[In the following essay, Folkenflik describes passages of detachment, self-mockery, and fake impressions in Gibbon's autobiographical Memoirs.]

Critics have often pointed out that Gibbon's is the autobiography of an historian, not simply that of a man; but it is even more than that an autobiography which explains through the empirical consideration of a single person the necessity of the detached looking backward which, for Gibbon, is history itself. Bemusement with his earlier self and not complacency is the dominant mood. Gibbon's whole work is pervaded by a knowledge of how wrong he had been and of how fortunate, given his mistakes, he was to become the historian of Rome. Remembering the original title of Pride and Prejudice, a book which was first conceived during the same decade in which Gibbon was attempting to write his memoirs, we can say that his work, no less than Jane Austen's, is about “first impressions” that were, invariably, mistaken.

What we should see in these Memoirs is the striking confrontation of a younger by an older self. Ian Watt, in an urbane essay on ironic prose, says of Gibbon's famous epigram: “I sighed as a lover: I obeyed as a son”: “The abstractions, the conventional roles, the mighty framework for the eternal littleness of man—they surely damp our resolution to live our own lives. Mr. and Mrs. Gibbon, I fancy, found little more satisfaction in their son than Mademoiselle Curchod in her lover.”¹ And John N. Morris says of the same passage: “we sense that he did not sigh very deeply nor obey very reluctantly.”² But the memoirist's sentence is an imperfect clue to the extent of his earlier emotion. What we do know is that years later he writes of the incident as one which was decisively brought to a conclusion and which, by its very miniaturization, is shown as playing a small part in his life when seen in perspective.

In a sense this attitude towards time may seem to be one of the saws of autobiography. In the first English autobiography, A Book of Songs and Sonnets, Thomas Whythorne, alluding to the words of St. Paul, says

When I was a child, I did as a child, and when I was a young man, weening then that young men were as wise as the old experienced men be (as indeed some be, although not many), but now I wot, though I am not very old, that there remains many follies in young men.³

Gibbon's attitude, however, becomes not simply proverbial wisdom (as we read Whythorne we are reminded time and again that he was apprenticed to John Heywood, the best-known Elizabethan collector of proverbs) but part of the method by which he writes and the fabric of his mode of living.

The epistemological basis for his changes is to be found in one of the two “causes” Gibbon lists that “will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.” He writes:

The proportion of a part to the whole is the only standard by which we can measure the length of our existence. At the age of twenty, one year is a tenth perhaps of the time which has elapsed within our consciousness and memory: at the age of fifty it is no more than a fortieth, and this relative value continues to decrease till the last sands are shaken by the hand of death.⁴

The love affair had a larger reality for the young man than for the memoirist, not simply because of his lack of “experience” (a part of Gibbon's second cause), but also because it had more temporal significance. As Gibbon lived, the relative importance of time shrunk the significance of each moment in his life which came before. Hence the tone of his writing is by turns ironic and elegiac.

When we hear the voice of the older Gibbon, we have a difficult time in perceiving the lover, the Englishman returning home through French lines disguised as a Swiss mercenary, the gambler who lost over one hundred guineas in a night when he was on an allowance of two guineas a month, or the convert to Catholicism. His conversion to Roman Catholicism, the dangerous and enthusiastic action of a young man, is summed up in a sentence which echoes the triumphant Caesar in its self-mockery: “I read, I applauded, I believed. …”⁵ While he saw himself as akin to a conqueror entering a new province, he was actually being vanquished. As in the Decline and Fall, Gibbon battled with books. The young Gibbon made what his older self views as the strategical error of encountering that doughty champion of Catholicism, Bossuet: “The blind activity of idleness urged me to advance without armour into the dangerous mazes of controversy. … I surely fell by a noble Hand.”⁶ Gibbon sees his youth and emotion as the causes of his danger: “Youth is sincere and impetuous; and a momentary glow of enthusiasm had raised me above all temporal considerations.” This is his judgment on the decision of the convert to profess his faith. What endangers him is a faulty relationship to time. The “momentary” takes precedence over the whole of his “temporal” life; the word “temporal” means “secular” as opposed to religious, but from the point of view of the older Gibbon it means not simply transitory life—though that meaning is ironically present—but all the life we have.

