Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/594

Rh 576 G I I3 HON After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate; I sighed as i sometimes interrupted with a sigh, which I breathed a lover, I obeyed as a son ; my wound was insensibly healed by time. absence, and the habits of a new life.” 1 In 1753 he returned with mingled joy and regret to Eng- land, 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 m-mners 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 n1uch 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 fathers country seat at Buriton, in Hampshire, only nine months being given to the metro- polis. 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 .Irs iibbon ; after tea his father claimed his conversation; in the midst of an in- teresting work he was often called down to entertain idle visitors; and, worst of all, he was periodically compelled to return the well-meant compliments. Ile 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 his life both at home and abroad.” No sooner had he re- turned 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 Jlemoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions,” an Academy which has been well characterized (by Sainte- I Beuve) 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 ex- amined”; 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 educa- tion, 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 ‘ The affair, however, was not finally broken off till 1763. lIdl1e. Curchod soon afterwards became the wife of Necker, the famous finan- cier _: and Gibbon and the Neckers frequently afterwards met on terms of mutual friendship and es-teeni. towards Lausnnne ; 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.” _lIe renewed former acquaintance, however, with the “ poet ” Mallet, and through him gained access to Lady l[ervey’s circle, where a congenial admiration, not to say affect-ation, of French manner.s 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 to 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 vernaculnr,— - 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 Hu1ne’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 ]:'.-.s-rzz' SN?‘ l’1i'lmle de la ].z'lIc'=ratzu'c, 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, a11d 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 “com- plied, 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. ulibbon 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 di.sgraced a thinker or a scholar of much maturer age. His account of its first re- ception and subsequent fortunes in England deserves to be. cited as a curious piece of literary history. “In Englam _,” he says, “it was received with cold indiﬂerenee, little read, and speedily forgotten. A small impression was slowly dis- persed; the bookseller murmured, and the author (had his feelings been more exquisite) might have wept over the blunders anrl 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 booksellers 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 1l[isccIl(mcous ll'orlc.s'. Yilleniain ﬁnds in it “pen de rues, nulle originalité surtout, mais une grnnde passion litter-aire, l’amour des reeherches savantes et du beau langage.” Sainte-Beuve’s criticism is almost identical with Gibbon’s own; but though he finds that “La