GIBBON, EDWARD (1737-1794), English historian, was born at Putney on April 27 (0.S.), 1737. His father, who was also named Edward Gibbon, was M.P. for Petersfield and South ampton until i747; he married Judith, daughter of James Porten, by whom he was the father of seven children. Edward was the only one to survive childhood, and he was so delicate as a child that his life was often despaired of. He first attended a day school in Putney, and studied Latin with John Kirkby, author of Authomates (1745). He went in 1746 to a school at Kingston-on Thames, where "at the expense of many tears and some blood, I purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax." Meanwhile he was reading Pope's Homer and Dryden's Virgil. His mother died in and his father moved into Hampshire, but Gibbon lived under the care of his aunt, chiefly at his grandfather's house at Putney. Here he developed his great love of reading, and had the run of his grandfather's library. His 12th year, 1748, he records as "the most propitious to the growth of my intellectual stature." At the end of that year, his aunt, Catherine Porten, opened a boarding-house for Westminster school. Gibbon went with her, and entered the school in Jan. 1749. His health broke down again, and he was taken in 175o to Bath and Winchester, without much effect. He made one more attempt at Westminster, but it was evident that his health would never stand it, and after this he studied under various tutors. Meanwhile his appetite for history was developing, and he read widely, ranging over every period. On a visit to his father he first discovered later Roman history.
Oxford and Lausanne.—About his 16th year his health rapidly improved, and on April 3, 1752, he went to Magdalen col lege, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner, "with a stock of erudi tion which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy might have been ashamed." He disliked the university and his tutors, and they disliked him. "I spent 14 months at Magdalen college," he says; "they proved the 14 months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life." While at Oxford he was influenced by Middleton's Free Inquiry to join the church of Rome, and his conversion was completed by Bossuet's Variations of Protestantism and Exposition of Catholic Doctrine. Gibbon was received into the church on June 8, He announced his decision in a letter to his father, who became exceedingly annoyed and removed him from Oxford. Soon of ter wards he was sent to live at Lausanne, with M. Pavilliard, a Calvinist minister. Here he learned French of necessity, and after five years "spontaneously thought" in that language, which influenced his style to the last. He studied the logic of Crousaz, and "the articles of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream." In less than two years he had returned to Protestantism. He studied widely, classics, philosophy and mathematics, which last he soon abandoned. In 1755 he travelled in Switzerland, studying the Swiss political institutions. In 1757 he met Voltaire. In the same year he fell in love with Susan Curchod, daughter of the pastor of Crassier, who afterwards became Madame Necker. On his return to England his father objected to the marriage, and Gibbon "sighed as a lover," but "obeyed as a son." He found that his father had married again. At this time he met Mallet, who introduced him to Lady Hervey's circle, where his French accom plishments made him welcome. Mallet advised him to counteract• the influence of French on his style by reading Addison and Swift. In 1761 Gibbon published his Essai sur l'etude de la litterature, begun in Lausanne in 1758. His father urged its publication, hop ing that it might introduce him to public notice, but it was more successful abroad than in England. It was translated into English in 1764.
His Later Life.—He was already contemplating a his tory, but had not chosen his period. In 1763 he left for a tour on the continent. He went first to Paris, where he found the circle of d'Alembert and Diderot congenial, and was tempted to stay there permanently; then to Switzerland, staying a year at Lau sanne, and in April 1764 to Italy. Rome was the main object of his visit, and it was in Rome he records "on the fifteenth of Octo ber 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol . . . that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind." He returned from the tour in June 1765, visiting Naples, Venice, and Verona on the return journey. The next five years were uneventful. Gibbon lived chiefly at Buriton. He projected and abandoned a history of the Swiss revolution, and in 177o successfully exposed Warburton's Virgilian theories in Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid. But he had by now formed the plan of his history, and settled down to the vast researches it involved. His studies were interrupted in 177o by his father's death, and his own consequent move to Lon don, but by Oct. 1772 he was fairly started. At first he moved slowly and with hesitation; after the first few chapters, swiftly and without corrections or alterations. In Feb. 1776 the first volume was published, and met with an unprecedented success, passing rapidly through three editions. He was allowed by his publishers two-thirds of the profits on the first edition, which amounted to £490. Hume, in the midst of his congratulations, warned him that he was provoking a controversy in the chapters on the growth of Christianity, and the controversy was not slow in following. His only reply was the Vindication (1779), a com plete and crushing reply to Davies and others who had attacked him (for a full account see Bibliographers' Manual, 1858, pp. 885-886).
