Part 1 (1/2)
Gibbon
by James Cotter Morison
CHAPTER I
GIBBON'S EARLY LIFE UP TO THE TIME OF HIS LEAVING OXFORD
Edward Gibbon[1] was born at Putney, near London, on 27th April in the year 1737 After the reformation of the calendar his birthday became the 8th of May He was the eldest of a family of seven children; but his five brothers and only sister all died in early infancy, and he could reretted
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Gibbon's Memoirs and Letters are of such easy access that I have not deees with references to them Any one ishes to controlso with the Miscellaneous Works, edited by Lord Sheffield, in his hand Whenever I advance anything that seeive my authority]
He is at soth and quality of his pedigree, which he traces back to the ti the fact, we pass on to a nearer ancestor, his grandfather, who seey of character and business talent He e fortune, which he lost in the South-Sea Scheme, and then made another before his death
He was one of the Commissioners of Custobroke was heard to declare that no man knew better than Mr Edward Gibbon the coland
His son, the historian's father, was a person of very inferior stae, travelled on the Continent, sat in Parliaentleman, and here his achievements came to an end He seems to have been a kindly but a weak and i and deserving his son's affection by genial sympathy and kindly treatment
Gibbon's childhood was passed in chronic illness, debility, and disease All atteular education were frustrated by his precarious health The longest period he ever passed at school were two years at Westminster, but he was constantly moved from one school to another This even his delicacy can hardly explain, and it must have been fatal to all sustained study Two facts he e In the year 1746 such was the strength of party spirit that he, a child of nine years of age, ”was reviled and buffeted for the sins of his Tory ancestors”
Secondly, the worthy pedagogues of that day found no readier way of leading the most studious of boys to a love of science than corporal punishment ”At the expense of e of the Latin syntax” Whether all love of study would have been flogged out of him if he had remained at school, it is difficult to say, but it is not an improbable supposition that this would have happened The risk was ree nervous affection, which alternately contracted his legs and produced, without any visible sy pain,” was his chief affliction, followed by intervals of languor and debility The saving of his life during these dangerous years Gibbon unhesitatingly ascribes to the more thanwhose naratitude trickling down his cheek” ”If there be any,” he continues, ”as I trust there are some, who rejoice that I live, to that dear and excellent woman they must hold themselves indebted Many anxious and solitary hours and days did she consume in the patient trial of relief and ahts did she sit byexpectation that every hour would be et over these details, and declares he has no wish to expatiate on a ”disgusting topic” This is quite in the style of the _ancien regi ill in those days, but people were expected to keep their infirmities to themselves ”People kne to live and die in those days, and kept their infirout, but you ris”[2] Similarly Walpole was ne's _Letters_ ”Heaven forbid,” he says, ”that I should say that the letters of Madane were bad I only meant that they were full of family details and mortal distempers, to which the most is a veracious historian, and fortunately has not refrained fro us a truthful picture of his childhood
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: George Sand, quoted in Taine's _Ancien Regi--his early and invincible love of reading, which he would not exchange for the treasures of India--he gives us a full account, and we notice at once the interesting fact that a considerable portion of the historical field afterwards occupied by his great work had been already gone over by Gibbon before he ell in his teens ”My indiscrirees into the historic line, and since philosophy has exploded all innate ideas and natural propensities, I must ascribe the choice to the assiduous perusal of the _Universal History_ as the octavo volumes successively appeared This unequal work referred and introduced me to the Greek and Roman historians, to as lish reader All that I could find were greedily devoured, from Littlebury's lame _Herodotus_ to Spelman's valuable _Xenophon_, to the poed _Procopius_ of the beginning of the last century” Referring to an accident which threw the continuation of Echard's _Rons of the successors of Constantine were absolutely new, and I was ie of the Goths over the Danube, when the sued me from my intellectual feast I procured the second and third volumes of Howell's _History of the World_, which exhibit the Byzantine period on a larger scale Mahomet and his Saracens soon fixed my attention, and soenuine sources Simon Ockley first opened my eyes, and I was led froed round the circle of Oriental history Before I was sixteen I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks, and the sauess at the French of D'Herbelot and to construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's _Abulfaragius_” Here is in rough outline a large portion at least of the _Decline and Fall_ already surveyed The fact sho deep was the sympathy that Gibbon had for his subject, and that there was a sort of pre-established harmony between his mind and the historical period he afterwards illustrated
Up to the age of fourteen it seeh life an illiterate cripple But as he approached his sixteenth year, a great change took place in his constitution, and his diseases, instead of groith his growth and strengthening with his strength, wonderfully vanished This unexpected recovery was not seized by his father in a rational spirit, as affording a welco the defects of a hitherto i the occasion thus presented of recovering so a sound foundation of scholarshi+p and learning on which a superstructure at the university or elsewhere could be ultimately built, he carried the lad off in an ientlee just before he had completed his fifteenth year (1752, April 3) This was perhaps the most unwise step he could have taken under the circunorant to profit by the advantages offered by Oxford to a entle the idle and dissipated who are only expected to waste their enerally considered as reflecting no small credit on its possessor; but in the majority of cases it reflects credit on the wise solicitude of his parents or guardians rather than on hinorant and frivolous lounger, the merit was his own
