Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/165

 history, Gibbon's great book stands almost alone in English literature. The one British author of his own day whose work could in any department stand a comparison in these qualities was Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations appeared in the same year with the first volume of the Decline and Fall. That, too, was the product of many years' concentrated effort upon a task early taken up. At the present day, if we take for granted the conventional lamentations, the chances of such achievement are smaller than ever. We are, our sentimentalists complain, too hurried and jaded by the excitement of modern society to devote ourselves to a single purpose. We 'fluctuate idly without term or scope'; and 'each half lives a hundred different lives.' Our works are fragmentary because we live in a perpetual hurry. We also suffer, indeed, from the opposite evil. Modern authors often contrive to write books quite long enough; and undertake sufficiently gigantic tasks. Unfortunately, the vast accumulation of materials and the demand for exhaustive inquiry overpowers the conscientious writer, unless he be a German professor, and then is rather apt to extinguish his vivacity.

I am, I confess, rather suspicious of these