It is not only his own love affair that he treats with detachment. The early description of his grandfather Porten's resistance to the marriage of Gibbon's parents (mere imitation of his wealthy paternal grandfather's opposition) deftly places the event in perspective:

The usual consequences ensued: harsh threats and tender protestations, frown and sighs; the seclusion of the Lady, the despair of the Lover; clandestine correspondence and stolen interviews. At the distance of forty years my Aunt Catherine Porten could relate with pleasure the innocent artifices which she practiced to second or screen her beloved sister. …⁷

This comic summary is made possible by two traits of the historian, the ability to see the specific case as part of a general pattern and the tendency of time to disclose the true importance of things. For Gibbon only when all passion is spent can we see reality.

As a man in his twenties Gibbon was capable of writing, after praising a new acquaintance, “I will not decide too hastily but I believe and hope that I am forming a connection which will last as long as my life.”⁸ Beyond one journal entry and two passing references in letters of the same period, we never hear of M. d'Augny again. The writer of the Memoirs, schooled in such disappointments, knows better than to make statements like this one. And yet it is precisely because he was capable of feeling that a new acquaintance might become a life-long friend that he feels all the more the need to protect himself from entanglements.

Gibbon does not mention d'Augny in the Memoirs—he may indeed have forgotten his name—but he does show his awareness of his tendency as a young man to attempt to invest new relationships with an emotional permanence. His account of a friendship with one Lord H. is emblematic of all such relationships in which he was proven wrong by time:

In our domestic society I formed … an intimate acquaintance with a young nobleman of my own age, and vainly flattered myself that our sentiments would prove as lasting as they seemed to be mutual. On my return from abroad his coldness repelled such faint advances as my pride allowed me to make, and in our different walks of life, we gradually became strangers to each other.⁹

Personal attachments are presented in this way throughout the Memoirs, but if we think only of Gibbon's notorious love affair as a paradigm of such experiences, we may miss their significance. A useful corrective is the account of his relationship with his stepmother:

During my absence my father had married his second wife Miss Dorothea Patton, who was introduced to me with the most unfavorable prejudice: I considered his second marriage as an act of displeasure, and the rival who had usurped my mother's bed appeared in the light of a personal and domestic enemy.¹⁰

He says that though he did not quite fear she would murder him, he recalled the Roman hatred of stepmothers and the characterization of them as inhuman, savage, and wicked. This bizarre vision, buttressed by quotations from Euripides and Virgil, yields to the actual presence of Dorothea Gibbon:

But the injustice was in my own fancy; and the imaginary monster was an amiable and deserving woman. I could not be mistaken in the first view of her understanding, her knowledge and the elegant spirit of her conversation: her polite welcome, and her assiduous care to study and gratify my wishes announced at least that the surface would be smooth: and my suspicions of art and falsehood were gradually dispelled by the full discovery of her warm and exquisite sensibility. After some reserve on my side our minds associated in confidence and friendship, and as Mrs. Gibbon had neither children nor the hopes of children, we more easily adopted the tender names and genuine characters of mother and son.¹¹

The ogre becomes his mother. The first meeting drives away his extravagant ideas, but it takes time to overcome his suspicions and his reserve. The process was gradual. His attitude towards her changes as he learns more about her. Yet the final touch that brings them together is her inability to have children (who would make him take second place in his grandfather's will and her affections). The verb “adopted” in his last sentence is close to the literal meaning and seems typical of Gibbon's relationship to experience. Here as elsewhere there is a strong sense of consciously accepting a role, of choosing a state rather than insensibly sliding into it. His stepmother becomes far more a mother to him than, on his own account, Judith Gibbon had ever been. She clearly approaches the ideal of sisterhood which Gibbon sets forth in discussing the deaths of his siblings:

The relation of a brother and sister, especially if they do not marry, appears to me of a very singular nature. It is a familiar and tender friendship with a female, much about our own age; an affection, perhaps softened by the secret influence of sex, but pure from any mixture of sensual desire, the sole species of Platonic love that can be indulged with truth and without danger.¹²

The characteristic attempt to free himself from danger is here. It is significant that the boy who was neglected by his mother and who rejected his lover should find his stepmother, his aunt, and the wives of his friends the most important women in his life. What is most important in the narrative of his relationship to his stepmother, as in his account of Suzanne Curchod, is the shift in understanding which comes about through the passage of time.