In 1774 he became M.P. for Liskeard, which did not interrupt his work, except for an interval in 1779 when he was employed to write a Memoire justi ficati f in answer to a French manifesto. For this service he was rewarded with a seat at the Board of Trade and plantations worth f Boo a year. Gibbon lost his seat in Sept. 178o, but was returned for Lymington in a by-election in June 1781. In April 1781 the second and third volumes of his history appeared, which caused no excitement, but sold fast. Then followed a critical event in his life; Lord North's ministry fell, and Burke abolished the Board of Trade. Gibbon gave up his parliamentary career, which had been mute and inglorious indeed, but had acted as "a school of civil prudence, the first and most essential virtue of an historian," sold everything but his library, and moved to Lausanne in Sept. 1783, where he joined his friend Deyverdun. Here, in a house with a charming garden and a won derful view, the history was quickly finished; the fourth volume was finished in 1784, the fifth two years later; and, he says, "it was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June 1787, be tween the hours of 11 and 12, that I wrote the last line of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recov ery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious." He took the manuscript to London in 1787, and in April 1788 the last three volumes were published, with as great success as before. He returned to Lausanne, where he suffered greatly from the loss of his friend Deyverdun, who died on July 4, 1789. The provisions of Deyverdun's will enabled Gibbon to remain in the same house, and there he wrote his Memoirs of my Life and Writ ings in 1789. In 1793 he came back to England and later in the year was obliged to undergo several operations. He never re covered his strength, and died on Jan. 16, 1794. He was buried at Flitching, Sussex. (J. S. B.; X.) The Value of His Work—Gibbon's literary art, the sustained excellence of his style, his piquant epigrams and his brilliant irony, would perhaps not secure for his work the immortality which it seems likely to enjoy, if it were not also marked by ecumenical grasp, extraordinary accuracy and striking acuteness of judgment.
It is needless to say that in many points his statements and con clusions must now be corrected. He was never content with sec ond hand accounts when the primary sources were accessible ; "I have always endeavoured," he says, "to draw from the fountain head; my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals ; and if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend." Since he wrote, new authorities have been discovered or rendered acces sible; works in Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Armenian, Syriac, Arabic and other languages, which he was unable to consult, have been published. Again, many of the authorities which he used have been edited in superior texts. The relative weights of the sources have been more nicely determined by critical investigation. Archaeology has become a science. In the immense region which Gibbon surveyed there is hardly a section which has not been submitted to the microscopic examination of specialists.
But apart from the inevitable advances made in the course of a century during which historical research entered upon a new phase, the reader of Gibbon must be warned against one capital defect. In judging the Decline and Fall it should carefully be observed that it falls into two parts which are heterogeneous in the method of treatment. The first part, a little more than five-eighths of the work, supplies a very full history of 46o years (A.D. 180-641) ; the second and smaller part is a summary history of about Boo years (A.D. 641-1453) in which certain episodes are selected for fuller treatment and so made prominent. To the first part unstinted praise must be accorded; it may be said that, with the materials at the author's disposal, it hardly admitted of improvement, except in trifling details. But the second, not withstanding the brilliancy of the narrative and the masterly art in the grouping of events, suffers from a radical defect which ren ders it a misleading guide. The author designates the story of the later empire at Constantinople (after Heraclius) as "a uniform tale of weakness and misery," a judgment which is entirely false; and in accordance with this doctrine, he makes the empire, which is his proper subject, merely a string for connecting great move ments which affected it, such as the Saracen conquests, the cru sades, the Mongol invasions, the Turkish conquests. He failed to bring out the momentous fact that up to the 12th century the empire was the bulwark of Europe against the East, nor did he appreciate its importance in preserving the heritage of Greek civilization. He compressed into a single chapter the domestic history and policy of the emperors from the son of Heraclius to Isaac Angelus; and did no justice to the remarkable ability and the indefatigable industry shown in the service of the State by most of the sovereigns from Leo III. to Basil II. He did not penetrate into the deeper causes underlying the revolutions and palace intrigues. His eye rested only on superficial character istics which have served to associate the name "Byzantine" with treachery, cruelty, bigotry and decadence. It was reserved for Finlay to depict, with greater knowledge and a juster perception, the lights and shades of Byzantine history. Thus the later part of the Decline and Fall, while the narrative of certain episodes will always be read with profit, does not convey a true idea of the history of the empire or of its significance in the history of Europe. It must be added that the pages on the Slavonic peoples and their relations to the empire are conspicuously insufficient ; but it must be taken into account that it was not till many years after Gibbon's death that Slavonic history began to receive due attention, in consequence of the rise of competent scholars among the Slays themselves.
