OF EDWARD GIBBON WRITTEN BY HIMSELF AND A SELECTION FROM HIS LETTERS WITH OCCASIONAL NOTES AND NARRATIVE BY JOHN LORD SHEFFIELD EDITED BY HENRY MORLEY, LL.D. EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, LIMITED BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL GLASGOW, MANCHESTER, AND NEW YORK 1891 مرم INTRODUCTION. EDWARD GIBBON'S unfinished Memoirs of his Life and Writings are justly regarded as one of the best pieces of Autobiography in English Literature. Supplemented by his nearest surviving friend, with an account of his death and a selection from his familiar letters, they reproduce for us the writer of the "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." That book, apart from the kindliness of which he made himself a centre, was the one fruit of Gibbon's life, and here we see it growing on the tree. The Memoirs help us to understand where lay the great strength of the History, and why it is without that one feature which, if we looked only to its subject and the time when it was written, we should most expect to find. At a time when modern States were tottering, and mighty forces were at work upon the reconstruction of the old world and the new, we might expect a historian of the Decline and Fall of Rome to show us the life and movement of the greatest of all past examples of decay and reconstruction as in a mirror where whoever looks upon it sees his own face in the middle of the scenes that lie behind. The past is always, of course, teacher of the present. Such a past as that which Gibbon set before his readers might be regarded as especially filled with suggestion to the present in which Gibbon himself lived and wrote. But Gibbon by his character was free from all temptation to moralise his tale. He dealt with the past only. He studied thoroughly a period that filled his mind. He mastered his authorities, and they were such as could be mastered by one man; they were all printed, |