Gibbon's famous debunking of Oxford is preceded by a glowing account of his arrival. It formed a “new era” in his life. As he writes forty years after, he still recalls his “first emotions of surprise and satisfaction.” He had been “suddenly raised from a boy to a man.” Treated on seemingly equal terms by his professors, distinguished by his dress, Gibbon at that time attained those things which make up so large a part in his conception of freedom: a liberal allowance, a key which gave him “free use of a numerous and learned library,” three “elegant and well furnished rooms in the new building.”¹³ He might well say of himself, as he had earlier of his father (adapting Milton's words at the end of Paradise Lost), that “the world was open before him.” “Such,” he concludes, “was the fair prospect of my entrance … into the University of Oxford.” His description of Oxford's shortcomings is delivered at some length and based on an historical assessment, but his personal experience is quickly registered: “I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: They proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.”¹⁴

If this brave new world gives way to the vision of remaining “steeped in port and prejudice among the monks of Oxford,” Gibbon's banishment to Lausanne, which also follows the pattern of mistaken first impressions, has a far happier conclusion. The outline he wrote for this sketch shows in capsule form the structure repeated so frequently throughout the Memoirs:

1. Journey to L[ausanne]. …

2. First aspect horrid. …

3. Benefits. …¹⁵

His inability to speak French, his displeasure with the customs, his disgust for the Pavillards and their domestic establishment, and his lack of a suitable allowance make this one of the low points of his life. The fall from Magdalen to the Pavillards is presented typically as an unpleasant return to childhood. “From a man,” says Gibbon, “I was again degraded to the dependence of a schoolboy.” Yet at its nadir the scene is replaced with the perspective which five years brought, and the paragraph swells rhetorically as we are made to realize that the man who holds the pen that tells us of the misery of banishment is writing happily in Lausanne:

My condition seemed as destitute of hope as it was devoid of pleasure. I was separated for an indefinite, which appeared an infinite, term, from my native Country; and I had lost all connection with my Catholic friends. … Such was my first introduction to Lausanne, a place where I spent near five years with pleasure and profit, which I afterwards revisited without compulsion, and which I have finally selected as the most grateful retreat for the decline of my life.¹⁶

The relation of Gibbon's comments on childhood and adulthood (or, as he generally calls it, “maturity”) to this pattern should be clear. For Gibbon, the child is not father to the man nor, as he lets us know by means of an allusion to Gray's “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” is ignorance bliss. Rousseau's doctrines and other forms of the child-cult were already putting thinkers like Gibbon on the defensive. His is “a protest against the trite and lavish praise” of childhood. Though he is careful to note that he had no personal experience of children's sports, he issues a general challenge:

My name, it is true, could never be enrolled among the sprightly race, the idle progeny of Eton or Westminster, who delight to cleave the water with pliant arm, to urge the flying ball, and to chase the speed of the rolling circle. But I would ask the warmest and most active Hero of the play field, whether he can seriously compare his childish with his manly enjoyments; whether he does not feel, as the most precious attribute of his existence, the vigorous maturity of sensual and spiritual powers, which Nature has reserved for the age of puberty.¹⁷

As elsewhere in the Memoirs, Gibbon's demythologizing tendency can be seen in the way he quotes or alludes to poetry when his intention is to attack the sentiments which the lines express. These are not quarrels with Euripides, Milton, Dryden, or Gray but with ideas which he considers merely imaginary. Like Pope, whose dunces are depicted as schoolboys on perpetual holiday, pampered sons of the mighty mother Dulness, or like Johnson, one of whose favorite terms of critical disapprobation is “puerile,” Gibbon takes adulthood as the state of fullest human existence. This thinking is so central to Gibbon's vision of the world that he even invokes the Great Chain of Being to account for his preference:

A state of happiness arising only from the want of foresight and reflection shall never provoke my envy; such degenerate taste would tend to sink us in the scale of beings from a man to a child, a dog, and an oyster; till we had reached the confines of brute matter, which cannot suffer because it cannot feel. …¹⁸

The keynote here is “foresight and reflection,” the historian's virtues, achieved only by the mature man.

