently with the consciousness of the value of his "History" to the world, it unfolds to us the processes of accident or study by which he gradually reached that great work. It was not till he felt that he had some claims upon the attention of the world by the completion of the History that he undertook the preparation of his personal memoir; and he proceeded in it with so much care that he left for his friend and literary executor, Lord Sheffield, no less than six different sketches of the work, all in his own handwriting. From all of these, the "Memoirs," as

Their motive is expressed in a few opening sentences, revealing at the start a certain pride of authorship and sense of the importance of the task; egotistical, of course, for to be successful in literary compositions one must be in love with his subject, so that a man who undertakes to write his autobiography should be first assured that he is in love with himself. If this were the only qualification, however, it must be admitted there would be few failures in productions of this class. "In the fifty-second year of my age," Gibbon commences, "after the completion of an arduous and successful work, I now propose to employ some moments of my leisure in reviewing the simple transactions of a private and literary life. Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of more serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative. The style shall be simple and familiar: but style is the image of character; and the habits of correct writing may produce, without labor or design, the appearance of art and study. My own amusement is my motive, and will be my reward: and if these sheets

are communicated to some discreet and indulgent friends, they will be secreted from the public eye till the author shall be removed beyond the reach of criticism or ridicule."

Following then this best authority, the historian himself, we ascend with him in the records of his ancestry to the eleventh century, when the Gibbons of Kent flourished in that old English county. One of the family was architect or castle-builder of King Edward III.; another, was captain of the English militia in the reign of Elizabeth. An alliance by marriage connected the historian, in the eleventh degree, with a Lord High Treasurer of England of the days of Henry VI., the historic Baron Say and Seale who was beheaded by the insurgents in the Kentish Rebellion, and who, in Shakespeare's play is reproached by Jack Cade with erecting a grammar school, setting printers at work, building a paper mill, and having men about him "who usually talk with a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear." "Our dramatic poet," writes the historian of the Roman Empire "is generally more attentive to character than to history; and I much fear that the art of printing was not introduced into England till several years after Lord Say's death: but of some of these meritorious crimes I should hope to find my ancestors guilty; and a man of letters may be proud of his descent from a patron and martyr of learning." At the beginning of the seventeenth century a branch of the family settled in London in mercantile life and prospered, Edward, the grandfather of the

historian, acquiring wealth as a draper and rising to a government appointment as one of the commissioners of the customs. Unhappily he became a director of the South Sea Company, and his previous fortune of sixty thousand pounds was lost in the wreck of that extraordinary speculation. Escaping from his creditors with a small allowance, he was however enabled by his energy to repair his losses and become again a man of consideration for his property. His son Edward was educated at Westminster School and at Cambridge, enjoyed the advantages of foreign travel, and on his return represented the tory interest in parliament as a borough member. He married the daughter of James Porten, a London merchant, and of this union, the first child, Edward, the subject of this notice, was born at the family estate at Putney, in the County of Surry, on the 27th of April, old style, 1737. So weak appeared the constitution of the child, that his father, to preserve the family designation, thought fit to call each of his five brothers who succeeded him by the name of Edward; yet they all died in their infancy, leav ing the first-born to maintain the honors of the title. The care of Edward in his feeble childhood fell to his aunt, Mrs. Catharine Porten, who watched over him with the greatest assiduity, and to whose kind care he attributed the preservation of his life. At the age of seven he was provided with a domestic tutor named Kirkby, a man of some ingenuity as an author and grammarian, from whose hands, at the end of eighteen months, he was sent to a school at Kingston, where, as he tells

[ocr errors]

