The five years and a half which intervened between his return from this tour, in June 1765, and the death of his father, in November 1770, seem to have formed the portion of his life which “he passed with the least enjoyment and remembered with the least satisfaction.” He attended every spring the meetings of the militia at Southampton, and rose successively to the rank of major and lieutenant-colonel commandant; but was each year “more disgusted with the inn, the wine, the company, and the tiresome repetition of annual attendance and daily exercise.” From his own account, however, it appears that other and deeper causes produced this discontent. Sincerely attached to his home, he yet felt the anomaly of his position. At thirty, still a dependant, without a settled occupation, without a definite social status, he often regretted that he had not “embraced the lucrative pursuits of the law or of trade, the chances of civil office or India adventure, or even the fat slumbers of the church.” From the emoluments of a profession he “might have derived an ample fortune, or a competent income instead of being stinted to the same narrow allowance, to be increased only by an event which he sincerely deprecated.” Doubtless the secret fire of a consuming, but as yet ungratified, literary ambition also troubled his repose. He was still contemplating “at an awful distance” The Decline and Fall, and meantime revolved some other subjects, that seemed more immediately practicable. Hesitating for some time between the revolutions of Florence and those of Switzerland, he consulted M. Deyverdun, a young Swiss with whom he had formed a close and intimate friendship during his first residence at Lausanne, and finally decided in favour of the land which was his “friend’s by birth” and “his own by adoption.” He executed the first book in French; it was read (in 1767), as an anonymous production, before a literary society of foreigners in London, and condemned. Gibbon sat and listened unobserved to their strictures. It never got beyond that rehearsal; Hume, indeed, approved of the performance, only deprecating as unwise the author’s preference for French; but Gibbon sided with the majority.
In 1767 also he joined with M. Deyverdun in starting a literary journal under the title of Mémoires littéraires de la Grande-Bretagne. But its circulation was limited, and only the second volume had appeared (1768) when Deyverdun went abroad. The materials already collected for a third volume were suppressed. It is interesting, however, to know, that in the first volume is a review by Gibbon of Lord Lyttelton’s History of Henry II., and that the second volume contains a contribution by Hume on Walpole’s Historic Doubts.
The next appearance of the historian made a deeper impression. It was the first distinct print of the lion’s foot. “Ex ungue leonem” might have been justly said, for he attacked, and attacked successfully, the redoubtable Warburton. Of the many paradoxes in the Divine Legation, few are more extravagant than the theory that Virgil, in the sixth book of his Aeneid, intended to allegorize, in the visit of his hero and the Sibyl to the shades, the initiation of Aeneas, as a lawgiver, into the Eleusinian mysteries. This theory Gibbon completely exploded in his Critical Observations (1770)—no very difficult task, indeed, but achieved in a style, and with a profusion of learning, which called forth the warmest commendations both at home and abroad. Warburton never replied; and few will believe that he would not, if he had not thought silence more discreet. Gibbon, however, regrets that the style of his pamphlet was too acrimonious; and this regret, considering his antagonist’s slight claims to forbearance, is creditable to him. “I cannot forgive myself the contemptuous treatment of a man who, with all his faults, was entitled to my esteem; and I can less forgive, in a personal attack, the cowardly concealment of my name and character.”
Soon after his “release from the fruitless task of the Swiss revolution” in 1768, he had gradually advanced from the wish to the hope, from the hope to the design, from the design to the execution of his great historical work. His preparations were indeed vast. The classics, “as low as Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Juvenal,” had been long familiar. He now “plunged into the ocean of the Augustan history,” and “with pen almost always in hand,” pored over all the original records, Greek and Latin, between Trajan and the last of the Western Caesars. “The subsidiary rays of medals and inscriptions, of geography and chronology, were thrown on their proper objects; and I applied the collections of Tillemont, whose inimitable accuracy almost assumes the character of genius, to fix and arrange within my reach the loose and scattered atoms of historical information.” The Christian apologists and their pagan assailants; the Theodosian Code, with Godefroy’s commentary; the Annals and Antiquities of Muratori, collated with “the parallel or transverse lines” of Sigonius and Maffei, Pagi and Baronius, were all critically studied. Still following the wise maxim which he had adopted as a student, “multum legere potius quam multa,” he reviewed again and again the immortal works of the French and English, the Latin and Italian classics. He deepened and extended his acquaintance with Greek, particularly with his favourite authors Homer and Xenophon; and, to crown all, he succeeded in achieving the third perusal of Blackstone’s Commentaries.