Gibbon returns from this grotesque slide down the Chain of Being to oppose Gray's joyful recess to the actual drudgery and misery of a typical schoolday. From the opposition of childhood and adulthood comes his conception of freedom:

Such blind and absolute dependence may be necessary, but can never be delightful: Freedom is the first wish of our heart; freedom is the first blessing of our nature: and, unless we bind ourselves with the voluntary chains of interest or passion, we advance in freedom as we advance in years.¹⁹

This conception of freedom is strongly connected to his historical ideal of detachment; it is a freedom from being wounded by emotions or dependent on the wills of others. Though the context is the schoolboy's total dependence on his master and the pain of such a state, it is clear that Gibbon's statement applies to love and other human entanglements as well. Gibbon's quest for freedom closely approaches the Epicurean ataraxia, the pleasure of rest, the joy, to use Gibbon's own oxymoron, of “decent luxuries.” What humanizes this freedom is Gibbon's great gift for friendship in his adult life.²⁰ He recognizes the importance of the emotional life which he frequently criticizes. His comments early in his narrative on the want of a sister point toward the compromise between detachment and feeling that he sees as desirable.

Gibbon's rejection of first impressions and of childhood are common to his age, but they appear in his work with a forcefulness which may have much to do with his own early years. In a passage which Georges Bonnard surprisingly omits from his edition, Gibbon gives us his version of Infant Sorrow, a condition that can hardly be called human:

… after floating nine months in a liquid element I was painfully transported into the vital air.

Of a newborn infant it cannot be predicated “he thinks, therefore he is”; it can only be affirmed “he suffers, therefore he feels.” But in this imperfect state of existence I was still unconscious of myself and of the universe; my eyes were open without the power of vision; and according to M. de Buffon, the rational soul, that secret and incomprehensible energy, did not manifest its presence until after the fortieth.²¹

He goes on to describe his place on the scale of being as below “the greatest part of the brute creation.” He discusses the certainty of his death if left to fend for himself, his inability to stand erect or speak, and the slightness of his body in “strength and proportions” when compared at the age of seven to his adult self. The emphasis is on his total dependency and vulnerability, the conditions in life which he most wishes to avoid. Though his history at this point is the history of the race, it is not surprising that he soon tells us that each of his five brothers who died in infancy was successively given the name Edward by his father so that when its sickly possessor died, the “patronymic appellation might be still perpetuated in the family.”²² This account sounds like that of a less comic, more ironic Tristram Shandy. As Gibbon's biographer D. M. Low points out, the anecdote is not true; only one of his brothers was named Edward.²³ Yet Gibbon's account, with this in mind, is even more revealing, the perfect objective correlative. It conveys Gibbon's extreme sense of his own frailty, his tenuous relationship to his family, his pleasure in having been lucky enough to become who he is, and perhaps his belief that his father wanted to see him dead. The tensions implicit in his relationship with his father are important for an understanding of his book. In a later age he might have called it, like Edmund Gosse, Father and Son. Gibbon had good reason to want to be free of entanglements, for his major entanglement was with his father, a thriftless and occasionally tyrannic man who probably caused him more anguish than any other individual during the course of his life.

“I sighed as a lover: I obeyed as a son,” says Gibbon, and consequently few have taken Gibbon's love or his dutifulness very seriously.²⁴ Yet we ought to consider that year after year Gibbon made painful, dutiful decisions in favor of a bully who squandered his son's wealth. James Scott's letter to the elder Gibbon states the case candidly: “You look all on your own side and nothing on your Son's. You seem to forget how much he has given up and how much he does now. It is not a Son in a thousand that would have done as much. …”²⁵ Gibbon is unable fully to indict his father, but his horror of childhood would seem to be colored by their relationship. His hatred of the “dependence” of the child can probably be traced to his own dependence on this arbitrary man. On a personal level, however, the dispassionate affection he displays for his father in the Memoirs is a sign of the forgiveness which the perspective of years permits him and of the way he comes to terms with life in his writings.

Gibbon's famous epitaph on his dead love affair has been seen as echoing a line from Corneille's Polyeucte (“J'en aurais soupiré, mais j'aurais obéi …”);²⁶ yet we may also recognize in it the outline of a far more important work for him. In turning down a foreign-born woman on the grounds of filial piety, he is in some ways imitating Aeneas. His action, we ought to notice, helps him to become the historian of the empire which Aeneas founded after leaving Dido. The line in the context of Sketch E is richer than it is in the place to which it was exported by Lord Sheffield. In the paragraph following, Gibbon, speaking of his education, refers to the “fortunate shipwreck which cast me on the shores of the Leman Lake.”²⁷ Aeneas landed the same way on Dido's island. Gibbon's epigram may be taken as an answer to Dido's “Num fletu ingemuit nostro?”—“Did he sigh when I wept?”

