Gibbon | Page 2

his aunt, Catherine Porten, on writing
whose name for the first time in his Memoirs, "he felt a tear of
gratitude trickling down his cheek." "If there be any," he continues, "as
I trust there are some, who rejoice that I live, to that dear and excellent
woman they must hold themselves indebted. Many anxious and solitary
hours and days did she consume in the patient trial of relief and
amusement; many wakeful nights did she sit by my bedside in
trembling expectation that every hour would be my last." Gibbon is
rather anxious to get over these details, and declares he has no wish to
expatiate on a "disgusting topic." This is quite in the style of the ancien
régime. There was no blame attached to any one for being ill in those
days, but people were expected to keep their infirmities to themselves.
"People knew how to live and die in those days, and kept their
infirmities out of sight. You might have the gout, but you must walk
about all the same without making grimaces. It was a point of good
breeding to hide one's sufferings."[2] Similarly Walpole was much
offended by a too faithful publication of Madame de Sévigné's Letters.
"Heaven forbid," he says, "that I should say that the letters of Madame
de Sévigné were bad. I only meant that they were full of family details
and mortal distempers, to which the most immortal of us are subject."
But Gibbon was above all things a veracious historian, and fortunately
has not refrained from giving us a truthful picture of his childhood.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: George Sand, quoted in Taine's Ancien Régime, p. 181.]
Of his studies, or rather his reading--his early and invincible love of
reading, which he would not exchange for the treasures of India--he
gives us a full account, and we notice at once the interesting fact that a

considerable portion of the historical field afterwards occupied by his
great work had been already gone over by Gibbon before he was well
in his teens. "My indiscriminate appetite subsided by degrees into the
historic line, and since philosophy has exploded all innate ideas and
natural propensities, I must ascribe the choice to the assiduous perusal
of the Universal History as the octavo volumes successively appeared.
This unequal work referred and introduced me to the Greek and Roman
historians, to as many at least as were accessible to an English reader.
All that I could find were greedily devoured, from Littlebury's lame
Herodotus to Spelman's valuable Xenophon, to the pompous folios of
Gordon's Tacitus, and a ragged Procopius of the beginning of the last
century." Referring to an accident which threw the continuation of
Echard's Roman History in his way, he says, "To me the reigns of the
successors of Constantine were absolutely new, and I was immersed in
the passage of the Goths over the Danube, when the summons of the
dinner-bell reluctantly dragged me from my intellectual feast.... I
procured the second and third volumes of Howell's History of the
World, which exhibit the Byzantine period on a larger scale. Mahomet
and his Saracens soon fixed my attention, and some instinct of criticism
directed me to the genuine sources. Simon Ockley first opened my eyes,
and I was led from one book to another till I had ranged round the
circle of Oriental history. Before I was sixteen I had exhausted all that
could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and
Turks, and the same ardour urged me to guess at the French of
D'Herbelot and to construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's
Abulfaragius." Here is in rough outline a large portion at least of the
Decline and Fall already surveyed. The fact shows how deep was the
sympathy that Gibbon had for his subject, and that there was a sort of
pre-established harmony between his mind and the historical period he
afterwards illustrated.
Up to the age of fourteen it seemed that Gibbon, as he says, was
destined to remain through life an illiterate cripple. But as he
approached his sixteenth year, a great change took place in his
constitution, and his diseases, instead of growing with his growth and
strengthening with his strength, wonderfully vanished. This unexpected
recovery was not seized by his father in a rational spirit, as affording a

welcome opportunity of repairing the defects of a hitherto imperfect
education. Instead of using the occasion thus presented of recovering
some of the precious time lost, of laying a sound foundation of
scholarship and learning on which a superstructure at the university or
elsewhere could be ultimately built, he carried the lad off in an impulse
of perplexity and impatience, and entered him as a gentleman
commoner at Magdalen College just before he had completed his