Without claiming any precocity of genius, Gibbon describes his mind as having opened considerably in his twelfth year. He had an early and indiscriminate appetite for books, and had indulged it in much desultory reading even before his admission at Oxford. A preference for historical works already displayed itself. His attention was fixed by the accounts of Mahomet and the Saracens; and the ‘Continuation of Echard’s Roman History’ first introduced him to the successors of Constantine. But, as his studies had been directed only by his own curiosity, his information was partial and ill-digested, and more useful as the result of literary habits, than as a fund for the use of his maturer years. Yet even thus early he made an essay at historical composition; and the subject showed that his mind had been chiefly attracted by the records of the Eastern World. The ‘Age of Sesostris,’ suggested perhaps by the ‘Siècle de Louis XIV.,’ then new and popular, was the first production of the pen of Gibbon. But this attempt was presently abandoned; though the unfinished manuscript remained for twenty years at the bottom of a drawer, and was not finally destroyed till 1772. His first publication was an ‘Essai sur l’Etude de la Littérature.’ It appeared in the spring of 1761, and was written in French, through a secret ambition in the author to acquire a peculiar celebrity, as a successful writer in a foreign language. This dream, however, was not realised. The ‘Essai’ was received with little enthusiasm abroad, with absolute indifference at home. Nor, indeed, were its intrinsic merits, clouded as they were by an obscure and abrupt style, sufficient to establish the author’s claims to the reputation which he sought.
Gibbon then turned his thoughts to some historical subject; and among many that attracted him were The Life of Raleigh; The History of the Liberty of the Swiss; and that of the Republic of Florence under the House of Medici. But he appears not to have engaged seriously in any one of these, at the time of his second departure for the Continent. To the second of those subjects however he afterwards returned, again discarding his native tongue, for the use of what he deemed a more general language. He wrote his ‘History of Switzerland’ in Latin. But having caused a specimen of it to be recited in a society of literary foreigners in London, at which he was himself present, though not known as the author, he had the affliction of hearing its condemnation. He submitted to the sentence, and delivered the imperfect sheets to the flames. And it was in the same year (October 24, 1767) that Hume addressed to him a very sensible exhortation to confine his compositions to his own language, as that which was destined, through conquest and colonization, to the most general prevalence in after-ages. It was worthy of the riper wisdom and genius of Hume, to direct the rising candidate for historical fame into the path wherein alone it was possible to find it; and to enlarge his views, to teach him to look beyond the actual and transient condition of the world, and fix his eyes upon the generations that were to come.
Gibbon mentions three works as having more than any others contributed to the formation of his mind: ‘Pascal’s Provincial Letters;’ ‘The Life of Julian, by the Abbé Bletterie;’ and ‘Giannone’s History of Naples.’ Not one of them was English; he acknowledges no early obligations to the literature of his own country; in fact, those five years which usually decide the character of the rest of life were entirely passed abroad, in the study and perpetual use of foreign languages, and the imitation of foreign literature. It was not then wonderful that he should continue for some time longer to follow the first impulse. But repeated failures would doubtless have shown him the false position in which he stood, even without the seasonable admonition administered by the authority of Hume.
Gibbon returned immediately from Italy to England, and retired to the peaceful retreat of his family and his books. Yet the five years which followed were those on which he reflected with least satisfaction. He was dependent on his father’s generosity, he had no professional occupation for an active and ambitious mind, his very reading was somewhat desultory, and his whole energies were not yet devoted to one great object. He felt the absence of this; and it was ill supplied by his ‘Critical Observations on the 6th Book of the Æneid,’ or his attempt at the History of Switzerland. The death of his father, in 1770, placed him in possession of a moderate fortune and of entire independence; and then it was that he entered in good earnest on the ‘History of the Decline and Fall.’
In 1772 he settled in London, and obtained a seat in parliament for Liskeard. He adhered to the Government of Lord North, and by “many a sincere and silent vote” on the American question, supported the rights (as he says), though not perhaps the interests, of the mother country. As a senator, he acquired no distinction. A mixture of timidity and pride, a want of physical energy and of that ready vigour of mind, which fits men for public life, better than habits of the sagest meditation, disqualified him for political polemics: and even his general opinions seem at that time to have been so little fixed, that when at last he accepted a place at the Board of Trade under Lord North, he gave surprise and offence to the opposition, who considered him as on their side. He fell with his patron; and his natural distaste for politics being probably increased by this and a subsequent disappointment, he retired for ever from the disquietudes of public life.
During his residence in London, he published the first three volumes of his History. On the composition of the first he had bestowed peculiar care, and its reception repaid his labours. A very laudatory letter, which he received from Hume, foretold the attacks to which the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters would subject him; for which he was entirely unprepared. And in his subsequent reflections on this subject, he admits that, had he foreseen the offence they were calculated to give, he “might perhaps have softened the two invidious chapters, which would create many enemies, and conciliate few friends.” Among his ecclesiastical opponents, by far the most eloquent and powerful was Bishop Watson, whose high-minded hostility deserved the respect bestowed on it by the historian himself, in his celebrated Vindication.
The second and third volumes were not so favourably received as the first; the author himself admits that they are possibly too minute and prolix: and the work made as yet no progress on the continent. But he persevered with increasing zeal in the labour which was now become necessary to his happiness; and that he might the more exclusively devote himself to it, he returned to establish himself at Lausanne, in 1783, nearly twenty years after his second visit to that place. He made it his residence until 1793, and there composed the last three volumes of his history: and he has carefully recorded, that it was on the 27th of June, 1787, between eleven and twelve at night, in a summer-house in his garden, that he wrote the last sentence. His fourth volume cost him rather more than two years, his fifth rather less, and the sixth little more than one. It had been his habit, till quite at last, to close his studies with the day, and commonly begin them with the morning, and the result of this late change is observed in the increased rapidity with which the latter portion of the work was written. He visited England to superintend the printing of these three volumes, and published them together on his fifty-first birthday.
He lived only five years and seven months longer: and his premature death (for he died during the full vigour of all his faculties and talents) may be ascribed to his own singular improvidence. He had been afflicted above thirty years by a disease requiring surgical assistance, which he altogether neglected till it became incurable. He died January 16, 1794, at the house of his friend Lord Sheffield, and was buried in his lordship’s family vault at Fletching in Sussex.
Of his miscellaneous works, the following are some of the most remarkable:—
Historical. ‘Outlines of the History of the World (written between 1755 and 1763); ‘Mémoire sur la Monarchie des Mèdes’ (do.); ‘Introduction à l’Histoire Générale de la République des Suisses’ (1767); ‘Antiquities of the House of Brunswick’ (1790).