In the same sketch he discusses the death of his father. “The tears of a son,” he says, “are seldom lasting.” And he adds, “I submitted to the order of Nature; and my grief was soothed by the conscious satisfaction, that I had discharged all the duties of filial piety.”²⁸ He had been an Aeneas even if the man whom he carried on his back throughout most of his adult life was no Anchises. This paragraph concludes with the observation that “Few, perhaps, are the children who, after the expiration of some months or years, would sincerely rejoyce in the resurrection of their parents.” Gibbon points out that he is no exception to this generalization. In one of Gibbon's earliest works, the “Critical Observations on the Design of the Sixth Book of the Aeneid,” he says that “Aeneas's piety has been more generally confessed than admired.”²⁹ Let the remark stand as a premonition of his own fate. Both Aeneas and Gibbon have been taken as rather frigid heroes, but the fortitude and perseverance, the sighs, if not the tears, that it took to complete the task of founding Rome were hardly lost on Rome's historian.

The Memoirs, however, cannot quite be left as brief epic. Gibbon's account of his life is an anomalous masterpiece. It is not of course a single work, but six separate attempts to tell the story of his own life.³⁰ These versions, which his executor Lord Sheffield pieced together in 1796 as Memoirs of My Life and Writings, actually bear a variety of titles: The Memoirs of the Life of Edward Gibbon with various Observations and Excursions; Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Edward Gibbon; two are named My Own Life, a title which Hume, whom Gibbon calls one of his masters in the field of self-portraiture, gave to his short autobiography. The longest of them has no title at all.

Samuel Johnson warns that one should hesitate to “judge by the event,” but we might note that Gibbon was never able to write the history of his own life, which was still in process, in definitive form, whereas he did turn the decline and fall of the Roman Empire into a history. Unlike the Romantic who is apt to take a point of origin as definitive and continually return to it for his values, Gibbon only finds definition and value in the finished whole. He can only see meaning in the event which is over.³¹ On the last page of the final volume of the Decline and Fall Gibbon mentions the moment of conception of his work. His account is given in fuller form in a famous passage of the Memoirs:

It was at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted 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.³²

It is the sudden vision of Rome destroyed and Christianity, substituting bare feet for majestic buildings, triumphant that provides a point for him to begin his work. His style may be said to be grounded on a knowledge of the end, and to consist of that “foresight and reflection” which he values so highly. The writer is in control of his meaning (though he makes allowance for qualifications within the sentence) and aware of the direction his utterance will take. He has, to borrow Frank Kermode's phrase, “the sense of an ending.” His description of his manner of composition is characteristic of his mode of thought as well: “It has always been my practise to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory; but to suspend the action of the pen, till I had given the last polish to my work.”³³ He will totally control his meaning. The pen does not touch paper until every word has been thought out, weighed, reflected upon. How different is this from those Senecan amblers who write the first phrase and let their pens write the second. History is what happened as seen by a man in position to observe the temporal whole. Whereas the distance of the historian from the event leads many historians to wring their hands, Gibbon, while recognizing the serious loss of material, finds that the distance itself permits him to take a stance of superior awareness.³⁴

Superior; yet not omniscient. There is room even in the Decline and Fall for his being wrong.³⁵ In the Memoirs, the narrative of a life not yet over, Gibbon suggests that though the voice we hear is being gathered into the artifice of eternity, it may not have the last word. While discussing his genealogy, Gibbon has occasion to mention the odd writings of an ancestor. John Gibbon, says his kinsman, “sings in a strain of self-congratulation,” for his Latin verses proclaim his importance as an interpreter of heraldic Latin and a preserver of words from barbarism. “Such,” adds Gibbon, “are the hopes of authors! In the failure of these hopes, John Gibbon has not been the first of his profession, and very possibly may not be the last of his name.”³⁶ The reader may smile at the combination of familial satire and mock-modesty, but we ought to observe that the conclusion of sketch E, which is unquestionably intended as the coda of the work, sounds the same note in a more personal and deeply ironic key: “In old age, the conclusion of hope is reserved for the tenderness of parents who commence as new life in their children; the faith of enthusiasts who sings Hallelujahs above the clouds; and the vanity of authors who presume the immortality of their names and writings.”³⁷ Though Gibbon would seem to have little doubt of the importance of the Decline and Fall, he once again makes provisional room for self-deception as he puts his emotional life on a level with the parents and enthusiasts with whom he has so little in common. It is clear in this passage, as throughout the Memoirs, that his history is both his religion and his child.