|

us, "by the common methods of disci- "acquire in a riper age the beauties of pline, at the expense of many tears and the Latin and the rudiments of the some blood, I purchased the knowledge Greek tongue." Unable to mingle in of the Latin syntax." The authors the sports of the school, his leisure with which he studied at this time, or, as his aunt was doubtless largely given he expresses it, "painfully construed to reading. He was already familiar and darkly understood," were the lives with Pope's Homer, Dryden's Virgil, of Cornelius Nepos and the fables of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Arabian Phædrus. The one gave him his first Nights' Entertainments, and had "turnof poetry. glimpses of the history of Greece and ed over many English pages Rome; the other taught him in an at- and romance, of history and travels," tractive form "the truths of morality in his maternal grandfather's library. and prudence." After two years' study A severe nervous affection now led to at the school, frequently interrupted his withdrawal from Westminster to by sickness, he was recalled by his seek relief from the mineral waters at mother's death, which brought him Bath, and some time was passed at vari again within the attentions of his aunt, ous residences, his education being cara lady of cultivated understanding, ried on in the most desultory manner, who encouraged his mental develop- till at about sixteen his constitution ment and inspired him with an ar- unexpectedly developing new powers dent pursuit of knowledge. "To her and throwing off his former complaints, kind lessons," he says, "I ascribe my after an unprofitable attempt to pursue early and invincible love of reading, his studies with Francis, the translator which I would not exchange for the of Horace, who proved too careless for young treasures of India." Owing to her fa- the duty which he assumed, the ther's losses in business, Mrs. Porten, Gibbon, without further preparation, in a spirit of independence, in keeping before he had accomplished his fifteenth with her high character, opened a year, was entered by his father as a boarding-house for the scholars of student at Magdalen College, Oxford. Westminster School. Her nephew, Edward, now at the age of twelve, joined her in this new residence and was immediately entered at the school, which, as we have seen, his father had attended before him. The boy still needed the care of his devoted aunt; his studies were still broken in upon by his maladies, while "in the space of two years, interrupted by danger and debility," as he informs us, he "painfully climbed into the third form." All this while his lessons were of the elementary character, leaving him to

Imperfectly trained in the regular academic studies in consequence of his frequent attacks of illness, the youth carried with him to the University an extraordinary stock of miscellaneous reading, which had already been concentrated upon history, especially in He reference to Greece and Rome. had eagerly perused all that he could lay his hands upon relating to these subjects in translations of the ancient authors, and had penetrated beyond the classic period into the later Byzantine period and the outlying history

of the East. "Before I was sixteen," says he, "I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks; and the same ardor urged me to guess at the French of D'Herbelot, and to construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's Albufaragius." Nor was this merely the gratification of an idle curiosity. The historic passion was already developed within him, as is shown by his careful study of geography and chronology. He sought order and accuracy in the confusion of the early dates, and perplexed himself with the systems of rival authorities. His sleep was disturbed by the difficulty of reconciling the Septuagint with the Hebrew computation. With such acquirements, "I arrived at Oxford," says he, "with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance, of which a school-boy would have been ashamed."

The transition to the University was well calculated to make a mark ed impression on a youth whose intellectual faculties were thus alive for wonder and admiration. Entering with all the privileges of wealth, "I felt myself suddenly raised from a boy to a man; the persons, whom I respected as my superiors in age and academical rank, entertained me with every mark of attention and civility; and my vanity was flattered by the velvet cap and silk gown which distinguished a gentleman-commoner from a plebeian student. A decent allowance, more money than a school-boy had a school-boy had ever seen, was at my own disposal; and I might command, among the tradesmen at Oxford, an indefinite and dangerous

latitude of credit. A key was deliv ered into my hands, which gave me the free use of a numerous and learned library: my apartment consisted of three elegant and well furnished rooms in the new building, a stately pile, of Magdalen College; and the adjacent walks, had they been frequented by Plato's disciples, might have been compared to the Attic shade on the banks of the Ilissus." With such advantages shielding the student so effectually in his defects of special preparation, one would have thought the course of an ingenuous youth would have been steadily onward without interruption. Every opportunity was in his way to amend his deficiencies, with a large liberty for the prosecution of his favorite studies. But too much appears to have been left to his choice; his tutors were compliant and indiffer ent, and he took advantage of their neglect, giving himself freely to the amusements and dissipations of the place. He needed restraint and prescribed duties, and from both he was exempt in the privileged ease of the college. But though he was acquiring little in exact learning or mental discipline, his mind was not inactive. In his first long vacation he was intent upon writing a book which involved much learned reading, on "The Age of Sesostris," and actually accomplished a portion of it. On his return to the University, he engaged in a course of religious reading, excited by the perusal of Dr. Middleton's "Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers possessed by the Church in the Early Ages," a work so consonant with Gibbon's later habits of thought, that it is surprising

« PreviousContinue »