At no period in their history had the English universities sunk to a lower condition as places of education than at the time when Gibbon went up to Oxford To speak of the see and clownish manners, the centres where all the faction, party spirit, and bigotry of the country were gathered to a head In this evil pre-ees appear to have been upon a level, though Lincoln College, Oxford, is ht exception in John Wesley's day to the prevalent degeneracy The strange thing is that, with all their neglect of learning and es were not the resorts of jovial if unseemly boon companionshi+p; they were collections of quarrelsory lawsuits The indecent contentions between Bentley and the Fellows of Trinity were no isolated scandal They are best known and remembered on account of the eminence of the chief disputants, and of the enius which they occasioned Hearne writes of Oxford in 1726, ”There are such differences now in the University of Oxford (hardly one college but where all the members are busied in law business and quarrels not at all relating to the proood letters decay every day, insomuch that this ordination on Trinity Sunday at Oxford there were no fewer (as I am informed) than fifteen denied orders for insufficiency, which is the more to be noted because our bishops, and those employed by thes had not much improved twenty or thirty years later when Gibbon went up, but perhaps it had improved a little He does not mention lawsuits as a favourite pastime of the Fellows ”The Fellows or monks of my time,” he says, ”were decent, easy ifts of the founder: their days were filled by a series of uniform employments--the chapel, the hall, the coffee-house, and the com slu they had absolved their consciences Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal Their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth, and their constitutional toasts were not expressive of the most lively loyalty to the House of Hanover” Some Oxonians perhaps could still partly realise the truth of this original picture by their recollections of faint and feeble copies of it drawn from their experience in youthful days It see a e standard of the h Such a satire as the _Terrae Filius_ of Ae deductions; but the caricaturist is compelled by the conditions of his craft to ailects the true, and with the benefit of this limitation the _Terrae Filius_ reveals a deplorable and revolting picture of vulgarity, insolence, and licence The universities are spoken of in terement by men of all classes Lord Chesterfield speaks of the ”rust” of Ca of which a polished man should promptly rid himself Adam Smith showed his sense of the defects of Oxford in a stern section of the _Wealth of Nations_, written twenty years after he had left the place Even youths like Gray and West, fresh from Eton, express themselves with contempt for their respective universities ”Considerfroe country, inhabited by things that call the with syllogisil are equally unknown” Gray, answering fro the words of the Hebrew prophet, and insists that Isaiah had Cae equally with Babylon in viehen he spoke of the wild beasts and wild asses, of the satyrs that dance, of an inhabitation of dragons and a court for owls
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: _Social Life at the English Universities_ By Christopher Wordsworth Page 57]
Into such untoward coe of fifteen That he succumbed to the unwholesome atmosphere cannot surprise us He does not conceal, perhaps he rather exaggerates, in his Merace accused himself of dreadful sins which in all likelihood he never coe, when study and learning were the only passions he knew, reflected with too much severity on the boyish freaks of his university life Moreover there appears to have been nothing coarse or unworthy in his dissipation; he was simply idle He justly lays much of the blame on the authorities To say that the discipline was lax would be to pay it an unmerited codalen as he el or the Mitre Tavern He not only left his college, but he left the university, whenever he liked In one winter he hamshi+re, and hethe voice of ad the hand of control” Of study he had just as much and as little as he pleased
”As soon as my tutor had sounded the insufficiency of his disciple in school learning, he proposed that we should read everythe first weeks I constantly attended these lessons in my tutor's room; but as they appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure, I was once tey was accepted with a smile I repeated the offence with less cereence; the slightestavocation at home or abroad was allowed as a worthy impedilect” No wonder he spoke with indignation of such scandalous neglect ”To the University of Oxford,” he says, ”I acknowledge no obligation, and she will as readily renounceto disclaie; they proved the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life The reader will pronounce between the school and the scholar” This is only just and fully uish of the true scholar old There was another side of the question which naturally did not occur to Gibbon, but which ht in ular public school and universityhe undoubtedly lost: he was never a finished scholar, up to the standard even of his own day If he had been, is it certain that the accoain? It may be doubted At a later period Gibbon read the classics with the free and eager curiosity of a thoughtful mind It was a labour of love, of passionate ardour, sireat scholars of the Renaissance
This appetite had not been blunted by enforced toil in a prescribed groove How much of that zest for antiquity, of that keen relish for the classic writers which he afterwards acquired and retained through life, ht have been quenched if he had first made their acquaintance as school-books? Above all, would he have looked on the ancient world with such freedoained, if he had worn through youth the harness of acadeest an answer, but they e for nearly a century have been turning out crowds of thorough-paced scholars of the orthodox pattern It is odd that the two greatest historians who have been scholars as well--Gibbon and Grote--were not university-bred men
As if to prove by experiment where the fault lay, in ”the school or the scholar,” Gibbon had no sooner left Oxford for the long vacation, than his taste for study returned, and, not content with reading, he atteinal composition The subject he selected was a curious one for a youth in his sixteenth year It was an attee of Sesostris, and sho soon the austere side of history had attracted his attention ”In h the systeer and Petavius, of Marsham and of Newton; andthe Septuagint with the Hebrew computation”