Notes

1. Ian Watt, “The Ironic Tradition in Augustan Prose from Swift to Johnson,” Restoration and Augustan Prose (Los Angeles, 1956), p. 36.

2. John N. Morris, Versions of the Self (New York, 1966), p. 82.

3. Thomas Whythorne, The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1962), p. 1.

4. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1966), p. 189.

5. Ibid., p. 59.

6. Ibid., pp. 58-59.

7. Ibid., p. 19.

8. Edward Gibbon, The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton (London, 1956), I, 138.

9. Gibbon, Memoirs, p. 39.

10. Ibid., p. 91.

11. Ibid., p. 92.

12. Ibid., pp. 24-25.

13. Ibid., pp. 46-47.

14. Ibid., p. 48.

15. Quoted from a facsimile of Gibbon's MS. notes in D. M. Low, Edward Gibbon: 1737-1794 (London, 1937), facing p. 340.

16. Gibbon, Memoirs, p. 70.

17. Ibid., p. 44.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., pp. 44-45.

20. For the mixture of the Epicurean and the Stoic in Gibbon, see J. W. Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (Princeton, 1967), pp. 199 ff. “Passion” in my quotation is probably best understood, to use one of the definitions in Johnson's Dictionary, as “violent commotion of the mind.”

21. Edward Gibbon, The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, ed. Dero A. Saunders (New York, 1961), p. 52.

22. Gibbon, Memoirs, p. 28.

23. Low, Edward Gibbon, p. 24.

24. Gibbon, Memoirs, p. 208. Bonard relegates this, the most famous sentence in the Memoirs, to an appendix, for Sheffield had drawn it into the main narrative from draft C. It would be a mistake to see the twentieth-century distaste for Gibbon's treatment of Suzanne Churchod as a modern development; James Macintosh, the reviewer for the Monthly Review the year the Memoirs appeared, complained of Gibbon's coldness as a lover, and Rousseau himself had earlier passed judgment on the affair in Suzanne's favor. What the manuscripts tell us is that Gibbon had a great deal of trouble deciding how to describe this event.

25. Quoted, from MS. by Low, Edward Gibbon, p. 197. I have regularized the spelling and punctuation.

26. See J. J. Dwyer, Times Literary Supplement, 19 June 1953, p. 397.

27. Edward Gibbon, The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray (London, 1897), p. 239.

28. Gibbon, Memoirs, p. 150.

29. Edward Gibbon, Miscellaneous Work of Edward Gibbon, ed. John, Lord Sheffield (London, 1796), II, 503.

30. The different status of the six drafts has been well canvassed by Barrett John Mandell, “The Problems of Narration in Edward Gibbon's Autobiography,” Studies in Philology, LXVII (1970), 559-564.

31. Dennis M. Oliver makes a somewhat similar point in “The Character of an Historian: Edward Gibbon,” English Literary History, XXXVIII (1971), 268.

32. Gibbon, Memoirs, p. 136, n.

33. Ibid., p. 159.

34. Although my account of Gibbon as historian is based on the Memoirs, the Decline and Fall eloquently makes this point: “A being of the nature of man, endowed with the same faculties, but with a longer measure of existence, would cast down a smile of pity and contempt on the crimes and follies of human ambition, so eager, in a narrow span, to grasp at a precarious and short-lived enjoyment. It is thus that the experience of history exalts and enlarges the horizon of our intellectual view.” Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. John B. Bury (London, 1896-1900), V, 242. In the passages just before this one, Gibbon describes the vagaries of the Byzantine throne and goes on to develop his theme. If we substitute “An historian” for “A being of the nature of man … but with a longer measure of existence,” we can see both Gibbon's characteristic stance and the basis of his contract with the reader.

35. See also Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction (Princeton, 1970), p. 214.

36. Gibbon, Memoirs, p. 12.

37. Ibid., p. 189.