Gibbon's verdict on the history of the middle ages is contained in the famous sentence, "I have described the triumph of bar barism and religion." It is important to understand clearly the criterion which he applied; it is frequently misapprehended. He was a son of the i8th century; he had studied with sympathy Locke and Montesquieu ; no one appreciated more keenly than he did political liberty and the freedom of an Englishman. This is illustrated by his love of Switzerland, his intense interest in the fortunes of that country, his design of writing "The History of the Liberty of the Swiss"—a theme, he says "from which the dullest stranger would catch fire." Such views and sentiments are incompatible with the idealization of a benevolent despotism. Yet in this matter Gibbon has been grossly misapprehended and misrepresented. For instance, Mirabeau wrote thus to Sir Samuel Romilly : "I have never been able to read the work of Mr. Gibbon without being astounded that it should ever have been written in English ; or without being tempted to turn to the author and say, `You an Englishman? No, indeed.' That admiration for an empire of more than two hundred millions of men, where not one had the right to call himself free; that effeminate philosophy which has more praise for luxury and pleasures than for all the virtues ; that style always elegant and never energetic, reveal at the most the elector of Hanover's slave." This criticism is based on a perverse misreading of the historian's observations on the age of Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines. He enlarges, as it was his business to do, on the tranquillity and prosperity of the empire in that period, but he does not fail to place his finger on the want of political liberty as a fatal defect. He points out that under this benevolent despotism, though men might be happy, their happiness was un stable, because it depended on the character of a single man; and the highest praise he can give to those virtuous princes is that they "deserved the honour of restoring the republic, had the Romans of their days been capable of a rational freedom." The criterion by which Gibbon judged civilization and progress was the measure in which the happiness of men is secured, and of that happiness he considered political freedom an essential con dition. He was essentially humane; and it is worthy of notice that he was in favour of the abolition of slavery, while humane men like his friend Lord Sheffield, Dr. Johnson and Boswell were opposed to the anti-slavery movement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Of the original quarto edition of The Decline and Bibliography.-Of the original quarto edition of The Decline and Fall, vol. i. appeared, as has already been stated, in 1776, vols. ii. and iii. in 1781 and vols. iv.—vi. (inscribed to Lord North) in 1788. In later editions vol. i. was considerably altered by the author ; the others hardly at all. The number of modern reprints has been very consider able. For many years the most important and valuable English edition was that of Milman (1839 and 1845) , which was reissued with many critical additions by Dr. W. Smith (8 vols. 8vo, 1854 and 1872) . This has now been superseded by the edition, with copious notes, by J. B. Bury (7 vols. 8vo, 1896-1900 ; new ed. 1909-13) . The edition in Bohn's British Classics (7 vols., 1853) deserves mention. See also the essay on Gibbon in Sir Spencer Walpole's Essays and Biographies (1907) . There are in addition, translations in nearly every Euro pean language. Gibbon's Miscellaneous Works, with Memoirs of his Life and Writings, composed by himself; illustrated from his Letters, with occasional Notes and Narrative, published by Lord Sheffield in two vols. in 1796, has been often reprinted. The new edition in five vols. (1814) contained some previously unpublished matter, and in par ticular the fragment on the revolutions of Switzerland. A French translation of the Miscellaneous Works by Marigne appeared at Paris in 1798. There is also a German translation (Leipzig, 1801).
(J. B. B.)