William Robertson (1721-1793) the son of a parish minister in Midlothian, was also a minister of the Church of Scotland, and the leader of the moderate party, as against the enthusiastic spiritual descendants of the Covenanters. The moderates aimed at taste, learning, and the acquisition of a style free from Scottish idioms. This style Robertson displayed (1759) in his history of Scotland. A topic could scarcely be more unpopular than his, the publisher said, but his book had a very wide success south of the Border, and his later works on the reign of Charles V. and on American history were not less popular. His manner is calm, reflective, and studiously destitute of enthusiasm. Both he and Hume viewed the religious history of their country with a critical tranquillity very unlike the spirit introduced by Carlyle. His defect lay, not in the art of clear and definite presentation, but in limited knowledge of original documents.
Edward Gibbon.
"The old reproach, that no British altars had been erected to the Muse of History, was recently disproved," says Gibbon, "by the first performances of Robertson and Hume, the histories of Scotland and the Stuarts.... The perfect composition, the nervous language, the well-turned periods of Dr. Robertson, inflamed me to the ambitious hope that I might one day tread in his footsteps: the calm philosophy, the careless inimitable beauties of his friend and rival" (Hume) "often forced me to close the volume with a mixed sensation of delight and despair." After ten years' work by Gibbon at his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" "a letter from Mr. Hume" (1776) "overpaid the labour, but I have never presumed to accept a place in the triumvirate of British historians."
The fondness of Caledonian patriotism cannot accept the compliment paid to Robertson and Hume by the modesty of the author of "The Decline and Fall". The works of the two Scottish historians, though still very readable, and distinguished in style, are superseded by histories much more learned and based on documents not accessible to the Scots. But the monumental edifice of Gibbon is "a possession for ever".
Born at Putney, early in May, 1737, Edward Gibbon came of an ancient though not historically distinguished family, whose wealth was impaired by the connexion of his grandfather with the South Sea Bubble, and by his father's lack of economy. Gibbon's health, in boyhood, was bad, and his education irregular: he was a sufferer in an age when "the schoolboy may have been whipped for misapprehending a passage" (in Phædrus) "which Bentley could not restore, and which Burman could not explain". Thus he writes in his Autobiography: in this work he affects to compose with artless effort, but the rounded periods of his great book come unbidden to his pen, or rather, he devoted elaborate care to the six drafts of his memoirs.
In two years passed at Westminster School, Gibbon did not master Greek and Latin. His next three years were passed in wide desultory reading, in translation of the classics, and in modern history, which from boyhood was his passion. Going to Magdalen College, Oxford, before he was 15, "with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed," he was disgusted by the indolent ignorance of the Fellows of his college, "decent easy men," at whose table as a gentleman commoner he dined. In close grammatical study under his tutor he found neither profit nor pleasure; he lived in or out of Oxford as he pleased; read Catholic books, professed himself a Catholic—"the offence," says Blackstone, "amounts to High Treason". It amounted to petty treason; Gibbon's father removed him from Magdalen to the tuition of Mallet, a free-thinker, and thence he was carried to Lausanne and the house of a Calvinist minister, who in two years brought him within the Presbyterian fold. After such a series of theological adventures it is not strange that Gibbon's aversion to Christianity declares itself wherever he has a chance of sneering at that religion. He returned to England in 1758, after sighing as a lover and obeying as a son, when his father commanded him to resign his passion for Mademoiselle Curchod, later Madame Necker, the mother of Madame de Staël. At Lausanne he had studied very widely and with elaborate organization of his work: in England he still read, "never handled a gun, seldom mounted a horse," but devoted himself to his duties as an officer in the Hampshire militia. Here he acquired some practical knowledge of military affairs which was valuable to him in his remarks on the discipline of the Roman Army: he meditated several historical topics; returned to the Continent, and at Rome (15 October, 1764) conceived, as he has told us in imperishable words, the idea of writing "The Decline and Fall," "as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter". The distractions of society, and of politics, for he had a seat in Parliament, and belonged to White's, Boodle's, Brooks's and The Club of Dr. Johnson, did not draw Gibbon from his great ambition. He had studied style till, in conversation, "his polish was occasionally finical... he moved to flutes and hautboys". George Colman the Younger has left a portrait of Gibbon in verse, which is corroborated, as far as his manner in conversation went, by a letter of his own (1764).
His person looked as funnily obese
As if a Pagod, growing large as Man,
Had rashly waddled off its chimney-piece,
To visit a Chinese upon a fan.
Such his exterior, curious 'twas to scan!
And oft he rapped his snuff-box, cocked his snout,
And ere his polished periods he began,
Bent forwards, stretching his forefinger out,
And talked in phrase as round as he was round about.
Roundness, meditated balance, are the characteristics of Gibbon's style. "Before he wrote a note or a letter he arranged completely in his mind what he wished to express." He says: "It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it in my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of my pen till I had given the last polish to my work". As one consequence, "my first rough manuscript, without any intermediate copy, has been sent to the press". Gibbon's History, in the vast whole, as well as in each sentence, was thus premeditated, under his ruling philosophic idea of what such a history should be. He had completely assimilated his mass of materials, and each topic was reduced to its proper dimensions, without encumbering details, while all marched to the flutes and hautboys of his rounded music. We may think it occasionally monotonous, and marvel that so many periods should conclude with a clause introduced by the preposition "of". But this is a trifling criticism, he had chosen his vehicle; and, though we should not imitate his style, yet a style it is, admirably adapted to its purpose. His reading was enormous in every branch of learning, including the science of coins; he constantly refers "to the medals as well as the historians". It may be curious to note that while he devotes four pages to the criticism of the iron cage of Bajazet (1402) he neglects to mention that such cages or huches were commonly used for the safeguarding of important prisoners of war by the contemporary chivalry of France and England.
It is, of course, impossible, it would not be easy for the most learned of historians, to criticize in a few words a historical work of such vast survey, and concerned with so many and such various topics, with the affairs of so many races and religions, throughout so many centuries. The faults which have been chiefly criticized are Gibbon's total inability to be generous towards Christianity; and the bad taste of some of his notes; which appear to be the refreshments of a natural fatigue. In his day, he says, "History was the most popular species of composition," and he "is at a loss how to describe the success of the work, without betraying the vanity of the writer". He ended his task, and he has described his emotions when all was done, on 27 June, 1787, at Lausanne, the place of his boyish exile and of his solitary affair of the heart. He died in 1794, having been mainly busy with the drafts of his Autobiography. These drafts, with his most interesting letters, have been published by the piety of the Earl of Sheffield, the grandson of his devoted friend, John Holroyd, first Lord Sheffield. In his early letters Gibbon is no purist, "I tipped the boy with a crown," he says, an early use of a familiar modern term.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan.