Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was buried at Fletching church in an unromantic tomb, with nothing for us to see except his name, by his friend Lord Sheffield, but his own work, famous for all time, is his true monument.

 

It is difficult to think of him apart from his majestic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; but there was a human Gibbon, a striving suffering, philosophic Gibbon, good friend and good company, beloved of Johnson and Goldsmith and Reynolds, a Major-of-Militia Gibbon, a farming Gibbon, even a shy lover Gibbon.

A delicate boy, he had little regular schooling, but in his reading of contemporary and classical authors he laid the foundation on which his great literary structure was to be reared. He sat mute for several years in Parliament and then, in 1776 when he was 39, produced the first volume of his masterpiece. How the work originated we know from his own words:

 

It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amongst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. Twelve years elapsed between the issue of the first and last volumes and the work had become a history, not of the city of Rome, but of the whole Roman Empire.

 

It was completed at Lausanne, and he recorded the event in language as melodious as Blake's, with something of the magnificence of the great book itself. It was on the night of the 27th of June, 1787 between the hours of 11 and 12, he says, that he wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in his garden. After laying down his pen, he took several turns in a covered walk of acacias, commanding a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains.

The air was temperate, he continues, 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 recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame," he writes. " 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 date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious."

The first of our scientific historians, Gibbon grew in renown. His modesty made him fearful of comparison with Hume and Robertson, but posterity has assigned him a place apart, unique and beyond challenge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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