The course of his study was for some time seriously interrupted by his father’s illness and death in 1770, and by the many distractions connected with the transference of his residence from Buriton to London. It was not, indeed, until October 1772 that he found himself at last independent, and fairly settled in his house and library, with full leisure and opportunity to set about the composition of the first volume of his history. Even then it appears from his own confession that he long brooded over the chaos of materials he had amassed before light dawned upon it. At the commencement, he says, “all was dark and doubtful”; the limits, divisions, even the title of his work were undetermined; the first chapter was composed three times, and the second and third twice, before he was satisfied with his efforts. This prolonged meditation on his design and its execution was ultimately well repaid by the result: so methodical did his ideas become, and so readily did his materials shape themselves, that, with the above exceptions, the original MS. of the entire six quartos was sent uncopied to the printers. He also says that not a sheet had been seen by any other eyes than those of author and printer, a statement indeed which must be taken with a small deduction; or rather we must suppose that a few chapters had been submitted, if not to the “eyes,” to the “ears” of others; for he elsewhere tells us that he was “soon disgusted with the modest practice of reading the manuscript to his friends.” Such, however, were his preliminary difficulties that he confesses he was often “tempted to cast away the labour of seven years”; and it was not until February 1776 that the first volume was published. The success was instant, and, for a quarto, probably unprecedented. The entire impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and a third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand. The author might almost have said, as Lord Byron after the publication of Childe Harold, that “he awoke one morning and found himself famous.” In addition to public applause, he was gratified by the more select praises of the highest living authorities in that branch of literature: “the candour of Dr Robertson embraced his disciple”; Hume’s letter of congratulation “overpaid the labour of ten years.” The latter, however, with his usual sagacity, anticipated the objections which he saw could be urged against the famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters. “I think you have observed a very prudent temperament; but it was impossible to treat the subject so as not to give grounds of suspicion against you, and you may expect that a clamour will arise.”
The “clamour” thus predicted was not slow to make itself heard. Within two years the famous chapters had elicited what might almost be called a library of controversy. The only attack, however, to which Gibbon deigned to make any reply was that of Davies, who had impugned his accuracy or good faith. His Vindication appeared in February 1779; and, as Milman remarks, “this single discharge from the ponderous artillery of learning and sarcasm laid prostrate the whole disorderly squadron” of his rash and feeble assailants.[6]
Two years before the publication of this first volume Gibbon was elected member of parliament for Liskeard (1774). His political duties did not suspend his prosecution of his history, except on one occasion, and for a little while, in 1779, when he undertook, on behalf of the ministry, a task which, if well performed, was also, it must be added, well rewarded. The French government had issued a manifesto preparatory to a declaration of war, and Gibbon was solicited by Chancellor Thurlow and Lord Weymouth, secretary of state, to answer it. In compliance with this request he produced the able Mémoire justificatif, composed in French, and delivered to the courts of Europe; and shortly afterwards he received a seat at the Board of Trade and Plantations—little more than a sinecure in itself, but with a very substantial salary of nearly £800 per annum. His acceptance displeased some of his former political associates, and he was accused of “deserting his party.” In his Memoir, indeed, Gibbon denies that he had ever enlisted with the Whigs. A note of Fox, however, on the margin of a copy of The Decline and Fall records a very distinct remembrance of the historian’s previous vituperation of the ministry; within a fortnight of the date of his acceptance of office, he is there alleged to have said that “there was no salvation for this country until six heads of the principal persons in administration were laid upon the table.” Lord Sheffield merely replies, somewhat weakly it must be said, that his friend never intended the words to be taken literally. More to the point is the often-quoted passage from Gibbon’s letter to Deyverdun, where the frank revelation is made: “You have not forgotten that I went into parliament without patriotism and without ambition, and that all my views tended to the convenient and respectable place of a lord of trade.”
In April 1781 the second and third quartos of his History were published. They excited no controversy, and were comparatively little talked about—so little, indeed, as to have extorted from him a half murmur about “coldness and prejudice.” The volumes, however, were bought and read with silent avidity. Meanwhile public events were developing in a manner that had a considerable influence upon the manner in which the remaining years of the historian’s life were spent. At the general election in 1780 he had lost his seat for Liskeard, but had subsequently been elected for Lymington. The ministry of Lord North, however, was tottering, and soon after fell; the Board of Trade was abolished by the passing of Burke’s bill in 1782, and Gibbon’s salary vanished with it—no trifle, for his expenditure had been for three years on a scale somewhat disproportionate to his private fortune. He did not like to depend on statesmen’s promises, which are proverbially uncertain of fulfilment; he as little liked to retrench; and he was wearied of parliament, where he had never given any but silent votes. Urged by such considerations, he once more turned his eyes to the scene of his early exile, where he might live on his decent patrimony in a style which was impossible in England, and pursue unembarrassed his literary studies. He therefore resolved to fix himself at Lausanne.
A word only is necessary on his parliamentary career. Neither nature nor acquired habits qualified him to be an orator; his late entrance on public life, his natural timidity, his feeble voice, his limited command of idiomatic English, and even, as he candidly confesses, his literary fame, were all obstacles to success. “After a fleeting, illusive hope, prudence condemned me to acquiesce in the humble station of a mute.[7] ... I was not armed by nature and education with the intrepid energy of mind and voice—‘Vincentem strepitus et natum rebus agendis.’ Timidity was fortified by pride, and even the success of my pen discouraged the trial of my voice.” His repugnance to public life had been strongly expressed to his father in a letter of a very early date, in which he begged that the money which a seat in the House of Commons would cost might be expended in a mode more agreeable to him. Gibbon was eight-and-thirty when he entered parliament; and the obstacles which even at an earlier period he had not had courage to encounter were hardly likely to be vanquished then. Nor had he much political sagacity. He was better skilled in investigating the past than in divining the future. While Burke and Fox and so many great statesmen proclaimed the consequences of the collision with America, Gibbon saw nothing but colonies in rebellion, and a paternal government justly incensed. His silent votes were all given on that hypothesis. In a similar manner, while he abhorred the French Revolution when it came, he seems to have had no apprehension, like Chesterfield, Burke, or even Horace Walpole, of its approach; nor does he appear to have at all suspected that it had had anything to do with the speculations of the philosophic coteries in which he had taken such delight. But while it may be doubted whether his presence in parliament was of any direct utility to the legislative business of the country, there can be no question of the present advantage which he derived from it in the prosecution of the great work of his life—an advantage of which he was fully conscious when he wrote: “The eight sessions that I sat in parliament were a school of civil prudence, the first and most essential virtue of an historian.”
Having sold all his property except his library—to him equally a necessary and a luxury—Gibbon repaired to Lausanne in September 1783, and took up his abode with his early friend Deyverdun, now a resident there. Perfectly free from every engagement but those which his own tastes imposed, easy in his circumstances, commanding just as much society, and that as select, as he pleased, with the noblest scenery spread out at his feet, no situation can be imagined more favourable for the prosecution of his literary enterprise; a hermit in his study as long as he chose, he found the most delightful recreation always ready for him at the threshold. “In London,” says he, “I was lost in the crowd; I ranked with the first families in Lausanne, and my style of prudent expense enabled me to maintain a fair balance of reciprocal civilities.... Instead of a small house between a street and a stable-yard, I began to occupy a spacious and convenient mansion, connected on the north side with the city, and open on the south to a beautiful and boundless horizon. A garden of four acres had been laid out by the taste of M. Deyverdun: from the garden a rich scenery of meadows and vineyards descends to the Leman Lake, and the prospect far beyond the lake is crowned by the stupendous mountains of Savoy.” In this enviable retreat, it is no wonder that a year should have been suffered to roll round before he vigorously resumed his great work—and with many men it would never have been resumed in such a paradise. We may remark in passing that the retreat was often enlivened, or invaded, by friendly tourists from England, whose “frequent incursions” into Switzerland our recluse seems half to lament as an evil. Among his more valued visitors were M. and Mme Necker; Mr Fox also gave him two welcome “days of free and private society” in 1788. Differing as they did in politics, Gibbon’s testimony to the genius and character of the great statesman is highly honourable to both: “Perhaps no human being,” he says, “was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood.”